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Churches in [tag]Bulawayo[/tag], as well as other churches in [tag]Zimbabwe[/tag], are commemorating the anniversary of [tag]Murambatsvina [/tag]in their town with a peaceful procession of [tag]Christian [/tag]witness, so that Zimbabwean citizens and the authorities will be reminded of this injustice and the consequent, enduring suffering.
The police are doing all they can to prevent the [tag]prayer[/tag] procession, as evidenced in a recent press release.
This post concludes with information on similar efforts taking place in [tag]London[/tag].
You can read an overview on Operation Murambatsvina in this Sokwanele article dated 18 June 2005. Or read blogs archived here. We also have a collection of Murambatsvina images on Flickr at this link. Please feel free to use the images on Flickr to spread the word and remind people. We'd appreciate it if you added a link back to this site and this article.
Thank you for your support!
PRESS STATEMENT FROM CHURCHES IN BULAWAYO : 16 May 2006
BULAWAYO – Church leaders in Bulawayo are seriously concerned that police in the city have made an about turn in granting them clearance to hold a prayer procession on Saturday May 20 to remember victims of last year's [tag]Operation Murambatsvina[/tag].
As Church leaders in Bulawayo we view this as an infringement of our freedom of worship. If police are to ban church services, which are exempt under the Public Order and Security Act, such a development will have serious implications on the Church's right to carry out its God given mandate. Such action serves to clearly demonstrate the desperate position of the regime.
The prayer procession scheduled for Saturday morning from St Patrick's Church in Makokoba to Brethren in Christ Church in the centre city, is part of nationwide activities being coordinated by [tag]Zimbabwe Christian Alliance[/tag] to stand in solidarity with the poor. A similar big event will be held in Chitungwiza on Saturday. The Zimbabwe Christian Alliance is organizing these prayer events not for political gain or mere publicity but because it has a Biblical mandate to stand in solidarity with the poor.
Churches in Bulawayo sheltered over 2 000 families at the height Murambatsvina and have continued to provide food assistance as well as medical help and payment of school fees for displaced children. What has frightened the police is that thousands of Bulawayo residents are intending to take parting the procession. The procession starts from Makokoba - the oldest and one of the suburbs worst affected by Murambatsvina. Police estimate that 15 000 people will turn out for the procession and claim they do not have enough manpower to control such a huge crowd.
Since yesterday, junior police officers have been calling individual clerics to interrogate and intimidate them to cancel procession. But this morning, Tuesday, about 30 senior security officers in Bulawayo who are members of the Joint Operations Command - that is composed of the police, army and Central Intelligence Organisation – summoned the leadership of Churches in Bulawayo to a two- hour interrogation session.
Soon after the interrogation a letter withdrawing clearance for the procession was issued. Clearance had initially been granted on Friday last week.
An urgent meeting of senior church leaders will be held tomorrow morning to decide on the way forward.
The police in Bulawayo have withdrawn clearance for a planned prayer procession by Churches in Bulawayo to remember victims of last year's Operation Murambatsvina.
For more information contact Zimbabwe Christian Alliance coordinator Useni Sibanda on 263 91 218 651 or 263 11 881 316
Date: Saturday 20 May 2006
Assembly And Starting Point: St.Patricks Church - Makokoba
Procession Through Town To: Bretheren In Christ Church/Central (Masotsha Ave)
Assembly Time: 9.30 am
Start Of Procession: 10.00 am
Last year on 18th May the police in Harare began the systematic destruction of what were deemed to be illegal dwellings. In addition street [tag]vendors[/tag], even those trading legally, were arrested and fined, their wares and assets confiscated. All this was done under the guise of a clean-up operation for the cities, purportedly to reduce criminal activity. However most of the people affected were neither dirty nor criminal: most were victims of disastrous government policies and were trying by all means to eke out a living for their families. Operation Murambatsvina (which means clean out the trash) spread its stain indiscriminately across the country and in June the squatter camps of Killarney and Ngozi Mine were demolished, along with many suburban structures in this town.
In response, many churches in Bulawayo sheltered and fed the newly homeless for six weeks before they were forcibly removed from sight to a camp at Helensvale. Shortly afterwards they uplifted were again and were strewn across the country. Several families found themselves camping in the open for days at a time while uninformed and unprepared local authorities decided what should be done.
Since that time some families have managed to integrate into their original rural communities. But many are living as strangers. They have lost their friends and family, their belongings, their means of earning a living. Sometimes they are not even allowed to bury their dead. They have to seek help from pastors to get a burial in town, which because of a shortage of funds, can take several days while families wait helplessly. On average two people a week (often babies) die and the rate is increasing. The cause of death is often [tag]HIV [/tag]related aggravated by malnutrition. Churches within Bulawayo have done their best to help but with food shortages and limited resources it has never been enough.
One group within the displaced, affected by the upheaval, were the children who needed to continue with their schooling. Funding was found that enabled almost 200 children to attend last term, but there was nothing for another 300.
These statistics only paint part of the picture. For many, the disruption to their lives, the loss of community and property, the deprivation of their livelihoods and the disregard for their dignity has been traumatic to the point of despair, even death.
As [tag]Christians[/tag], [tag]Jesus [/tag]expects us to be a voice for the poor and the oppressed, to be God's arm of help and to stand beside those who are suffering. For this reason Churches in Bulawayo, as well as other churches in Zimbabwe, are commemorating the anniversary of Murambatsvina in our town with a peaceful procession of Christian witness, so that our citizens and the authorities will be reminded of this injustice and the consequent, enduring suffering.
We are inviting you, to join us as a demonstration of faith in the redeeming work of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Let us stand with those who are treated as the least and proclaim God's indignation concerning oppression and injustice.
And for those who are in London:
Special Vigil to mark the Anniversary of the Start of Murambatsvina
Murambatsvina "Clear out the Trash†started a year ago this week. Tragically it is still continuing – the Telegraph reports today (16/5/06) that 10,000 of the most vulnerable – the street children of Harare – have been detained pending relocation to rural areas. Protests are planned in Zimbabwe to mark this anniversary. On Saturday, 20th May, the Churches in Bulawayo have planned a procession through the city. We pray they will be safe from attack. This Saturday, the Vigil is holding a sympathy demonstration to mark this horrendous anniversary (usual Vigil time of 2 - 6 pm).
Washinton Ali, Chair of the MDC-UK (part of the Vigil Coalition) urges all opposed to Murambatsvina to attend the Vigil. He also advises that MDC President, Morgan Tsvangirai, will be addressing supporters at a meeting in London on Sunday, 28th May – venue to be advised.
* PLEASE ALL COME AND SUPPORT THIS IMPORTANT PROTEST – HELP US MAKE THE PUBLIC AWARE OF THE HORRORS IN ZIMBABWE
Dr Makumbe, civic leaders and Norwegian unionist arrested in Zimbabwe
DR JOHN MAKUMBE, a fierce government critic was yesterday arrested at his offices at the University of Zimbabwe in connection with the planned commemoration of the Operation Murambatsvina anniversary, the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights has said.
The civic leaders were arrested and were being questioned on events earmarked commemorate the first anniversary of Operation Murambatsvina the brutal exercise that saw the government of Zimbabwe last year destroying people's houses and livelihoods, ostensibly to clean up the cities. It seems though that despite the UN condemning the exercise as illegal and disastrous, one the left over 2,4 million people in limbo, the government of Zimbabwe seems to be continuing in rounding up homeless people and dumping them outside the city. The homeless people are waiting to be deported to their rural homes.
Following Harare Roundup, Thousands Sent to New Holding Camp
One year after launching a highly controversial campaign of evictions and demolitions of unauthorized dwellings, Zimbabwean authorities have established another holding camp on a farm outside Harare to accommodate some 10,000 homeless people and street vendors rounded up in the capital over the past several weeks.
Civil society sources said some of those displaced a year ago in Harare's so-called Operation Murambatsvina (Shona for "Drive Out the Trash") have also been moved to Melfort Farm, located in Goromonzi district about 40 kilometers east of Harare.
A highly placed police source said police officers and central intelligence organisation agents have been deployed to Melfort Farm, and cordoned it off. A Harare city official speaking on condition of anonymity said Melfort lacked proper shelter and sanitary facilities and that the only food being provided was that seized from vendors.
