Typography

The zero-lower bound is the well-known 0% floor that a note-issuing bank hits whenever it attempts to reduce the interest rate it offers on deposits into negative territory. Should the bank drop rates below zero, every single negative yielding deposit issued by the bank will be converted into 0% yielding notes. When this happens, the bank will have lost any ability it once had to vary its lending rate. The ZLB is an artificial construct. It arises from the way the banking system structures the liabilities that it issues, namely cash and deposits. We can modify this structure to either remove the ZLB or find alternative ways to get around it. Much of the discussion over the econblogosphere over the last few years has been oriented around various ways to get below zero. There is another artificial bound, this one to the upside—let's call it the 5% upper bound, or FUB. The FUB is an archaic bound. Up until 1854, the Usury Laws prevented the Bank of England from increasing rates above...

In a recent speech leading up to an end-of-month national election, Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe hinted at the possibility of introducing a gold-backed Zimbabwe dollar. This is from the Mail & Guardian : Then there is the business about the Zim dollar, that one issue that makes every Zimbabwean wake up in a cold sweat, and one that every candidate should really avoid. We cannot use the US dollar forever, he [Mugabe] begins. We will have to look at ways of bringing back our currency, sometime in the future. There are uncomfortable murmurs. Mugabe appears to be thinking out loud. "Should we, should we not?" he asks himself. "What if we back our currency with all our gold? Wouldn't it be strong enough? Maybe not now, of course, but sometime in the future. Maybe we will talk to [Gideon] Gono, the Reserve Bank governor." I'm sure the memories of the hyperinflation are too fresh in the minds of Zimbabweans for them to buy into the folly of letting th...

I've been teaching myself a Javascript visualization library called D3 . It gives the chart creator an incredible degree of control in making interactive web-based charts. My previous interactive charts, including my interactive Eurosystem balance sheet tool , have all used the Google Vizualization API, which is far less powerful than D3. You may want to read my last post was on bitcoin alternatives in order to understand what I'm trying to get at in this post. In visualizing the cryptocoin market, I think it's important to convey information about both the relative size of each cryptocoin and the date on which it was born. In doing so I'm trying to illustrate how being the first mover engenders network effects -- early cryptocoins tend to attract the largest market share. I also want to capture the mini boom in new coins since May 2013. Below I've pasted a D3 visualization of this data. Users can interact with it by hovering the mouse over each circle. The code is...