New paper in the JPE Macro

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My paper Softening the Blow: U.S. State-Level Banking Deregulation and Sectoral Reallocation after the China Trade Shock with Lilia Ruslanova Habibulina is about to appear in the September 2024 issue of the Journal of Political Economy Macroeconomics. (follow the link above for open access. Link to replication files in the Harvard Dataverse). The upshot: U.S. … Read more

The SNB and its Watchers

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Together with Harris Dellas, I am organizing this year’s SNB and its watchers conference at the University of Zurich on November 22nd. See here for details and the program

Keynote at 2023 GPEG meeting.

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At the 2023 meeting of the Global Economic Policy Group (GPEG), I gave a keynote lecture on US Banking deregulation and sectoral reallocation after the China trade shock. This year the meeting was hosted by Hans-Jörg Schmerer‘s group from FU Hagen (Germany’s remote learning unversity) at the FU campus in Nürnberg. This was a fun … Read more

Panel discussion on global inflation and challenges for monetary policy

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On Mar 7 2023 I had the honour to moderate a panel with SNB President Thomas Jordan, (then) Swiss Re Chairman Sergio Ermotti and Franziska Tschudi Sauber, CEO of Weidmann group about the challenges to monetary policy in a challenging global environment. A retrospective of the event (in German) can be found under this link

Of banks and crises: the 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics

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An article (in German) about this year’s Nobel prize that I wrote with my colleagues Christian Ewerhart and Joachim Voth just appeared in the Swiss economic policy journal “Die Volkswirtschaft”. Learn more about why financial crises are hard to predict, why banks must be unstable, why the laureates’ work is super relevant in a world … Read more

“The hikes of others”: some thoughts on the global tightening cycle after the Fed and SNB decisions

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While the Fed’s 75bps hike on Wednesday 21st was in line with expectations, the market had priced in a 100 bps hike for the SNB. In this sense the 75bps announcement came as a dovish surprise, even though this still is the biggest SNB rate increase in more than 20 years.

While the SNB explicitly did not rule out further hikes in December and, if necessary, forex market intervention in the interim, it is noteworthy to what extent governor Thomas Jordan emphasized the role of international spillovers through the hiking of other central banks and the role of transitory inflation pressures in his opening statement and the subsequent media Q&A.

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Series of video interviews on energy crisis, inflation, (de-) globalization, China and government debt

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Matthias Schober from the German personal finance education portal pfenningfabrik.de invited me for a series of half-hour videos in which we discuss the current global economic situation, ranging from the energy crisis, ECB monetary policy to China and government finances. The first of the series, covering the energy crsis and inflation available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-g2BHOsfPw Update … Read more

Germany’s first trade deficit since the 1990s…

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Before the summer break I gave an interview to the New York-based Global Finance Magazine about what the first German trade deficit in almost three decades means and whether it is reason for deeper worry. The gist of my argument is that the German public has long fetishised its current account surpluses as a sign … Read more