[tags]poverty, IDPs, Internally Displaced Persons, homeless, protest, action, non violence, civic action[/tags]
I have a somewhat alternative take on this whole commeration deal. Read this post for more.What do you think?
[...] Events are taking place in Zimbabwe and London to mark the anniversary - for more information See Sokwanele [...]
Zim Youths in Diaspora blast at Mugabe
By Alois Phiri
With the latest specimen images from Amnesty International to show how people have
been severely affected with the Zimbabwean Gvt devastating policy of house demolitions
(operation Murambatsvina) shows the continued gross human rights violation by the
Mugabe Gvt,with is totally injustifiable under international law and have been widely
UN estimated more than 700 000 people including children,elderly,ill(one of the countries
with the highest rate of HIV and AIDS victims)are facing winter and rainly season with little
or no shelter not because
of natural disasters but because of their own Gvt which has forcibly evicted then,demolished
their homes and destroyed property and their livelihoods.Some families were moved to transit
camps where they have no shelter,cooking facilities,supplies,sanitary facilities and were they
cant even find ants to feed on.In which analyists and International observers see it as a way of
punishing them for voting for the Opposition party.
Life in Zimbabwe today have know meaning and have made life mean nothing to ordinary
citizens.A country which used to be the bread basket of Africa,with now the highest Inflation
rate of 1300%,Unemployment estimated at more than 90 %,with more than 85% of the population
living below poverty line.
With efforts from civic organisations,human rights org,student groups,student groups,youth groups
,oppositon parties and churches to hold peaceful protest and prayers to send a message to the
Mugabe Gvt to address the economic and political decay,and in respond the Gvt shows lack of
compassion and mercy by crushing peaceful protest by using armed police,soilders and militia to
silence hungry and angry innocent civilian.Gvt officials have even went to an extend of posing and
throwing death threats to any efforts to mobilise uprising saying the Gvt will physically eliminate any
individual who sort to organise any demos,directly refering to Morgan Tsvangirayi leader of the main
opposition party who earlier this year call for a mass action to push Mugabe to the negoiating table.
In conclusion,what everyone ask is who will save Zimbabwe?A country with a Gvt which has paralysed
the economy and food security(agriculture which used to be the backbone of the economy) with half of the
population needing food aid , with a Gvt which has denied humanitarian aid,and with a Gvt which has stepped
up an attack on NGOs labelling them as being used by European countries as their foreign policies.A Government
which has put in place harsh media and un constitutional laws POSA,AIPPA to close all loopholes for any form
of uprising,a country were the Gvt does not respect the rule of law,were Gvt officials and ministers can overturn
court rulings.
Zimbabweans were never had Independent,what makes Smith regime different from Mugabe regime no difference a big
NO difference
,what independent when a Gvt enforce draconian media and unconstitutional laws which are meant to cripple the country's
independant civil liberty and media,laws which makes it impossible to campaign for office,run a private publication or campaign
or lobby for human rights,laws which makes it illegal any statement criticizing the president or his policies ,what independent
when their is no freedom of association(were you have to seek for police clearance first before you visit a friend,or use a toilet)
.Zimbabwe is still under colony,this time under our own uncle who is selling and mortgaging the country(resources)to Chinese
for political grip.
A nation under a dictator who is almost a century years old who instead of addressing the nation problems by taking executive
decision of paving way for a young generation but has vowed to stay in power with no majority support till thy Kingdom come.
Who will save Zimbabwe,Zimbabweans the future lays in us its our house which is dirty and its our duty to clean it.Lets all unite
regardless of race,tribe,sexuallity and restore political sanity and dignity to the once bread basket of Africa.Diaspora,diaspora,
diaspora,diaspora you play a big and major role in pushing for a political transformation and more to push for Intenational
intervention to the Zim crisis.Why cant we all inherit a culture of Unity our late true revolutionaries leaders had the late
Joshua Unity Nkomo and Josiah Unity Tongogara if we all take that and put it into practice we can definitely bring in a new Gvt
which will feed everyone.And by the way allow me to pass my condolense to the Regime for their loss on Tichaona Jokonya Minister
of Information and Publicity well he fall a victim of his own prophecy and words for sure The end of a traitor is death.
Our criticism is Liberty why coz the Mugabe regime has never done anything for us (Youth) with all our Zim nation
been denied their civil rights!!
Zim youth in UK are holding a political awareness campaign and demos in solidality with their fellow youth and families back home
who are being denied their civic rights in the hands of Adhala Bob.
"Divided he rules†"United Mugabe Hitler goesâ€


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The answer to the second is that I wish I could rectify the answer to the first question.
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With the agreement of the Eurogroup to accept the Greek reform proposals the latest crisis in the euro area seems averted – for the moment. Apparently, Greece had no other option than to give in and prolong its current bailout program as requested or leave the monetary union. The latter would have been a complete surrender to the challenges of a common currency – not of Greece but of its European "partners". All can-kicking in recent years, all refusals to face the needs of a functioning monetary system, all costly bank bailouts to prevent a destabilization of national financial markets and policy structures, and all sacrifices made by individual countries under harsh austerity constraints in order to "save the euro" might have been fruitless as a Grexit inevitably would have triggered a chain reaction among other member countries and possibly the union's breakup.
The danger is not banned yet: Gabriele Steinhauser (Wall Street Journal) wrote immediately after the official consent that the IMF and others still have concerns over the seriousness of the reform measures. Alkman Granitsas (Wall Street Journal) listed five things to know about Greece's proposed reforms which its creditors might not expect or approve. And in order for the funds to be released the program must be implemented successfully and all its conditions met.
How real is the risk of a Grexit under these circumstances? In principle, no one could force Greece to leave the eurozone. As Phoebus Athanassiou wrote in an ECB Legal Working Paper: "[W]hile perhaps feasible through indirect means, a Member State's expulsion from the EU or EMU, would be legally next to impossible." And voluntarily they would not go. Polls show that up to 80 percent of Greeks want to keep the euro. This is the dilemma Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is facing, as the NZZ noted the other day. On the one hand most Greeks were supporting his unbending attitude in negotiations with the Eurogroup. On the other hand, they want to keep the euro which, as almost everybody is telling them, would have been impossible if he had succeeded. The question is, however, whether in this special case the Greeks eventually could not both have their cake and eat it.
Let us take stock. Greece is a small country in a monetary union which is both politically and economically largely dominated by Germany and a couple of other members. The adoption of an artificial common currency and centralized monetary policy is a unique experiment which prevents the Greek government from adjusting the exchange rate to domestic needs. Despite this restraint – and in contrast to the many myths prevailing in public debates – Greece managed to achieve an extraordinary economic performance in international comparison in recent years. Its fiscal consolidation is the fastest among European countries. Its change in overall responsiveness to Going for Growth recommendations has been the highest among OECD countries. It is leading the OECD reform ranking. Its government revenue in percent of GDP is rising. Its competitiveness as measured in Unit Labour Costs is higher than the euro average. (See Brian Lucey's collection of charts for these and other figures.)
As Greece's Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis told the Eurogroup (quoted by Tim Worstall, Forbes):
"We are committed to sound public finances. Greece has made a vast adjustment over the past five years at immense social cost. Its deficit is now below 3% in nominal terms, down from 15% in 2010. Its primary surplus has reached 1.5% at the end of last year, its structural balance, as measured by the IMF, has reached a surplus of 1.6%, the best performance in the EU."
Solvency and liquidity
Above all, Greece is facing two major problems:
1. The country won't ever be able to pay off its debts with austerity as Brendan Greeley (Bloomberg) argued convincingly and Michael Pettis explained in a more fundamental way.
2. A widespread fear of Grexit and currency conversion, which brings Greeks to withdraw cash from their banks and drives private capital out of the country, strongly limits the scope for policy action.
A bank run is the greatest immediate danger. In what the Wall Street Journal called The Greek Re-Vote in February an estimated €2 billion (others talked of €5 billion) was leaving the country each week already. Maybe the prospect of an ever larger number of bank customers withdrawing their deposits and the resulting threat of bank illiquidity was the main reason for the U-turn of the Greek government accepting the Eurogroup deal in contrast to earlier statements.
