Air Mines. Urban Space Station

Air Mines The sky over the city's port was the color of a faulty screen, only partly lit up. As the silhouette of nearby buildings became darker, but more clearly visible against the fading blur-filter of a background, the realization came about how persistent a change had been taking place. Slowly, old wooden water reservoirs and rattling HVAC systems stopped being the only inhabitants of roofs. Slightly trembling, milkish jellyfish-translucent air volumes had joined the show in multiples. A few years ago artists and architects seized upon the death of buildings as their life-saving media. Equipped with constructive atlases and instruments they started disemboweling their subjects, poking about their systems, dumping out on the street the battered ugliness of their embarrassing bits and pieces, so rightly hidden by facades and height from everyday view. But, would you believe it? Even ?old ladies?, investment bankers or small children failed to get upset. Of course, old ladies are not what they used to be. It was old ladies themselves that made it happen after years of fights with the town hall, imaginative proposals and factual arguments. An industry with little financial gains but lots of welcome externalities was not, in fact, the ground for investment bankers. But they too had to admit that having otherwise stately buildings make fine particulate pencils with their facades was not the worse that could happen. Yes, making soot pencils had been found an interesting and visible end product of the endeavor, a sort of mining the air for vintage writing tools one can actually touch. The new view from the street did not seem as solid or dignified as that of old, and they hated that the market for Fine Particulates Extraction (FPE, read efpee) had to be applied on a matrix of blocks and streets that prevented undue concentration of the best or worse solutions. It had to be an evenly distributed city policy in order for the city to apply for cleaning casino money. Once the first prototypes had been deployed in buildings siding Garden Avenue or Bulwark Street even fast movers appreciated the sidekick of flower and plant smell dripping down the Urban Space Stations (USS, read use; USSs, read uses) as air and walls cooled off for a few hours after sunset. Enough. It was all nice to remember, but it was now time to go up and start the lightweight afternoon maintenance of their USS. Coop discussions had taken place all through the planning and continued through the construction phase as to how maintenance was going to be organized. Fasters had voted for a pro, pay a small amount and let them use it for rent and produce. In the end some neighbors decided they were slow enough to take care and it was now the turn. Regret came periodically, sometimes a week before, and lasted until work actually started. But lately it had been replaced by anxiety when it needed to be passed over to the next caretaker. It did not look their shift was good enough and couldn?t wait to fix it. Today small preparations needed to be made for a class visit next day from a nearby cook school. They were frequenters. It had not been easy, but it shouldn?t have been that hard. In the end, even the easiest things are hard if they involve a city, buildings and neighbors. On the face of the data, the technicalities and the way final designs had been worked out for adaptation to the different settings, the decision of where to go was self evident, but organization issues and the ever-growing politics of taste in a city of already-gentrified-rodents almost put the project in the frozen orbit of timeless beautiful future possibilities. This is how it was. A series of designs by XClinic and OSS had made it possible to adapt to different building structures, leave in most cases the roof untouched and adapted a new technology of flexing fiberglass tubes that dissipated wind pressure in smooth bending.......

Money for structural reforms in the eurozone: making sense of contractual arrangements. Egmont Paper 57, May 2013

Executive Summary. Both the Commission’s proposal for a ‘Competitiveness and Convergence Instrument’ and the ‘contractual arrangement’ presented by President Van Rompuy share a common concept: associating EU money with national structural reforms under a binding arrangement. The targeted ‘structural reforms’ are the labour market reforms and product and services market reforms in eurozone ‘peripheral’ countries facing the most severe external imbalances. Their implementation would speed up and facilitate the ‘internal devaluation’ process of these countries. In the worst case scenario, failure to adopt the necessary reforms and to adjust wages and prices downwards may lead the most vulnerable countries to leave the eurozone under social and political pressure. Contracts seek to reduce this risk by increasing compliance with the country-specific recommendations for structural reforms issued by the EU institutions within the European Semester, and in particular with the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure (MIP). As for the financial support, it follows two different, albeit overlapping rationales. First, the perspective of obtaining EU funding would incentivize the governments of vulnerable countries to adopt reforms that would bear a high political and social cost in the short term. That is, without some form of incentive, it is unlikely that the necessary reforms would be undertaken and this could have significant negative consequences for the EMU as a whole. The second rationale amounts to outright solidarity: EU support is needed to cushion the inevitable socio-economic costs implied not only by the structural reform, but also by the internal devaluation taking place. To make sense of contractual arrangements, some points should be considered in future discussions: 1. Contracts on a voluntary basis only: Contracts cannot be mandatory unlike initially suggested in the Van Rompuy report. This stems not only from the inherent definition of a ‘contract’ – where mutual consent is key – but also from the non-binding nature of the preventive arm of the MIP. Making the country-specific recommendations issued by the EU institutions systematically binding would imply transfers of sovereignty from the national to the EU level that go well beyond the present discussion. Instead, contracts would introduce the possibility of making the preventive arm binding for some countries where corrections are most needed and urgent for the EMU as a whole.

