Eduardo Levy Yeyati
The arrival of Covid-19 instigated financial turmoil in March 2020. As in previous episodes of financial instability, the uncertainty made investors rush to hold US dollar-denominated assets, creating a dollar shortage. To mitigate acute strains in the offshore dollar funding markets and avoid a global systematic financial crisis, the Federal Reserve (‘Fed’) made US dollar liquidity readily available. They did so by reducing the pricing of swap operations, extending the maturity, and increasing the frequency of swap operations with the major central banks. The Fed had numerous swap lines with other central banks including the Bank of Canada (BOC), the Bank of England (BOE), the Bank of Japan (BOJ), the ECB, and the Swiss National Bank (SNB). On 19 March 2020, the Fed reactivated the swap lines it had established with nine central banks at the time of the 2008 Global Crisis and doubled their maximal lines.
Tolerated for centuries of European history, only in the last few decades has sex between adults and children become an absolute taboo. In
Unspeakable, Rachel Hope Cleves uses the life of one self-identified ‘pederast’, the writer Norman Douglas, to explain the conditions that made widespread sexual abuse of children possible.
Douglas was a fixture of the early 20th-century European literary scene, a friend of Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence and Somerset Maugham. Born in 1868 to a Scottish family in Austria, he briefly lived in Russia and in Britain, but spent much of his life in Italy, where widespread poverty meant that many children worked in a sex trade that catered to wealthy northern European tourists. He had sex with, by his own estimation, hundreds of children, mostly boys but also girls, usually aged between ten and 13. The photographs judiciously chosen to illustrate the book demonstrate, without sexualising Douglas’ child victims, just how young they were. Cleves a
Sebastian Edwards, Luis Cabezas 08 April 2021
The nominal exchange rate plays a dual role in macroeconomic adjustments – it is part of the transmission mechanism of monetary policy, and it also helps accommodate external and domestic shocks through its effect on the real exchange rate. This column uses disaggregated price index data from Iceland to test how exchange rate pass-through varies with the international tradability of goods and with the monetary policy framework. It shows that pass-through is significantly higher for tradables relative to nontradables. In addition, it finds that improvements in the credibility of the central bank are associated with declines in the exchange rate pass-through.
I am a cultural historian of the 20th-century US, with a focus on gendered popular culture – particularly popular therapeutic cultures and the media cultures that sustain them.
My book The Language of the Heart: Twelve-Step Recovery from AA to Oprah was published in 2009 by University of North Carolina Press. I m the co-editor (with Timothy Aubry) of Rethinking Therapeutic Culture (U. Chicago, 2016). My public-facing work has appeared in places like Bitch: Feminist Responses to Popular Culture, Inside Higher Ed, and Raritan: A Quarterly Review.
In 2012, with my colleague Joe Spillane, I co-founded Points: the Blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society, where I now serve as Managing Editor Emerita. My current project Feminists on Drugs: A History is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.
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Meeting the challenge. Eye-roll of the month was surely the Biden Administration telling us that the invasion of our country from the south is not a crisis, merely a
challenge.
When the managerial class tell us that something or other is a
challenge, you can be sure it s a disaster caused by their own crackpot policies. I covered this in Chapter 2 of my spacetime-bending 2009 bestseller
That was when I had just gotten through tossing and goring political scientist Robert Putnam s pimping for diversity in the teeth of all the evidence of his own researches. Then:
Professor Putnam tells us in his Uppsala paper that: [T]his article is but a prolegomenon to a larger project on how to manage the challenge that immigration and diversity pose to social capital and solidarity.