Interest and Prices

Interest and Prices
Author: Michael Woodford
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 805
Release: 2011-12-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1400830168

With the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, any pretense of a connection of the world's currencies to any real commodity has been abandoned. Yet since the 1980s, most central banks have abandoned money-growth targets as practical guidelines for monetary policy as well. How then can pure "fiat" currencies be managed so as to create confidence in the stability of national units of account? Interest and Prices seeks to provide theoretical foundations for a rule-based approach to monetary policy suitable for a world of instant communications and ever more efficient financial markets. In such a world, effective monetary policy requires that central banks construct a conscious and articulate account of what they are doing. Michael Woodford reexamines the foundations of monetary economics, and shows how interest-rate policy can be used to achieve an inflation target in the absence of either commodity backing or control of a monetary aggregate. The book further shows how the tools of modern macroeconomic theory can be used to design an optimal inflation-targeting regime--one that balances stabilization goals with the pursuit of price stability in a way that is grounded in an explicit welfare analysis, and that takes account of the "New Classical" critique of traditional policy evaluation exercises. It thus argues that rule-based policymaking need not mean adherence to a rigid framework unrelated to stabilization objectives for the sake of credibility, while at the same time showing the advantages of rule-based over purely discretionary policymaking.

The Price of Time

The Price of Time
Author: Edward Chancellor
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2022-08-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0802160077

A comprehensive and profoundly relevant history of interest from one of the world’s leading financial writers, The Price of Time explains our current global financial position and how we got here In the beginning was the loan, and the loan carried interest. For at least five millennia people have been borrowing and lending at interest. The practice wasn’t always popular—in the ancient world, usury was generally viewed as exploitative, a potential path to debt bondage and slavery. Yet as capitalism became established from the late Middle Ages onwards, denunciations of interest were tempered because interest was a necessary reward for lenders to part with their capital. And interest performs many other vital functions: it encourages people to save; enables them to place a value on precious assets, such as houses and all manner of financial securities; and allows us to price risk. All economic and financial activities take place across time. Interest is often described as the “price of money,” but it is better called the “price of time:” time is scarce, time has value, interest is the time value of money. Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, interest rates have sunk lower than ever before. Easy money after the global financial crisis in 2007/2008 has produced several ill effects, including the appearance of multiple asset price bubbles, a reduction in productivity growth, discouraging savings and exacerbating inequality, and forcing yield starved investors to take on excessive risk. The financial world now finds itself caught between a rock and a hard place, and Edward Chancellor is here to tell us why. In this enriching volume, Chancellor explores the history of interest and its essential function in determining how capital is allocated and priced.

Appeals to Interest

Appeals to Interest
Author: Dean Mathiowetz
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2015-06-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0271072172

It has become a commonplace assumption in modern political debate that white and rural working- and middle-class citizens in the United States who have been rallied by Republicans in the “culture wars” to vote Republican have been voting “against their interests.” But what, exactly, are these “interests” that these voters are supposed to have been voting against? It reveals a lot about the role of the notion of interest in political debate today to realize that these “interests” are taken for granted to be the narrowly self-regarding, primarily economic “interests” of the individual. Exposing and contesting this view of interests, Dean Mathiowetz finds in the language of interest an already potent critique of neoliberal political, theoretical, and methodological imperatives—and shows how such a critique has long been active in the term’s rich history. Through an innovative historical investigation of the language of interest, Mathiowetz shows that appeals to interest are always politically contestable claims about “who” somebody is—and a provocation to action on behalf of that “who.” Appeals to Interest exposes the theoretical and political costs of our widespread denial of this crucial role of interest-talk in the constitution of political identity, in political theory and social science alike.

Exploring the Psychology of Interest

Exploring the Psychology of Interest
Author: Paul J. Silvia
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2006-04-13
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0199722072

Psychologists have always been interested in interest, and so modern research on interest can be found in nearly every area of the field: Researchers studying emotions, cognition, development, education, aesthetics, personality, motivation, and vocations have developed intriguing ideas about what interest is and how it works. Exploring the Psychology of Interest presents an integrated picture of how interest has been studied in all the wide-ranging areas of psychology. Using modern theories of cognition and emotion as an integrative framework, Paul Silvia examines the nature of interest, what makes things interesting, the role of interest in personality, and the development of peoples idiosyncratic interests, hobbies, and avocations. His examination reveals deep similarities between seemingly different fields of psychology and illustrates the profound importance of interest, curiosity, and intrinsic motivation for understanding why people do what they do. The most comprehensive work of its kind, Exploring the Psychology of Interest will be a valuable resource for student and professional researchers in cognitive, social, and developmental psychology.

The Love Interest

The Love Interest
Author: Cale Dietrich
Publisher:
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2017-05-16
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 125010713X

In a secret organization that cultivates teenage spies, the stakes are high for two agents, Caden and Dylan, whose mission to compete for a girl destined for great power becomes complicated when Caden finds himself falling in love with his competition.

Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century

Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century
Author: Jacob Sider Jost
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2020-12-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813945062

Can a single word explain the world? In the British eighteenth century, interest comes close: it lies at the foundation of the period’s thinking about finance, economics, politics, psychology, and aesthetics. Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century provides the first comprehensive account of interest in an era when a growing national debt created a new class of rentiers who lived off of interest, the emerging discipline of economics made self-interest an axiom of human behavior, and booksellers began for the first time to market books by calling them "interesting." Sider Jost reveals how the multiple meanings of interest allowed writers to make connections—from witty puns to deep structural analogies—among different spheres of eighteenth-century life. Challenging a long and influential tradition that reads the eighteenth century in terms of individualism, atomization, abstraction, and the hegemony of market-based thinking, this innovative study emphasizes the importance of interest as an idiom for thinking about concrete social ties, at court and in families, universities, theaters, boroughs, churches, and beyond. To "be in the interest of" or "have an interest with" another was a crucial relationship, one that supplied metaphors and habits of thought across the culture. Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century recovers the small, densely networked world of Hanoverian Britain and its self-consciously inventive language for talking about human connection.

In the Interest of Others

In the Interest of Others
Author: John S. Ahlquist
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2013-09-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1400848652

A groundbreaking study of labor unions that advances a new theory of organizational leadership and governance In the Interest of Others develops a new theory of organizational leadership and governance to explain why some organizations expand their scope of action in ways that do not benefit their members directly. John Ahlquist and Margaret Levi document eighty years of such activism by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in the United States and the Waterside Workers Federation in Australia. They systematically compare the ILWU and WWF to the Teamsters and the International Longshoremen's Association, two American transport industry labor unions that actively discouraged the pursuit of political causes unrelated to their own economic interests. Drawing on a wealth of original data, Ahlquist and Levi show how activist organizations can profoundly transform the views of members about their political efficacy and the collective actions they are willing to contemplate. They find that leaders who ask for support of projects without obvious material benefits must first demonstrate their ability to deliver the goods and services members expect. These leaders must also build governance institutions that coordinate expectations about their objectives and the behavior of members. In the Interest of Others reveals how activist labor unions expand the community of fate and provoke preferences that transcend the private interests of individual members. Ahlquist and Levi then extend this logic to other membership organizations, including religious groups, political parties, and the state itself.

Interest Rate Markets

Interest Rate Markets
Author: Siddhartha Jha
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2011-02-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 111801779X

How to build a framework for forecasting interest rate market movements With trillions of dollars worth of trades conducted every year in everything from U.S. Treasury bonds to mortgage-backed securities, the U.S. interest rate market is one of the largest fixed income markets in the world. Interest Rate Markets: A Practical Approach to Fixed Income details the typical quantitative tools used to analyze rates markets; the range of fixed income products on the cash side; interest rate movements; and, the derivatives side of the business. Emphasizes the importance of hedging and quantitatively managing risks inherent in interest rate trades Details the common trades which can be used by investors to take views on interest rates in an efficient manner, the methods used to accurately set up these trades, as well as common pitfalls and risks?providing examples from previous market stress events such as 2008 Includes exclusive access to the Interest Rate Markets Web site which includes commonly used calculations and trade construction methods Interest Rate Markets helps readers to understand the structural nature of the rates markets and to develop a framework for thinking about these markets intuitively, rather than focusing on mathematical models

The Public Use of Private Interest

The Public Use of Private Interest
Author: Charles L. Schultze
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Total Pages: 104
Release: 2010-12-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0815719051

According to conventional wisdom, government may intervene when private markets fail to provide goods and services that society values. This view has led to the passage of much legislation and the creation of a host of agencies that have attempted, by exquisitely detailed regulations, to compel legislatively defined behavior in a broad range of activities affecting society as a whole—health care, housing, pollution abatement, transportation, to name only a few. Far from achieving the goals of the legislators and regulators, these efforts have been largely ineffective; worse, they have spawned endless litigation and countless administrative proceedings as the individuals and firms on who the regulations fall seek to avoid, or at least soften, their impact. The result has been long delays in determining whether government programs work at all, thwarting of agreed-upon societal aims, and deep skepticism about the power of government to make any difference. Strangely enough in a nation that since its inception has valued both the means and the ends of the private market system, the United States has rarely tried to harness private interests to public goals. Whenever private markets fail to produce some desired good or service (or fail to deter undesirable activity), the remedies proposed have hardly ever involved creating a system of incentives similar to those of the market place so as to make private choice consonant with public virtue. In this revision of the Godkin Lectures presented at Harvard University in November and December 1976, Charles L. Schultze examines the sources of this paradox. He outlines a plan for government intervention that would turn away from the direct "command and control" regulating techniques of the past and rely instead on market-like incentives to encourage people indirectly to take publicly desired actions.