The Asset Quality Review and Capital Needs: Why re-capitalise banks with public money? CEPS Policy Brief No. 311, 19 December 2013

It is generally assumed that any capital needs discovered by the Asset Quality Review the ECB is scheduled to finish by the end of 2014 should be filled by public funding (= fiscal backstop). This assumption is wrong, however. Banks that do not have enough capital should be asked to obtain it from the market; or be restructured using the procedures and rules recently agreed. The Directorate-General for Competition at the European Commission should be particularly vigilant to ensure that no further state aid flows to an already oversized European banking system. The case for a public backstop was strong when the entire euro area banking system was under stress, but this is no longer the case. Banks with a viable business model can find capital; those without should be closed because any public-sector re-capitalisation would likely mean throwing good money after bad.

An economy with unrealistic indicators: an evaluation of the economic situation in Belarus and a forecast for 2013. OSW Commentary No. 103, 2013-02-20

The macroeconomic results achieved by Belarus in 2012 laid bare the weakness and the inefficiency of its economy. Belarus’s GDP and positive trade balance were growing in the first half of last year. However, this trend was reversed when Russia blocked the scheme of extremely lucrative manipulations in the re-export of Russian petroleum products by Belarus and when the demand for potassium fertilisers fell on the global market. It became clear once again that the outdated Belarusian model of a centrally planned economy is unable to generate sustainable growth, and the Belarusian economy needs thorough structural reforms. Nevertheless, President Alyaksandr Lukashenka consistently continues to block any changes in the system and at the same time expects that the economic indicators this year will reach levels far beyond the possibilities of the Belarusian economy. Therefore, there is a risk that the Belarusian government may employ – as they used to do – instruments aimed at artificially stimulating domestic demand, including money creation. This may upset the relative stability of state finances, which the regime managed to achieve last year. The worst case scenario would see a repeat of what happened in 2011, when a serious financial crisis occurred, forcing Minsk to make concessions (including selling the national network of gas pipelines) to Moscow, its only real source of loans. It thus cannot be ruled out that also this time the only way to recover from the slump will be to receive additional loan support and energy subsidies from Russia at the expense of selling further strategic companies to Russian investors.

Financial Engineering Instruments and their Assessment Under EU State Aid Rules. Bruges European Economic Policy (BEEP) Briefing 26/2013

Financial engineering instruments such as guarantees, loans and equity are increasingly used in public funding of enterprises. These instruments have three attractive features: they are repayable, they “leverage” private involvement, and they have a multiplier effect because they generate new income. At the same time, however, they are technically complex and they are subject to state aid rules. Their assessment under EU state aid rules creates two additional problems. First, under certain conditions financial instruments may not contain state aid. This is when public authorities act as “private investors”. This means that state aid cannot be presumed to exist in all financial instruments. It must first be established through market analysis. Second, when state aid is found to be present it is not always possible to quantify it. For this reason the state aid rules that apply to financial instruments differ significantly from other rules. This paper reviews how financial instruments have been assessed by the European Commission and under which conditions the state aid they may contain can be considered to be compatible with the internal market. The paper finds that by and large Member States have succeeded to design measures that have all been approved by the Commission.

Money, Finance and the Real Economy: What went wrong? CEPS Paperback, 17 March 2015

The functions of the financial system of a developed economy are often badly understood. This can largely be attributed to free-market ideology, which has spread the belief that leaving finance to its own devices would provide the best possible mechanism for allocating savings. The latest financial crisis has sparked the beginnings of a new awareness on this point, but it is far from having led to an improved understanding of the role of the financial institutions. For many people, finance remains more an enemy to be resisted than an instrument to be intelligently exploited. Its institutions, which issue and circulate money, play an important role in the working of the real economy that it would be imprudent to neglect. The allocation of savings, but also the level of activity and the growth rate depend on it. In this book, the authors carefully analyse the close links between money, finance and the real economy. In the process, they show why today the existence of a substantial potential of saving, instead of being an opportunity for the world economy, could threaten it with ‘secular stagnation’.