Observers wondered about the role of the ECB in this situation. Guntram B. Wolff (Bruegel) pointed to the fact that "[i]n a normal bank-run, a central bank needs to provide unlimited liquidity to allow all depositors to withdraw their cash if they wish to. For the Greek banking system, the theoretical limit would be the size of all deposits. … The Greek banking system has a pretty large deposit base of 243.8 billion (December 2014)."
Although recently the ECB increased its amount of Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) from 60 billion to 65 billion the question arose whether it would be prepared to go beyond this and act as a lender of last resort to the whole system. Guntram B. Wolff wrote:
"[M]y answer would clearly be "it depends". If there is certainty that Greece stays in the euro, its banks remain solvent and a political compromise is reached, then the answer is an unambiguous "yes". More problematically, if there is a clear political consensus that no agreement between euro area partners can be found, then the ECB cannot provide unlimited funding. The reason is simply that the ECB would know that in the case of a certain exit, the Greek banks would be insolvent as the economy is collapsing and therefore the value of the assets of the banks would be inferior to the liquidity provided. And even if Grexit wasn't certain but government default was, parts of the banking system would be insolvent requiring limits on ELA."
What would happen if Greece would run out of funds? Nikolaos Chrysoloras, Marcus Bensasson and Christos Ziotis (Bloomberg) described How a Liquidity Squeeze Could Push Greece Out of the Euro. In this case Greece would not only be unable to further service its international debt obligations. State and banks would no longer be able to adequately provide the economy with cash. Government would be forced to cut expenditures and also to establish a new currency to secure payments. Many would regard this as a first step to a de-facto exit from the euro area and a return to the drachma.
But maybe there is still another option: New currency could be introduced in parallel to the euro explicitly for a limited time and a well-defined limited purpose with the intent to return to the status quo ante as soon as political and economic prospects do no longer cause panic and anxieties, confidence in the ECB's lender-of-last-resort function is restored and capital flows are reversed.
Parallel currency
In the past, there have been several proposals to introduce a parallel currency as a solution to the Greek dilemma. Sven Böll (Der Spiegel) reported on a blatant sort of cleansing approach which aimed at ejecting Southern European crisis countries from the monetary union "in a civilized way". Accordingly, not only the drachma but also peseta, lira and escudo would be brought back alongside the euro. Their countries' national central banks would tie these currencies to the euro at fixed rates which would allow them "to remain connected to the euro and devalue their currencies and still have a calculable form of payment at their disposal." … "Withdrawal from the euro would take place "in an orderly and certainly cautious manner," and could possibly be reversed after a few years through a complete return to the monetary union."
Another concept to separate the wheat from the chaff via parallel currencies was proposed by Thomas Mayer, former Chief Economist of Deutsche Bank Group and Head of DB Research, and now a senior fellow at the Center for Financial Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt and external adviser to Deutsche Bank. Considering the likelihood of a euro breakup he mused about the alternative of a "mutation" of the existing monetary arrangement to a three-tier monetary union. He explained:
"The first step in this process would be for northern European countries to index all financial and real-economy contracts, as well as payments to and receipts from governments, to national inflation rates. This protects these countries' residents from the effects of the ECB's looser policy. Should inflation really kick up, however, the contracts could be redenominated in a new currency whose supply would be managed by a subsidiary of the stronger countries' national central banks.
The parallel currency would exist only virtually, as a means to store wealth in countries with secure government finances and strong trade links with Germany. The euro would continue to be used as the basis for cash transactions. …
"Softening" the euro still might not be enough for countries like Greece, however. When external funding for these governments' budget deficits eventually dries up, they could be made to issue IOUs to their domestic creditors. When these IOUs start to be traded, they could assume the role of a second parallel currency. But this currency would exist only as a means of transaction; the euro would remain as a store of value in the background.
Thus a three-tier euro zone would emerge. Countries like France, Italy and Spain would become the "core" countries, where the euro would be used both as a medium for transactions and a store of value. Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and its peers would constitute the "upper tier," where the euro is a means of transaction but not a store of value. Countries such as Greece, Cyprus and Portugal would compose the "lower tier," where the euro is a store of value but not a means of transaction."
Matthew Boesler (Business Insider) elaborated further on Thomas Mayer's idea of a parallel currency for Greece. Summarizing his approach he wrote that the Troika could decide on "a partial stop in financial assistance, with continuing support for debt service needs and the Greek banking sector but no further support for the financing of the government's primary expenses."
Where would the cash come from to cover the latter expenses? Boesler, citing Mayer:
"[A] plausible response of the government to the shortage of euro cash as a result of the end of financial transfers would be to issue debtor notes (IoUs) to its creditors, promising payment as soon as fresh euro cash would become available. As creditors lacking euro cash would have to use the IoUs to settle their own bills, these instruments would assume the role of a parallel currency (let's call it Geuro).
The Geuro would probably quickly be used in most domestic transactions. For the purchase of essential imports, Geuros would have to be exchanged against euros, most likely at a hefty discount of 50% or more. Since an increasing number of domestic goods, services and wages would be paid in devalued Geuros, the export sector could reduce its prices in euro and regain competitiveness against foreign suppliers. …
Greece could formally remain in EMU, execute the exchange rate devaluation necessary to regain international competitiveness, and in the future decide for itself through issuance of Geuros, whether and over what time span it would want to return to a hard currency that is stable against the euro. It could eventually even return completely to the euro by repurchasing Geuros against euros."
David Marsh, too, reflected about a parallel currency for Greece. In the event that talks with creditors break down, in his concept Greece would also remain part of the eurozone but with different arrangements for domestic and international transactions. He wrote:
"Greece would have to print its own currency, the new drachma (ND), which would be heavily depreciated. All domestic wages and prices would be fixed in ND, with the euro still in force for international payments. The government could initially peg the ND wherever it wished, maybe 10% below par with euro, but could then leave it to float lower. Very likely the new currency would settle 20 to 30% below the current imputed value of the Greek currency against the euro."
The fixing of contracts and payments in a new currency with rapidly declining value is exactly what many Greeks fear. The mere announcement of such a policy would result in more cash withdrawals and capital flight driving the country ever faster into ruin.
But what if the state makes it quite clear from the beginning that
– no existing contracts would be touched;
– in reaction to a liquidity shortfall new currency could be issued by the government, but also by any other economic agent with public acceptance deciding whether it gets established or not;
– new currency which would be established beside the euro would be solely intended to transitorily fill the gap which the ECB left in retreating from its lender-of-last-resort function;
– its use, and that of the euro, would not be restricted to a special purpose such as government transactions, domestic sales or international trade;
– the exchange rate between the euro and any new currency would be negotiated freely in transactions;
– denomination could be chosen freely by the issuer – be it in euro or another currency or a precious metal;
– the circulation of new currency would be limited explicitly to the time of the shortfall in euro liquidity. Once economic prospects improve and the role of the ECB becomes less ambiguous it would cease;
– any kind of new currency beside the euro would be held and dealt in entirely voluntarily.
This is the concept of Notgeld (necessity money or emergency money) as it is known from history.
Emergency money
There is a long tradition of emergency money in times of crisis. However, as noted by Iliazd in the introduction to a remarkable Flickr Notgeld album of over 5,000 mostly German notes "Notgeld was not the norm but the exception in the history of currencies" making it a sought-after collector's item.
Here are some extracts from the introduction to illustrate the nature of the instrument:
"Notgeld (emergency currency) was issued by cities, boroughs, even private companies while there was a shortage of official coins and bills. Nobody would pay in coins while their nominal value was less than the value of the metal. And when inflation went on, the state was just unable to print bills fast enough. Some companies couldn't pay their workers because the Reichsbank just couldn't provide enough bills. So they started to print their own money – they even asked the Reichsbank beforehand. As long as the Notgeld was accepted, no real harm was done and it just was a certificate of debt. Often it was even a more stable currency than real money, as sometimes the denomination was a certain amount of gold, dollars, corn, meat, etc.
It was not legal tender, so the only people who dealt in it were those that wanted to. It was very stable and debt free. To keep it flowing, sometimes it was set up to lose 2 or 3% of its value every month, which kept people from hoarding it.
There were several advantages to issuing Notgeld. First, it stabilized local government and local markets, so people could sell and buy what they needed and government services kept functioning. Second, it was a stabilizing influence on the real currency, which was still used. And third, it helped to concentrate the real currency at the government level, so they could import things not found locally.
