The composition of interest: The judaic prohibition

An interest charge is made up of an award for waiting known as the real rate of interest, a premium for risk and compensation for transaction costs. Where inflation exists the lender seeks further compensation. In order to understand the composition and evolution of different versions of the usury prohibition it is necessary to ask which components of an interest charge are prohibited by each version. The Judaic prohibition has two aspects which are of particular interest to business historians and students of usury. First, the general rule is that a reward for waiting is prohibited. This focuses on the time-based part of interest charge. Second, interest is prohibited because it amounts to placing a stumbling block before the blind. This focuses on the typical gullibility of the borrower confronted by a more expert, better funded lender. Economics confirms and enriches our understanding of these important aspects of the prohibition. They achieve this by increasing our understanding of two facts: first, that the borrower is a gullible individual subject to irrational and inconsistent behaviour; and, second, that this behaviour relates to the waiting aspect of interest which is proscribed in the prohibition. How far these insights apply to other civilisations' prohibition, particularly those which derive from the Judaic prohibition, merits further study; so also do the ethical lessons of the Mosaic rules for a globalised society based on capitalism.     

China＇s Social Security： Case Studies of the Interest Groups and Policy Monopoly

This section introduces an asymmetric information model to analyze the interest groups and policy monopoly in social security management, mainly focusing on the relation between the interest groups in the social security products market and the social security government institutions at the central level, namely the major social security policy makers.     

Rethinking the role of NCBs in the EMU

Five years after the introduction of unified monetary policy in the EMU, some member countries are wondering whether they have ceded too much of their policy-making powers. The fact that National Central Banks no longer carry out sizable expansionary open market or foreign exchange market operations suggests that they face substantially reduced abilities to set economic policy.This paper demonstrates that, in fact, very little power has been yielded: on the fiscal front, the force of such policy initiatives is enhanced by the fixity of the exchange rate. On the monetary front, we show that there is an observational equivalence between all Central Bank actions under fixed exchange rates. This implies that the authorities retain the same amount of policy flexibility as before. So long as they use an alternative form of policy initiative, carrying out what previously would have been characterized as sterilized foreign exchange market operations, their ability to influence the macro performance of their economy is undiminished.     

土工实验中的液、塑限测定浅议

文章分析了当前土工实验中的液、塑限测定过程中应当注意的问题及其存在的问题,并论述了如何对其实验数据进行处理和分析的方法。     

China''''s Economic Prospects and Sino-US Economic Relations

I. Introduction The rapid rise of the economic weight of China in the world economy has increasingly caught the attention of many analysts as well as policy-makers, eliciting various opinions on the global implications. Although China’s economic performance in the past 2 decades46 Pingfan Hong / 45 – 55, Vol. 14, No. 2, 2006 or so is indeed miraculous, the rest of the world should become less surprised or bewildered if they see China’s recent performance from a long-run historical perspe…     

基于BP网络对我国通货膨胀率的预测及其分析

本文首先由我国的CPI计算出通货膨胀率,综合分析了我国通货膨胀率和GDP增长率数据。其次,用带有动量项和自适应学习率的BP神经网络预测出2008～2009年我国CPI,从而推算出2008～2009年我国通货膨胀率分别是4.99%和4.91%左右。并提出了一些相应的政策建议。     

International interest rates and US monetary policy announcements: Evidence from Hong Kong and Singapore

This paper investigates the responses of market interest rates to US monetary policy announcements for the US and two emerging economies, Hong Kong and Singapore which are similar on many respects but have experienced opposite exchange rate regimes in the last twenty years. Our results, based on market expectations extracted from federal fund futures rates, document that FOMC announcements significantly affect the term structure of interest rate in the US and both Asian countries. Further, international interest rate differentials around FOMC meeting dates tend to be negative for short maturities with the impact gradually dissipating as bond maturity increases. Finally, for the case of Singapore, we find that domestic interest rates react to both external and domestic monetary policy announcements with a magnitude that is larger over the full bond maturity spectrum for domestic announcements. These results are robust to time-varying futures risk premia and alternative measures of interest rates expectations.     

Generalized piecewise linear histograms

We extend the concept of piecewise linear histogram introduced recently by Beirlant, Berlinet and Györfi. The disadvantage of that histogram is that in many models it takes on negative values with probability close to 1. We show that for a wide set of models, the extended class of estimates contains a bona fide density with probability tending to 1 as the sample size n increases to infinity. The mean integrated absolute error in the extended class of estimators decreases with the same rate n^–2/5 as in the original narrower class.     

Inflation,interest and exchange rates in the transition1

Central and Eastern European economies have made extraordinary progress in their trade and exchange regimes. Surprisingly, instant convertibility was established for a great variety of exchange rate regimes. In spite of diversity, all these countries have followed a common pattern: severe initial undervaluation - the cost of speed and unrestricted trade - followed by rapid real revaluation and incipient protectionism. Since 1994 in many cases an embarrass de richesse has appeared: high capital inflows which are either inflationary or costly to sterilize. A major cause of these flows - or at any rate of the high cost of sterilization - is the presence of significant interest rate differentials higher than required to cover the risk of devaluation. These are the necessary consequence of a policy of positive real interest rates and of real revaluation from excessively undervalued exchange rates. Lower interest rates are recommended, both to stem financial capital inflows and to reduce the cost of their sterilization.