The law of money securities : In three books. I. Personal securities. II. Securities on property. III. Miscellaneous /

Mode of access: Internet.

Use by the Department of the Treasury of the geographic targeting order as a method to combat money laundering : hearing before the Subcommittee on General Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Banking and Financial Services, House of Representatives, One Hundred Fifth Congress, first session, March 11, 1997.

"Serial no. 105-7."

The meaning of money.

Introductory.- Coined cash.- Paper cash.- The bill of exchange.- The manufacture of money.- London, the world's monetary clearing house.- The cheque-paying banks.- The bill-brokers and discount houses.- The accepting houses and foreign banks.- The foreign exchanges.- The bank of England.- Bank rate and market rate.- The bank return.- The gold reserve.- Other reserves.- Summary and conclusion.- Index.

1960 price list and supplement to volume 1 of Criswell's currency series : current market value on notes listed by Criswell's numbers.

Mode of access: Internet.

Conditional performance evaluation and the relevance of money flows for Australian international equity funds

This paper assesses the importance of fund flows in the performance evaluation of Australian international equity funds. Two concepts of fund flows are considered in the context of a conditional asset pricing model. The first measure is net fund flow relative to fund size and the second is net fund flow relative to sector flows. We find that incorporating a fund flow measure relative to the sector flow results in a reduction of measured perverse market timing. The results indicate that, at the individual fund level, cash flows are relevant in assessing management outcomes.

Minding the money: A growing responsibility for informal carers

Managing the assets of older people is a common and potentially complex task of informal care with legal, financial, cultural, political and family dimensions. Older people are increasingly recognised -as having significant assets, but the family, the state, service providers and the market have competing interests in their use. Increased policy interest in self-provision and user-charges for services underline the importance of asset management in protecting the current and future health, care and accommodation choices of older people. Although 'minding the money' has generally been included as an informal care-giving task, there is limited recognition of either its growing importance and complexity or of care-givers' involvement. The focus of both policy and practice have been primarily on substitute decision-making and abuse. This paper reports an Australian national survey and semi-structured interviews that have explored the prevalence of non-professional involvement in asset management. The findings reveal the nature and extent of involvement, the tasks that informal carers take on, the management processes that they use, and that 'minding the money' is a common informal care task and mostly undertaken in the private sphere using some risky practices. Assisting informal care-givers with asset management and protecting older people from financial risks and abuse require various strategic policy and practice responses that extend beyond substitute decision-making legislation. Policies and programmes are required: to increase the awareness of the tasks, tensions and practices surrounding asset management; to improve the financial literacy of older people, their informal care-givers and service providers; to ensure access to information, advice and support services; and to develop better accountability practices.

Modeling equity market integration using smooth transition analysis:a study of Eastern European stock markets

This paper assesses the extent to which the equity markets of Hungary, Poland the Czech Republic and Russia have become less segmented. Using a variety of tests it is shown there has been a consistent increase in the co-movement of some Eastern European markets and developed markets. Using the variance decompositions from a vector autoregressive representation of returns it is shown that for Poland and Hungary global factors are having an increasing influence on equity returns, suggestive of increased equity market integration. In this paper we model a system of bivariate equity market correlations as a smooth transition logistic trend model in order to establish how rapidly the countries of Eastern Europe are moving away from market segmentation. We find that Hungary is the country which is becoming integrated the most quickly. © 2005 ELsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Testing term structure estimation methods:evidence from the UK STRIPs market

Prices and yields of UK government zero-coupon bonds are used to test alternative yield curve estimation models. Zero-coupon bonds permit a more pure comparison, as the models are providing only the interpolation service and also not making estimation feasible. It is found that better yield curves estimates are obtained by fitting to the yield curve directly rather than fitting first to the discount function. A simple procedure to set the smoothness of the fitted curves is developed, and a positive relationship between oversmoothness and the fitting error is identified. A cubic spline function fitted directly to the yield curve provides the best overall balance of fitting error and smoothness, both along the yield curve and within local maturity regions.