It was a controlled complementary currency, so prices were set by whoever issued it. In effect, this created wide scale and orderly rationing."
Reading this I was wondering what role a digital currency such as Bitcoin could play in such a case these days …
The introduction of emergency currency beside the euro would allow the Greek government to flexibly react to a liquidity shortage, mitigate its effects and resume negotiations with its creditors under less pressure. In contrast to concepts of a parallel currency emergency currency would be created where it is needed. The spreading to many issuers would reduce the risk of default. Different conditions and denominations would secure the attractiveness in different circumstances.
In analogy to an argument used by Martin Sandbu (Financial Times) Greece cannot make Notgeld legal tender beyond the payment it is used for. But an emergency currency would enable the government to economise on euros, leaving them for cases where Notgeld would not be accepted. These would include
– cases where emergency money is not accepted in domestic transactions;
– most international transactions;
– international debt payments.
Since living and making economic policy in a state of emergency is not desirable and promoting economic growth has highest priority to end it as soon as possible, default on existing debt and negotiation of debt restructuring is a real option. As Michael Pettis stressed, trade and investment flow to countries with good future prospects, and not to countries with good track records. Once growth prospects improve, with among other things a manageable debt burden, "foreign businesses and investors will fall over each other" to regain the market regardless of a country's debt repayment history. He emphasized: "This is one of those things about which the historical track record is quite unambiguous."
In another article Pettis further elaborated on the point:
"Debt can be thought of as a moral obligation when a loan is extended from one individual to another, especially if there is no interest on the loan. But loans to businesses or to sovereign entities are business transactions, and they should be managed as such. The only moral obligation in restructuring sovereign debt, it seems to me, is for policymakers to fulfill their political responsibilities to do what is in the best interests of their citizens and to participate in a responsible way in the global community. The debt restructuring process is, in other words, morally neutral."
There must be innumerable disadvantages of this proposal to allow for emergency currency and I am looking forward to your comments on it. Surely, at first glance, the idea seems crazy. With several currencies in circulation economic processes risk to become more cumbersome, less efficient and less transparent. But, as Michael Pettis asked in a different context: Compared to what? The Greek economy is already in disastrous shape, its debt burden is choking any long-term economic recovery, it can never grow its way out of its debt no matter how radical and forceful the reforms, and a liquidity shortfall may put an abrupt end to any remaining illusion of the benefits of EMU membership.
Examples of parallel currencies in and outside the euro area have shown that they can function remarkably well on a local level, promoting entrepreneurial initiative and stimulating economic activity. For Greece, fending off the immediate dangers, regaining control over its economic – and to some extent within existing restraints – monetary situation as prerequisite for long-term recovery should take precedence over all other political considerations. Maybe a crazy idea is what is needed now.
These days, there is a flood of articles and comments of varying quality and importance on Greece and the eurozone. With the following quotes I would like to draw attention to a small selection of contributions which may be relevant beyond the day.
Joseph E. Stiglitz: A Greek Morality Tale
Both supporters and opponents of the plans of the Greek government cite moral arguments why Greece should, or should not, have its way in the current situation. Opponents point to the risk of moral hazard. As Joseph Stiglitz put it: "There is a fear that if Greece is allowed to restructure its debt, it will simply get itself into trouble again, as will others."
Joseph Stiglitz tells another morality tale as the following excerpts from his article show. Furthermore, he reminds us that the current crisis is not a Greek problem but deeply rooted in the structure of the eurozone:
"When the euro crisis began a half-decade ago, Keynesian economists predicted that the austerity that was being imposed on Greece and the other crisis countries would fail. It would stifle growth and increase unemployment – and even fail to decrease the debt-to-GDP ratio. Others – in the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and a few universities – talked of expansionary contractions. But even the International Monetary Fund argued that contractions, such as cutbacks in government spending, were just that – contractionary."
"[L]et us be clear: Greece could be blamed for its troubles if it were the only country where the troika's medicine failed miserably. But Spain had a surplus and a low debt ratio before the crisis, and it, too, is in depression. What is needed is not structural reform within Greece and Spain so much as structural reform of the eurozone's design and a fundamental rethinking of the policy frameworks that have resulted in the monetary union's spectacularly bad performance."
The Greek example points to a fundamental problem. It reminds us "how badly the world needs a debt-restructuring framework. Excessive debt caused not only the 2008 crisis, but also the East Asia crisis in the 1990s and the Latin American crisis in the 1980s. It continues to cause untold suffering in the US, where millions of homeowners have lost their homes, and is now threatening millions more in Poland and elsewhere who took out loans in Swiss francs.
Given the amount of distress brought about by excessive debt, one might well ask why individuals and countries have repeatedly put themselves into this situation. After all, such debts are contracts – that is, voluntary agreements – so creditors are just as responsible for them as debtors. In fact, creditors arguably are more responsible: typically, they are sophisticated financial institutions, whereas borrowers frequently are far less attuned to market vicissitudes and the risks associated with different contractual arrangements."
"So it is not debt restructuring, but its absence, that is "immoral." There is nothing particularly special about the dilemmas that Greece faces today; many countries have been in the same position. What makes Greece's problems more difficult to address is the structure of the eurozone: monetary union implies that member states cannot devalue their way out of trouble, yet the modicum of European solidarity that must accompany this loss of policy flexibility simply is not there."
Silvia Merler: Who's (still) exposed to Greece?
When Syriza won elections on a pledge of ending austerity policies and seeking debt relief one immediate question was who is still exposed to Greece. Silvia Merler provided statistics which indicate that on the creditor side the situation is far less dramatic than a few years ago. She observed:
"Since the start of the crisis, the structure of Greek debt has changed considerably (almost 80 percent of government financial liabilities are now accounted for by loans, against slightly less than 20 percent back in 2008). At the same time, the weight of public creditors has increased among the creditors of the government. … At the end of 2013, debt due to official creditors amounted to 216 billion of loans (IMF/EU loans) and 38 billion of securities (under SMP). This means that, at the end of 2013, official creditors accounted for about 94 percent of the total loans due to non-residents and 89 percent of the total securities held by non residents."
"The data show, however, that since 2012 (when the ECB introduced the OMT programme) private investors have been timidly and slowly coming back to Greece. While exposures of euro area banks are still at very low levels compared to the pre-crisis period, it is tempting to interpret this as a first trace of normalisation and a resumption in confidence, which the present political turmoil risks reverting."
ECB interference and the game of a "bankrupt country"
Frances Coppola: What on earth is the ECB up to?
As the Greek government is in danger to run out of money soon, all eyes focus on the role of the European Central Bank (ECB). What on earth is the ECB up to? asked Frances Coppola as the central bank lifted the waiver under which it had been prepared to accept Greek sovereign bonds as collateral for liquidity. Referring to the timing of the decision Frances in a passionate rant questioned the legitimacy of its interference. Furthermore, she pointed to the fact that the ECB has pursued this strategy before:
"The ECB is acting far beyond its mandate in seeking to influence negotiations between Eurozone member states regarding the terms and conditions under which member states lend to their distressed partners. It has no business interfering in fiscal policy: if the Greek government decides to run 1.5% fiscal surpluses instead of 4.5%, hike minimum wages and create lots of government jobs, it is none of the ECB's business. The ECB's monetary policy failures are legion: it should put its own house in order, rather than interfering with the conduct of fiscal policy. And worse, its persistent interference in fiscal policy is a clear conflict of interest, as the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice noted in relation to the OMT programme. It should not be a member of the Troika at all, and certainly should not use changes in fiscal policy by a democratically-elected sovereign government – even one that has inherited an economy in tatters with a massive debt burden – as justification for limiting liquidity to that country's banking system. Monetary policy should never be used to serve fiscal or political ends. Not ever."
"Over 6 months ago, Varoufakis predicted that the ECB would attempt to pull funding from the Greek banks. …
[P]ulling ELA from Greek banks would cause their sudden disorderly collapse. The ECB has used this trick before: it threatened to pull ELA from Irish banks in 2010, and it actually pulled ELA from Cyprus's Laiki Bank and the Bank of Cyprus, forcing immediate closure and restructuring. This second piece of brinkmanship resulted in the worst bank bailout decision in the history of the planet, which was (fortunately) subsequently overturned by the Cypriot legislature. Undermining deposit insurance is almost criminally insane."
