Vanessa Ogle on the history of tax havens and decolonization (academic paper, yet reads like a “normal” article). Twitter summary here.
The Tax Justice Network has more articles on offshore history.
How oil companies use captive insurance companies in tax havens to minimize their taxes.
How much money from public tenders in the EU goes to tax havens? (Article has some discussion of methodology)
Computer-aided design (CAD) enables engineers to create products much faster and cheaper compared to trial and error.
But did you know that innovators have used abstract modeling long before the existence of computers?
Anton Howes, a historian of innovation, tells the story of Matthew Baker. Baker was a 16th century shipbuilder who improved the construction of carvel ships.
As Howes explains:
What Matthew Baker did in the 1570s was to take the design process out of the shipyard, and onto paper. He drew his ships, to scale. And by using pen and paper, with geometry to make such drawings possible, he opened up grand new possibilities for design. […] He drew out new designs for frames, using geometry to work out how any variation would affect the overall shape of the hull, as well as its weight and carrying capacity – all at the cost of only time, ink, and paper, and avoiding the huge potential waste of conducting experiments at full scale in wood. His process allowed him to innovate more easily, and even to design new measuring instruments.
Interestingly, the new methods were not quickly adopted in the rest of Europe:
By the 1580s, new English ships were among the most technically advanced in Europe, and even in the mid-seventeenth century, ship plans were apparently still unknown in France. Having once lagged far behind, geometry began to give English shipbuilding the edge.
It’s still true today that good business practices (a) can save you a lot of money and (b) are hard to copy.
In a 2017 blog post, I wondered why Germans remember the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic era.
Nils Redeker, Lukas Haffert and Tobias Rommel have recently published a paper about this very question. In Misremembering Weimar: unpacking the historic roots of Germany’s monetary policy discourse, they show that
most Germans do not know that Germany’s interwar period was shaped by two separate crises, but rather see them as being one and the same.
Furthermore,
Looking back into a skewed version of their own history, many Germans conclude that mass unemployment and high inflation are just two sides of the same coin. What makes this worse is that this misconception is especially prevalent among well-educated and politically interested Germans. Hence, the group of people following the ECB’s monetary policy most closely is also the group most likely to draw the wrong lessons from German history. But public thinking about Weimar economic history is not just substantially flawed. We can also show that the skewed memory of the Weimar Republic still affects the way in which at least some Germans think about monetary policy today.
Update 15/02/2020: The following comment on a FT Alphaville article about German financial assets corroborates Redeker et al‘s thesis:
The commenter is probably well-educated, or he wouldn’t read Alphaville. But he makes two mistakes. First of all, the hyperinflation did not occur in the 1930s. Secondly, there is a logical inconsistency. If Germans fear hyperinflation, why do they hold 40% of their assets in currency and deposits? That doesn’t make any sense, as a new hyperinflation would make these assets worthless.
A selection of the best articles I’ve read on the 10th anniversary of September 15, 2008.
Can we survive the next financial crisis?
Why claims that the 2008 bailout was a “success” should make you angry
Crisis firefighters still uninterested in fire prevention
The broken conversation about financial regulation
10 jaar bankencrisis (in Dutch)
The ten year anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy is fast approaching. Some quick thoughts on what has changed and what we’ve learned over the past decade, with a focus on Europe.
The South China Morning Post ran a series of articles about the Spanish trade between Asia and Mexico that started in the 16th century.
Nice illustrations describe the journey, the construction of the galleons, life aboard, silk, the Spanish dollar…
Start here: The China Ship – chapter one.
H/T to FT Alphaville for linking to the series.
In a recent episode of the Macro Musings podcast, David Beckworth talked to professor and author Laurence M. Ball about his new book The Fed and Lehman Brothers: Setting the Record Straight on a Financial Disaster.
Starting around minute 45 of the podcast, they discuss the role of Henry Paulson, the Secretary of the Treasury. Professor Ball notes that “It was Paulson1 who was making the decisions. That’s a little bit odd, because legally, under the Federal Reserve Act, it was the Federal Reserve’s job to decide whether or not they made loans. The Treasury Secretary legally didn’t have any more role than the Secretary of Agriculture or the Governor of Maryland. But Henry Paulson just arrived at the New York Fed and started saying what was gonna happen and people did what he said”.
This doesn’t surprise me one bit. In times of crisis, you cannot avoid politics.
In ‘The next crisis’, the final chapter of Bankers are people, too, I wrote
“It remains to be seen how long regulations will keep risks in check. When a major (shadow) bank fails in spite of all the monitoring and supervision, the value of the institutional framework will become clear. Because of the importance of banking to the economy, I am sure that the highest officials
in government will be involved if a too big to fail bank is about to collapse, whether or not that is against the law.”
So much for legal constraints during a major crisis.
This is a review of a book written over 50 years ago by a central banker.
Based on that introduction, even most finance geeks will probably think “boring!” or “irrelevant!”. Until you learn it has Nazis, hyperinflation and the Nuremberg trials in it. And those are not even the interesting parts. Continue reading “The Magic of Money”
David Beckworth recently interviewed1 (podcast) professor Jesús Fernández-Villaverde. Among other things, they discussed the hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic, i.e. Germany after World War I. The economists ponder why a hyperinflation that occurred in 1923 has had such a large impact on German economists and central bankers, even to this day. After all, the NSDAP rose to power in the 1933, at a time of mass unemployment and austerity. This was almost a decade after the hyperinflation ended.
The professors get to the hyperinflation at 8:20 into the conversation. Fernández-Villaverde tells the story of how inflation got out of hand when French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr2. The Weimar government encouraged workers to resist the military occupation. Strikers were paid with money freshly printed by the Reichsbank, the German central bank. The combination of no real economic production with an increasing amount of Papiermarks tanked the purchasing power of the currency. The hyperinflation began. Continue reading “Why do Germans remember the Weimar hyperinflation?”
As the end of 2016 is quickly approaching, it is time to reflect on the past year. For people working in large bureaucratic organizations like banks and government, this means filling out performance evaluations. Organizations collect these records of their employees’ professional histories. Managers can use old reviews to motivate (non) promotions of their subordinates.
One intriguing aspect is the fact that employees are expected to write negative things about themselves. In management speak this is called “opportunities for growth” or some other bullshit term. But basically the writers have to incriminate themselves. The self-evaluation provides the proverbial rope for somebody to hang them with.
This reminded me about something I read in a book1 by historian Orlando Figes on the Soviet Union. Members of the Communist Party had to write an autobiography which was regularly updated. The higher-ups in the hierarchy could use these documents to control their underlings and their rivals.
The more you think about it, the more parallels there are between modern business life and Soviet society.
It is well known that corporations are not democracies nor markets. But this post focusses on the cultural similarities that caught my attention. Continue reading “Annual reviews and other Soviet business practices”
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