Masaaki Shirakawa— Currently, overnight interbank interest rates in many developed economies are zero or slightly negative, and long-term interest rates are also extremely low. Did policymakers and economists expect it to happen and persist, say, twenty years ago? Back then, only Japan experienced such a situation, and it was regarded
Ben S. Bernanke, Timothy F. Geithner, Henry M. Paulson Jr.— The crisis of 2008 was a classic financial panic, a staple of economic history at least since the Dutch tulip crisis of 1637, except this time it was rooted in a mania over dubious mortgages rather than fashionable flowers. As
Stephen Davis— If you need an example of how the financial system has failed the test of public trust, look no further than Wells Fargo. But it is vital to go deeper than the headline story about fraudulent cross-selling into systemic miscarriages of governance and shareholder oversight. The scandal appears
Edward Castronova— Three years ago, the digerati were abuzz about the idea of a “real” virtual currency. That turned out not to be the killer app. We still face the full disintermediation of the finance industry, but it’s being driven not by digital currencies but by digital wallets. What’s the
Follow @jentaub To address the 2008 financial crisis, congress passed the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to bailout out the banks and the federal government committed trillions of dollars to save the entire system. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke defended the massive government intervention to rescue the banks. He said, “it wasn’t
Bitcoin is on the rise. The completely digital currency has been covered by Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, among others. Bitcoins have the power to buy anything from a hot dog at a Sacramento Kings NBA game to a hotel room at a Holiday Inn in