As the Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has a background as an expert in game theory many observers were musing about the strategy behind his decisions. Frances Coppola came upon a very interesting approach which explains how in a game called "coercive deficiency" weakening Greece's position could actually strengthen its hand. [The footnotes in the following quote all refer to a piece by Jacques Sapir which you might be interested to check.]
"In this strategic game, it is clear that Greece has deliberately chosen the strategy qualified by Thomas Schelling, one of the founders of game theory, but also of nuclear dissuasion, as «coercive deficiency»[5]. In fact, this term of «coercive deficiency» was imagined by L. Wilmerding in 1943 in order to describe a situation where agencies enter into expenses without prior financing, knowing that morally the government will not be able to refuse funding them [6]. Schelling's contribution consists in showing that this situation can be generalized and that a situation of weakness can reveal itself to be an instrument of coercion upon others. He also showed how it can be rational for an actor knowing himself to be in a position of weakness from the start, to increase his weakness in order to use it in negotiation. Reversing Jack London, one can speak in this instance of a "strength of the weak." [7]. It is in this context that we must understand the renunciation by the Greek government of the last slice of aid promised by the so-called «Troïka, » amounting to 7 billion euros. Of course, having rejected the legitimacy of said "Troïka, » it could not logically accept to take advantage of it. But, in a more subtle way, this gesture is putting Greece voluntarily at the edge of the abyss and demonstrates all at once its resolve to go the bitter end (like Cortez burning his ships before moving up to Mexico) and to increase the pressure on Germany."
Central bank rules versus discretion
Karl Whelan: What's Going On with Greece and the ECB?
The role of the ECB is also the topic of this article by Karl Whelan. He discussed the extent to which ECB decisions are rule-bound:
"One of the key uncertainties surrounding the situation in Greece is the relationship between the Greek banks and the ECB. Lots of press coverage is suggesting the ECB has a set of well-established rules that mean it will not be able to lend to Greek banks in March unless the government negotiates a new EU-IMF program to replace the one expiring at the end of this month. …
As a general matter, the idea that the ECB is considering pulling funding from the Greek banks seems to be true. But, as is often the case when the world's press attempts to understand the ECB, the reports get most of the details wrong."
"… the ECB has almost complete discretion over which banks it lends to. I have written about the ECB's Risk Control Framework before and it's been rolled out regularly in the years since I wrote that post. The bottom line is that the ECB can single out specific institutions and decide to not lend to them for pretty much whatever "risk-related" reason they feel like putting forward. Still, this approach, if taken, isn't based on any hard and fast rules."
"… the idea of "junk-rated bonds are only eligible if a country is in a program" being part of "the ECB's rules" is an over-statement. In truth, the ECB makes up these rules as it goes along and the "in again, out again" routine with Greek government bond eligibility is a long-standing one at this point."
"… Greek banks were using at most €8 billion in Greek government debt in December as collateral for loans from the Eurosystem. Set against the total loans of €56 billion owed to the Eurosystem this is fairly small beer. (Factoring in haircuts, its share in collateral would be even less than this comparison suggests).
So, on its own, the eligibility of Greek government bonds is just not that big a deal."
"The ECB is pretty clearly playing from its tried and tested playbook in their current stand-off with the Greek government. Governing Council members know they can cut off lots of credit from the Greek banks in March and many of them are happy to tell the world they are thinking about doing this. As a result, they hope to get Greece's new government to sign a new deal with the EU and IMF. But don't believe for a minute that this is a technocratic thing to do with "the ECB having to follow its rules.""
"I fully expect the ECB-as-heavy-hearted-technocrat angle to dominate press coverage of this story this month. That's a pity because the "ECB in politicised mission creep while helping trigger a bank run" story is more interesting and closer to the truth."
Lessons from history
Michael Pettis: Syriza and the French indemnity of 1871-73
In a knowledgeable and highly readable article which has too many important points to do it justice here Michael Pettis put the current conflict in Europe into historical perspective. Here are some snippets:
"European nationalists have successfully convinced us, against all logic, that the European crisis is a conflict among nations, and not among economic sectors. …
This is absurd. The European debt crisis is not a conflict among nations. All economic systems— and certainly an entity as large and diverse as Europe— generate volatility whose balance sheet impacts are mediated through different political and economic institutions, among which usually are domestic monetary policy and the currency regime. With the creation of the euro as the common currency among a group of European countries, monetary policy and the currency regime could no longer play their traditional roles in absorbing economic volatility. As a result, for much of the euro's first decade, a series of deep imbalances developed among various sectors of the European economy. Because Europe's existing economic and political institutions had largely evolved around the national sovereignty of individual countries, and also because the inflation and monetary histories of individual countries varied tremendously before the creation of the euro, it was probably almost inevitable that these imbalances would manifest themselves in the form of trade and capital flow imbalances between countries."
"Resolving a debt crisis involves nothing more than assigning the losses. In the current crisis these costs have to be assigned to different economic sectors within Europe, but to the extent that the assignation of costs can be characterized as exercises in national cost allocation, it is easy to turn an economic conflict into a national conflict."
"Most currency and sovereign debt crises in modern history ultimately represent a conflict over how the costs are to be assigned among two different groups. On the one hand are creditors, owners of real estate and other assets, and the businesses who benefit from the existing currency distortions. One the other hand are workers who pay in the form of low wages and unemployment and, eventually, middle class household savers and taxpayers who pay in the form of a gradual erosion of their income or of the value of their savings. Historically during currency and sovereign debt crises political parties have come to represent one or the other of these groups, and whether they are of the left or the right, they are able to capture the allegiance of these groups.
Except for Greece, in Europe the main political parties on both sides of the political spectrum have until now chosen to maintain the value of the currency and protect the interests of the creditors."
"By early 1871, the French army was roundly defeated by Prussia, which during that time had unified the various German states as the German Empire under the Prussian king … [One] consequence was the French indemnity. As part of the privilege of conquest and as a condition for ending the occupation of much of northern France, Berlin demanded war reparation payments originally proposed at 1 billion gold francs but which eventually grew to an astonishing 5 billion, at least in part because of an explicit decision by Berlin to impose a high enough burden permanently to cripple any possible French economic recovery. …
[But] France was able to raise the money very quickly, mostly in the form of two domestic bond issues in 1871 and 1872, which were heavily over-subscribed …"
"One important point is to distinguish between financial crises that occur within a globalization cycle and those that end a globalization cycle. Whereas the latter are often devastating and mark the end for many years of economic growth, the former — like the 1994 Tequila crisis or the 1997 Asian crisis, or even the 1866 Overend Gurney crisis — may seem overwhelming at first, but markets always recover far more quickly than most participants expect. When markets are very liquid, and in their leveraging-up stage, they can absorb large debt obligations easily, and because they can even turn these obligations into "money", they almost seem to be self-financing.
The 1858-73 period was one such "globalization period", with typical "globalization" characteristics: explosive growth in high-tech communications and transportation (mainly railways), soaring domestic stock and real estate markets, booming international trade, and a surge in outflows of capital from the UK, France, the Netherlands and other parts of Europe to the United States, Latin America, the Far East, the Ottoman Empire, and other financial "frontiers".
"From an "asset-side" analysis, as I discuss in my January 21 blog entry, the transfer of capital over three years from France to Germany equal to more than 20% of either country's annual GDP would have had very predictable impacts — they should have been very negative for France, as Berlin expected, and very positive for Germany. In fact the actual results were very different. This is because there are monetary and economic conditions under which liability structure matters much more, and conditions under which it matters much less. Economists and the policymakers they advise are too quick to ignore these differences, perhaps because there is not as well-formulated an understanding of balance sheets in economics theory as in finance theory, so that when someone like Yanis Varoufakis proposes that there are ways in which partial debt forgiveness increases overall economic value, instead of merely creating moral hazard, worried economists often recoil in horror, while finance or bankruptcy specialists (and an awful lot of hedge fund managers) shrug their shoulders at such an obvious statement."
"What does all of this have to do with Syriza? A few weeks ago I was discussing with a group of my Peking University students Charles Kindleberger's idea of a "displacement", and I proposed, as does Kindleberger, that the 1871-73 French indemnity is an especially useful example of a displacement from which we can learn a great deal about how financial crises can be generated.(4) It then occurred to me that the French reparations and their impact on Europe could also tell us a great deal about the euro crisis and, more specifically, why by distorting the savings rate wage policies in Germany in the first half of the last decade would have led almost inexorably to the balance of payments distortions that may eventually wreck the euro."
