Though Bitcoin currently enjoys a healthy niche, the aspirations of many in the project are grander: to supplant the existing regime of fiat currencies with cryptocurrencies, and to do so outside of normal political channels. Its primary practical obstacle is its purchasing power volatility, arising from a rigid money stock in the face of wide swings in demand. Nevertheless, the historical example of gold, another (much more successful) money commodity with a more or less rigid supply, illuminates the institutional prerequisites for purchasing power stability, economic efficiency, and sustained growth – namely a market of financial intermediaries whose liabilities denominated in the base money themselves circulate as media of exchange. This paper discusses potential benefits and hurdles to establishing financial intermediation in cryptocurrency, as well as the possibility of managing the money supply to create a stable purchasing power cryptocurrency without the need for intermediation at all. Such schemes ultimately require an existing market of intermediaries in order to provide any benefits, the emergence of which governments are for the moment well-positioned to prevent.
At present, bitcoin is held mostly as a speculative vehicle, little used to pay for goods and services. Its value has been unstable, which impedes bitcoin’s wider use as a payment medium. We explain why the value of bitcoin has been so unstable. Then, we discuss entrepreneurial efforts that might enable bitcoin to become a more commonly accepted payment medium.
Meilė Jasienė, Arvydas Paškevičius, Ieva Astrauskaitė
Searching for alternative source of bank financing, the view on capital market is taken. Recent research on capital market issues are arranged into four dimensions: theory and assumptions of efficient capital market, government’s role in it, other distortions and global interrelatedness. Main investigations are decentralized and visualized in “theoretical eight” model. Conclusions made on the diversity of interpretation of market efficiency, strongly expressed demand of information symmetry, soft actions of governments and the value of foreign performance in domestic markets. Furthermore, new approach to the classification of countries by their maturity in capital market is argued. The state of art of 2009-2012 of bond market and government debt is briefly described.
In this paper we study the optimal monetary and fiscal policies of a general equilibrium model of unemployment and money with search frictions both in labor and goods markets\nas in Berentsen, Menzio and Wright (2010). We abstract from revenue-raising motives to focus on the welfare-enhancing properties of optimal policies. We show that some of the\ninefficiencies in the Berentsen, Menzio and Wright (2010) framework can be restored with appropriate fiscal policies. In particular, when lump sum monetary transfers are possible,\na production subsidy financed by money printing can increase output in the decentralized market and a vacancy subsidy financed by a dividend tax even when the Hosios’ rule does\nnot hold.
This paper studies the effects of stock market valuation on research investment, the rate of innovation, and welfare. In the presence of financing constraints for R&D investment, episodes of high market valuation can ease these constraints and raise the economy-wide investment in R&D and the rate of innovation. If the decentralized equilibrium rate of innovation is inefficiently low, then such episodes may lead to an increase in aggregate welfare even if the higher valuation is not entirely justified by fundamentals. We present a Schumpeterian-style growth model with a costly financial intermediation process to characterize the relationship between market value, entry of new firms, and the aggregate rate of innovation. We use the model to measure the welfare consequences of a stock market run-up that may only partly be justified by fundamentals. In particular, we apply the model to the US economy in the 1990s and calibrate the impact of the NASDAQ boom on the rate of innovation, growth and welfare. The welfare effect depends on the underlying change in fundamentals. We find that with an acceleration in US trend productivity growth from a pre-1995 rate of 1.4% to a rate of 2.0% per annum, the NASDAQ boom will have resulted in a net welfare gain of 0.55%. If the new growth rate is as high as 3%, the net gain was 1.35% of the present discounted value of consumption.
This article studies the effects of political institutions on inflation. In our view, hyperinflation is the manifestation of a tragedy of commons in a divided society with a weak central monetary authority. Economies with fiat money are inherently inflation-prone: the collection of seigniorage through the inflation tax is less conspicuous than other taxes, and the printing of money is essentially costless. In many countries, the control of the money supply is de facto or de jure decentralized. Sets of agents (in various regions or interest groups) can effectively pressure the central government to finance their expenditures. As these interest groups pursue their self-interest, they neglect the welfare effects of the inflation tax on individuals in other groups. These elements combine to imply that countries which rely on the inflation tax to meet the resource demands of competing interest groups will typically experience inefficiently (due to negative spillovers) high inflation.
The World Economic Outlook (WEO) exercise at the IMF evolved during the 1980s, partly in response to demands by policymakers in national finance ministries for objective and internationally comparable projections and policy scenarios. The exercise had begun as a staff initiative, encouraged by the Managing Director (Johannes Witteveen). Gradually, the Executive Board, the Interim Committee, the Group of Seven, and others came to view the discussion of the WEO documents as an important element in their efforts to keep abreast of world economic developments and prospects. Direct and indirect feedback from those discussions informed the staff as to how the exercise should be improved. Driven by this policy relevance, the WEO evolved from a decentralized project that was only haphazardly model-based into a more rigorous and coordinated exercise.