"[T]here are three important things to remember:
1. There is an enormous economic cost, not to mention social and perhaps political, to any delay. I worry about the terrifyingly low level of sophistication among policymakers and the economists who advise them when it comes to understanding balance sheet dynamics and debt restructuring. Greece's debt overhang imposes rising financial distress costs and increasingly deep distortions in the institutional structure of the economy over time, and the longer it takes to resolve, the greater the cost. …
2. From what I read, much of the focus of the restructuring will be aimed at determining an acceptable and manageable debt-servicing cashflow for Greece. There is a mistaken belief that this is the only "real" variable that matters, and the rest is cosmetics. I don't agree. Greece's nominal debt structure will not just affect the debt-servicing cashflows but will also determine future behavior of economic agents. …
3. In fact the overall restructuring must be designed so that the interests of Greece, the producers who create Greek GDP, and the creditors are correctly aligned. To date sovereign debt restructurings have almost never included the instruments that reflect the instruments in corporate debt restructurings that accomplish this alignment of interests …
Yanis Varoufakis should really take the lead in designing an entirely new form of sovereign debt restructuring, not just for Greece but for the many countries, in Europe and elsewhere, that will soon follow it into default."
The derivatives issue
Mark Melin: "Confrontational" Greece Negotiations Suddenly Turn Into Polite Tea Party
There is one aspect which in contrast to earlier stages of the euro crisis, this time seems to play a minor role in public debates. This is what Mark Melin called the derivatives issue. But, possibly, this has been resolved behind the scenes already. Reviewing a Goldman Sachs research analysis Mark Melin argued that in agreeing to not seek to reduce the total amount of their debt through forgiveness Greece has given up "its most important bargaining chip". He wrote:
"This last issue is key, because the derivatives that underlie the financial system are said to be significantly exposed to sovereign debt default and related interest rates. Had Greece sought debt forgiveness, it might have created a daisy chain reaction in many of the large bank unregulated derivatives positions. Such an event is a national security concern …
The Goldman Sachs report did not address the derivatives issue, as the bank is among the largest issuer of such "insurance" contracts.
One of the key components discussed in the Goldman Sachs report is the potential for a "Grexit," which Goldman says could cause significant market volatility, labeling the issue "systemic" as magnitude was considered. "The intensity and persistence of such volatility would depend on the process by which Grexit occurred, and on the nature of the policy and political response to it in other Euro area countries."
What the report didn't say is that if a Grexit were to occur, it would probably occur as relations are strained and a demand for debt forgiveness was the central issue. In other words, a Grexit correlation to a sovereign bond default might be a high probability relationship. The Greeks, however, are unlikely to trigger the bank's derivatives exposure. The cost would simply be too high."
A conclusion?
In particular with respect to the last aspect I would like to conclude modifying an earlier quote from Karl Whelan:
Don't believe for a minute that this is a European policy thing to do with Greece, its economy or its people.
In his Ted Talk Dragon King beats Black Swan in June 2013 Didier Sornette contrasted his ideas of market predictability to Nassim Taleb's concept of a Black Swan. As Sornette explained a black swan is a rare bird. Seeing a black swan shatters all beliefs that swans should be white. The Black Swan stands for the idea of unpredictability and extreme events that are "fundamentally unknowable". Sornette compared this idea with his concept of a Dragon King which is "exactly the opposite". According to his view, most extreme events are actually knowable and – at least to a certain extent – predictable.
In May 2014, there was a very stimulating ETH-sponsored debate between Nassim Taleb and Didier Sornette which threw further light on their "Diametrically Opposite Approaches to Risk & Predictability", so the title of the meeting. The following video is an edited version of what Nassim Taleb called a "diplomatic debate". To him this is a conversation in which one looks for synthesis as opposed to one in which one is trying to win an argument by all means. This is surely benefitting the audience who, if they had not read their books, may know Didier Sornette and Nassim Taleb mainly from their highly technical scientific papers here and here.
For an outside observer it is hard to take sides after these 45 minutes. To me, there seems to be no "right" or "wrong". There are valid arguments on either side and on second sight Taleb's Black Swan turns out to be one of several possible crisis scenarios in Sornette's framework.
Nassim Taleb's focus is on risk management of exposures. He starts with the example of a china cup which is fragile because "it doesn't like volatility and has very specific attributes." (0:43) On the other side, there are other things with other attributes which like volatility. The same holds in risk management. Knowledge about these attributes allows to adjust exposures respectively and benefit from volatility without identifying and predicting a concrete event.
Taleb draws attention to three mistakes which in his view people make in managing risk:
(1) They study random variables as sources of risk instead of exposures (1:06). He argues that very often risk, or the source of risk, is extremely hard to compute. He can avoid this wasting of time, as he calls it, by changing his exposure instead. (1:20)
(2) People tend to adjust to the worst past. (This is the example of the high-water mark at 1:51) But, as Taleb argues, if you look at natural things, they don't adjust in the same way. They adjust to something higher and "overcompensate". But the brain doesn't. This explains why in his view when people study risk they are not as good as when they act based on their perception of risk.
(3) People neglect that the response of their exposures to a source of risk is nonlinear. In Taleb's concept, exposure to the source of risk may be concave or convex, and concavity – an accelerated harm or negative response to risk – and fragility are related. A single item may be fragile. "If you're fragile than you're necessarily concave to the source of risk." (3:35) Take again the china cup. There are more downsides than upsides from earthquakes in this case. In contrast, Taleb's exposure is symmetric.
Didier Sornette's approach is indeed "diametrically opposite" to this concept. While Nassim Taleb accepts the world's inherent uncertainty, and abstains from trying to predict the course of random events, Didier Sornette and his Financial Crisis Observatory in a sense are searching for "patterns". According to Sornette extreme events such as the French revolution in 1789 or the "Spanish" worldwide flu of 1918, but also the dotcom crash in 2000 and the financial crisis in 2008, go through dynamical processes that make them knowable and to some degree predictable before they occur (6:20).
Focusing on financial time series and studying the distribution of peak-to-valley losses Sornette shows that a large part of these losses can be represented by a power law (6:39). However, some of them, which are associated with great crashes in the past, are outliers. They occur much more frequently than predicted by the law. These are the Dragon Kings.
As Sornette wrote in his book Why Stock Markets Crash: "Large financial crashes … form a class of their own that can be seen from their statistical signatures. … They are special and thus require a special explanation, a specific model, a theory of their own." (p.xvi)
In the debate, Sornette then goes on arguing how these extreme events result from a progressive maturation towards an instability or bifurcation. He takes water levels at different temperatures as an example (7:53). The fact that at the boiling point the nature of the water changes can be inferred from the past although "macroscopic linear extrapolation" is no longer possible.
Note in this context what Nassim Taleb wrote in his textbook on Probability and Risk in the Real World (p. 13): "The risk of breaking of the coffee cup is not necessarily in the past time series of the variable; in fact surviving objects have to have had a "rosy" past." This may hold for the coffee cup, but not for water. In Didier Sornette's example, the past of the observed variable was "rosy", too. Nevertheless, he argues that it is possible to draw conclusions from the past dynamics of the water about its entirely different behaviour in the future.
Sornette considers financial market crashes as the result of the collective behaviour of herding agents that ends up destabilizing the system ("a single molecule does not boil at 100°"). But, he continues that there is good news: From the theory of bifurcations and dynamical systems he has learned about the Fundamental Reduction Theorem. It says that most of the time, the system is too complex to predict its behaviour. But, close to bifurcation there is a window of visibility (9:10).
Sornette continues explaining how "generally, close to a regime transition, a system bifurcates through the variation of a single (or a few) effective "control" parameter". This brings him to two questions:
Can predictability be implemented in practice? Can the process be influenced?
As an example he presents the activities of the Financial Crisis Observatory developed at ETH Zurich since 2008. There are two hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1: Financial (and other) bubbles can be diagnosed in real-time before they end.
Hypothesis 2: The termination of financial (and other) bubbles can be bracketed using probabilistic forecasts, with a reliability better than chance (which remains to be quantified).
Passionately, Sornette states that never again will we "go through the process of these extremely damaging crises where the policymakers, analysts and so on conclude that … this was not knowable in advance."
Furthermore, this type of knowledge should empower the researcher to go to the next stage which is control. "Of course the control system is not of the scale of the full financial market but … in some circumstances, when we understand this system shows this power distribution of events with a Dragon King, by very tiny perturbations at the right moment we can actually control and slay this Dragon King."
Sornette finishes his presentation by summarizing his view in a kind of predictability diagram where he distinguishes two dimensions (13:25). One is heterogeneity or diversity of the different elements in the system and the other is the level of coupling or interaction. "By classifying a system in a given regime, we can assert its degree of predictability." In this framework, non-predictability is part of a larger picture. Sornette concedes that there are Black Swans, but most crises are Dragon Kings:
"This Financial Crisis Observatory that we have developed, for me was really a reaction to the disgust that developed from the often heard statement that the financial crisis of 2008 was a big surprise, was a Black Swan. It was no Black Swan, it was clearly visible – not in detail. But it was clearly visible that something was going to happen."
And, according to his findings it is about to happen again (see also at the end of this article the extract of an interview Sornette gave to Finanz und Wirtschaft in September 2013). Right now, a crisis has been looming for many years and once the bubble bursts nobody can pretend that this was not knowable in advance. As Sornette said: Not the details, but the broad picture. And we feel that he is right in that policymakers and analysts foreseeably will come up exactly with the Black Swan argument that this is coming as a surprise – and we will know simply from watching from outside that this cannot be true. Whether the dynamics can be captured in mathematical detail early enough to prevent the bubble from bursting is another matter. But it is encouraging to see that in Zurich efforts are made in this direction.
What has the Greek tragedy mentioned in the title to do with all this? It is not the form of theatre I had in mind, but the drama which is currently unfolding in the Eurozone. Both Taleb and Sornette stress that bubbles and crises are part of our lives. They will happen again and again. On January 25, Greece could become a trigger – as could any other minor or major event before and after. Then again analysts and policymakers will tell us that this is a Black Swan.
Do not believe them. They could have known.
The following is a short extract from a German-language interview with Didier Sornette by Gregor Mast und Mark Dittli, Finanz und Wirtschaft, September 19 2013:
"Die Notenbanken pumpen neue Blasen auf"
Herr Sornette, fünf Jahre sind seit dem Zusammenbruch von Lehman Brothers vergangen. Ist das globale Finanzsystem heute sicherer als 2007?
Nein, im Gegenteil. Die Situation ist schlimmer als zuvor. Die zehn bis fünfzehn grössten Banken sind heute noch grösser und von noch höherer systemischer Wichtigkeit als vor fünf Jahren. Sie bilden als sogenannte Superspreader das Zentrum des globalen Finanznetzwerks. All die falschen Anreizsysteme innerhalb der Banken sind intakt, da wurde nichts geändert. Das wissen die Banker, die Regulatoren und die Notenbanker ganz genau. Alles, was in der Zwischenzeit getan wurde, all die Stresstests, die Massnahmen der Notenbanken, diente bloss dazu, das Vertrauen ins System wieder herzustellen. Die grundsätzlichen Probleme wurden nicht angepackt.
Wir tanzen eine Art Tango aus ¬Manie und Crash. Und die Notenbanken reagieren auf jeden Crash damit, dass sie eine neue Blase aufpumpen.
Tun sie das auch jetzt wieder?
Ja und nein. Unbestritten ist: Wir sehen heute eine enorme Blase im Bondmarkt, im gesamten Kreditvolumen. Mit ihren riesigen Bilanzen führen die Notenbanken ein einzigartiges Experiment durch. Generell kann gesagt werden, dass eine Unmenge an Geld gegenwärtig nach Anlagemöglichkeiten sucht. Wir identifizieren am Financial Crisis Observatory an der ETH heute eine ganze Reihe blasenähnlicher Übertreibungen in verschiedenen Märkten. Es blubbert überall. Das Finanzsystem ist viel fragiler als früher.
Sie führen die vierjährige Hausse an den Börsen auf die Politik des Fed zurück?
Wir sehen auf jeden Fall eine hohe Korrelation zwischen dem Bilanzvolumen des Fed und dem amerikanischen Aktienmarkt. Jedes Mal, wenn ein Quantitative-Easing-Programm startete, stiegen die Kurse. Und jedes Mal, wenn eines stoppte, kam es zu einer Korrektur.
Wie wird das alles dereinst enden?
Die Frage ist furchteinflössend. Wir wissen, dass diese Geldpolitik nur kurzzeitig den Schmerz lindert, die grundsätz¬lichen Probleme aber nicht löst. In den USA haben wir einen dreissigjährigen kreditgetriebenen Boom gesehen. In Europa, um ein anderes Beispiel zu -nennen, haben wir mit dem Euro ein ¬unfassbares Monster geschaffen, eine politische Kreatur, ohne jeden ökonomischen Verstand. Das kann die EZB nicht ewig überdecken."
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Interconnectedness, uncertainty and innovation – Brian Arthur on economic complexity
Dragon King beats Black Swan: Ted Talk with Didier Sornette
Complexity and the madness of crowds – lessons from disaster prevention
Fighting financial complexity with simple rules?
Where I live, the time between Christmas and New Year – or "between the years" as we call it – is a quiet time. Business has slowed down in many areas and the frantic activity of Christmas preparations is over. The old year is still ruling but there is not much left to do and although once in a while thoughts are wandering ahead to new plans and challenges we are not willing to face them yet. This is a time to lean back and enjoy the lights and warmth sheltered from a grey and hostile environment outside, the company of family and friends, the purring cat, films and books, longer than usual Twitter conversations and a stroll through the vasts of the internet.
From the latter, there is a small choice of pieces which I would like to share with you.
Making Manuscripts
Have you ever had the opportunity to look at some of the precious ancient books produced by monks in the Middle Ages? There is a wonderful video from the Getty Museum channel which shows how they were made:
"An illuminated manuscript is a book written and decorated completely by hand. Illuminated manuscripts were among the most precious objects produced in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, primarily in monasteries and courts. Society's rulers–emperors, kings, dukes, cardinals, and bishops–commissioned the most splendid manuscripts."
How Ballerinas Are Preparing Their Pointe Shoes
Did you watch a Christmas ballet this year admiring the seeming weightlessness of the ballerinas? And did you possibly think to yourself what dancers are doing to their feet when going on pointe? In a fascinating article, Olga Khazan from The Atlantic is presenting YouTube videos of ballet dancers preparing their pointe shoes. She writes:
"Don't get me wrong, I like the actual ballet well enough. But there's something so uniquely soothing and satisfying about seeing these women (it's mostly women—male dancers are usually too heavy to go on pointe) ready the tools of their trade.
There's the slipping of the original, light-pink shoe out of its bag, and then the hours spent scraping, ripping, crushing, sewing, and burning (!!), only to end up with a shoe that looks identical to the layman but is uniquely tailored to the ballerina."
In one video from the Australian Ballet, for example, dancer Jessica Fyfe explains how she has six to eight pairs of shoes going at once, including "a pair that's good for jumping in, a pair that's stage-perfect…"
In another video, Pennsylvania Ballet Principal Dancer Arantxa Ochoa says she goes through 60 pairs per season. To make them last slightly longer, she glues the tips. Like many other dancers, she also cuts off the material around the toes to keep herself from slipping.
Citing Olga Khazan again: "It's almost like the dance's most distinctive qualities—exterior perfection, inner struggle, insane physicality—get concentrated in the shoes. Even early retirement: After one or two stage performances, the shoes begin to "die.""
See for yourself! Here is the article and this is one of the videos:
Astronaut's-Eye View of NASA's Orion Spacecraft Re-entry
Extraordinary things happened in the last weeks of the year. Did you find the time among deadlines at work and Christmas preparations to follow NASA's Orion project in December? There is an awesome video presenting the last 10 minutes of the Orion's test flight which gives a glance of what an astronaut could see from a spacecraft while rushing down through our planet's atmosphere:
"The video begins 10 minutes before Orion's 11:29 a.m. EST splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, just as the spacecraft was beginning to experience Earth's atmosphere. Peak heating from the friction caused by the atmosphere rubbing against Orion's heat shield comes less than two minutes later, and the footage shows the plasma created by the interaction change from white to yellow to lavender to magenta as the temperature increases. The video goes on to show the deployment of Orion's parachutes and the final splash as it touches down."
Here you may see how the spacecraft was brought home afterwards. I liked the photo showing how it almost vanished in this huge ship.
Ambition the film
Another even more exciting project was Rosetta, the mission of the European Space Agency (ESA). Tomek Bagiński made a short film to advertise the Rosetta project. The film, titled "Ambition", makes clear, that "it is the essence of what it means to be human, to attempt difficult things, to reach for seemingly impossible goals, to learn, adapt and evolve.
And at the heart of this film is Rosetta, ESA's real mission to rendezvous with, escort and land on a comet. A mission that began as a dream, but that after decades of planning, construction and flight through the Solar System, has arrived at its goal.
Its aim? To unlock the secrets hidden within the icy treasure chest for 4.6 billion years. To study its make-up and its history. To search for clues as to our own origins.
From 100 km distance, to 50, 30 and then, defying all expectations, to just 10 km, Rosetta continues to captivate and intrigue with every image and every data packet returned.
It will rewrite the textbooks of cometary science.
But there is more, an even greater challenge, another ambitious first: to land on the comet.
The stage is set. The date: 12 November 2014."
Read more …
This is the film:
There is even a Making Of:
The making of 'Ambition'
"The making of the short film Ambition, a collaboration between Platige Image and ESA. Directed by Tomek Bagiński and starring Aidan Gillen and Aisling Franciosi, Ambition was shot on location in Iceland, produced in Poland, and screened on 24 October 2014 during the British Film Institute's celebration of Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder, at the Southbank, London."
I enjoyed the film, but also thought about what Lukasz Sobisz (Simulation TD, Platiga Image) said in the Making Of:
"The actual campaign idea is certainly well targeted. But, shooting myself in the foot a bit, I'm very surprised that you need something like this at all now. Mankind sends a probe into space to catch a comet and land on it. And we need a great director, film and actors to convince people this is interesting."
209 Seconds That Will Make You Question Your Entire Existence
The following is a nice video about the observable universe and your place in it. Unfortunately, I did not manage to embed it without the advertisement. Don't get irritated. Simply klick, it's very much worth watching:
A Year in the Life of Ise Shrine
From the silence in space to the silence on Earth: In a series of stunning images photographer Nakano Haruo documented the beauty of the four seasons at the Ise shrine, one of Japan's most important sacred spaces. He writes:
"In Japan, it is traditional to begin the New Year by visiting a shrine to pray for good fortune in the 12 months to come. Ise Shrine will be a particularly popular choice this year. What better way to mark the New Year than by walking along the gravel paths leading to the ancient-but-always-new shrine at Ise?
I grew up in Ise, where my family ran a small business providing fish for the ceremonial offerings at the shrine. Growing up near the shrine, I got to know at close hand the many faces of the sacred precincts throughout the year. In spring, I used to follow the mejiro (Japanese white-eye) birds that played in the branches of the cherry trees; in summer, I could sense the trees and plants luxuriating in a sudden evening downpour; in autumn, I would enjoy the light streaming through the foliage; and in winter, I would occasionally wake to the wonderful surprise of a rare covering of snow. The sacred grounds of the shrine were home to more pleasures than I could count."
Watch the photos here …
In addition, you may like this video which gives a vivid, more worldly impression of the shrine during New Year visits:
Xmas Unwrapped by Toby Smith and Unknown Fields
Christmas has many facets. Beckett Mufson describes in the creatorsproject's blog how Holiday Doc Unwraps the Less-Than-Festive Factories Behind Christmas.
Read more …
See the video which explores those factories where holiday baubles are made:
Toby Smith explains:
"In August I travelled East with the Unknown Fields Division, to Vietnam, China and beyond. We traced the supply chain of the world's consumer products across the South China Sea down cargo routes and inland to their production.
Yiwu in China is not only home to the world's largest wholesale commodity market but also many of the "Just in Time" factories that produce seasonal or trending products. Christmas consumables are produced in summer ready for wholesale, packaging and shipping to principally western markets…."
How Cats See Christmas…
Christmas can be a challenging time, in particular for pet owners. Under the fresh impression of this year's efforts to defend tree and decorations you may enjoy the following attempt to bridge the culture gap between you and your cat:
If this doesn't help you may find many Christmas Greetings on the internet to cheer you up. The following one is starting with a quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act I, Scene 1:
Epic Chuck Norris Greetings – Merry Christmas with epic split
There is more:
From Brown Bag Films comes
Granny O'Grimm's Christmas Greeting
Space Station Crew Members Offer Christmas Greetings to the World
"Aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Commander Barry Wilmore and Flight Engineer Terry Virts of NASA offered their thoughts and best wishes to the world for the Christmas holiday during downlink messages from the orbital complex on Dec. 17. Wilmore has been aboard the research lab since late September and will remain in orbit until mid-March 2015. Virts arrived at the station in late November and will stay until mid-May 2015."
And German football players, too, send their greetings:
FC Bayern wishes you a merry Christmas
Furthermore, there are the songs. Like this one:
Eva Celia – Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas @ Mostly Jazz 21/12/13 [HD]
There is so much more. Maybe, you find time "between the years" to enjoy some of this admittedly haphazard selection. I'm sending season's greetings to all of you and wish you peaceful days and a merry Christmas.
The Bank of Japan just published the latest results of its TANKAN survey which observers usually take as an indicator of the state of the Japanese economy and as signal in which direction future monetary policy may go. Here is some background information.
In 2014, the International Bankers Association of Japan (IBA Japan) celebrates its 30th anniversary. For thirty years IBA Japan has represented the international banking community in Japan. Starting with 12 founding members in 1984 there are now just under 60 banking members from 22 countries and over 25 associate member firms.
In a speech at a meeting commemorating the anniversary, Haruhiko Kuroda, Governor of the Bank of Japan, mentioned the significant role foreign financial institutions played in Japan's economy. However, relations between the banks and their host country were never free of tensions and compared to other world financial centres their influence is smaller than many believe – and in decline.
One of the controversial topics in the debates of Scottish independence is the currency question. The other day, the Financial Times asked several economists to consider four options available to an independent Scotland: a currency union with the UK, sterlingisation (which would be the continued use of the pound sterling but without backing of the Bank of England), establishing a new Scottish currency, and joining the euro. Not surprisingly, opinions were divided.
However, strictly speaking, the choice is not limited to these four options. Besides, there are others which deserve a closer look as well in this context.
The other day, Charles Consult on Twitter drew attention to a fascinating paper by W. Brian Arthur on Complexity Economics.
At a time of never-ending financial crises and lasting imbalances when people are becoming increasingly aware of the shortcomings of traditional economics with its focus on equilibrium as the natural state of an economy, Brian Arthur presents a different approach, a nonequilibrium view of economic processes and structures. In his paper, in acting and interacting firms, consumers, investors and other economic agents collectively create an outcome and then adjust their strategy in response to what they see they have created. The result of these adjustments is another outcome which causes them anew to make revisions – and so forth.
As a consequence, the economy is constantly in motion. It is not "something given and existing but forming from a constantly developing set of technological innovations, institutions, and arrangements that draw forth further innovations, institutions and arrangements." In this scenario, equilibrium is the exception, not the rule. As the author notes: "For highly interconnected systems, equilibrium and closed form solutions are not the default outcomes; if they exist they require justification."
In a recent article, Felix Salmon summarized the key points of a widely noticed speech delivered by Nobel prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz on the problems of financial innovation in general, and high-frequency trading (HFT) in particular.
Stiglitz asked Are Less Active Markets Safer and Better for the Economy? and came to the conclusion that they are. His arguments revolved around three aspects: speed, costs and social value.
In the first part of this article, the speed aspect was discussed. This second part deals with the costs and social value of HFT.
Building bridges between scientists and the public in communicating research findings is one of the most rewarding activities of bloggers and journalists. Felix Salmon is an outstanding example in this respect. In a recent article, he summarized the key points of a widely noticed speech delivered by Nobel prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz on the problems of financial innovation in general, and high-frequency trading (HFT) in particular.
Stiglitz asked Are Less Active Markets Safer and Better for the Economy? and he came to the conclusion that they are. His arguments revolved around three aspects: speed, costs and social value.


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