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The Bundesbank: ECB massively exceeds its mandate

It's no secret that the Germans are negative to further financial support of the weak euro countries. Germany's current strategy is inaction to the calls of introducing Eurobonds or Germany to leave the Euro. What they dread is the other option - that a weak country would leave the euro and its implications on... Germany.

Reinhart, Rogoff... and Herndon

Thomas Herndon, the UMass Amherst PHD student who discovered an Excel coding flaw in the famous paper "Growth in a Time of Debt" by economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, which had claimed that when a country's debt surpasses 90% of GDP, then growth slows precipitously, was the man of the week.

EU commissioner Olli Rehn and influential US Republican politician Paul Ryan have both quoted a 90% debt-to-GDP limit to support their austerity strategies.

Budget 2014-2020: Don't sacrifice EU's future to the current crisis, say MEPs

EU member states must not use the economic crisis as a pretext to force austerity upon the EU until 2020, MEPs warned in a debate on Wednesday. The EU needs a budget that is flexible enough to cope with unforeseen events and is funded from new sources, they added. The debate with Commission President José Manuel Barroso and Ireland's EU Presidency Minister Lucinda Creighton was Parliament's final input to the 7-8 February EU budget summit.

Handelsbanken - A brand new type of Bank has sprung up in the UK

A bank, new to Britain, is expanding rapidly across the UK.  Its name is Handelsbanken and it is from Sweden. However, it is about to open its 150th branch in the UK.

Decision Making

The world hasn't learned anything since The Kreuger Crash

The reason no one wanted to lend to or trade with the banks during the fall of 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, was that no one could understand the banks’ risks. It was impossible to tell, from looking at a particular bank’s disclosures, whether it might suddenly implode.

Growth and renewal in the Swedish economy

The 2012 McKinsey Global Institute report Growth and renewal in the Swedish economy shows that the nation can’t afford to coast on its achievements. Sweden’s economic growth mainly reflects productivity gains in the areas most exposed to international competition: manufacturing and business and financial services, which together account for only about one-third of the nation’s economy. In its two other main components—the public sector and local services—economic growth has been much slower, at a pace comparable to that of the rest of the EU-15.

1 trillion dollar platinum coin

The theory of the one trillion dollar platinum coin has been around a few years. But recently Krugman decided to take a stance pro-coin. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/be-ready-to-mint-that-coin/

Should President Obama be willing to print a $1 trillion platinum coin if Republicans try to force America into default? Yes, absolutely,” Krugman wrote. “He will, after all, be faced with a choice between two alternatives: one that’s silly but benign, the other that’s equally silly but both vile and disastrous.

Asymptotix in CIOmag 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 day to go - what happens if no agreement is reached?

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Haldane giving evidence at the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards

Haldane: No change is not an option. Fully 70% or 80% of the IT spend of the big banks currently is about the maintenance of legacy (antiquated) systems...

Macroprudential Supervision and the Transmission Mechanism

 

What is the Central Bank thinking?

Below is a review of recent central bank literature in the area of macro prudential supervision, this review is intended to elucidate why it is that a banking crisis crosses the line between free market private individual economics and public sector control, in a sense why the banking system is “different” in that executive officers of a financial institution have a higher order responsibility (ironically) to the general welfare of the population which flows form their interrelatio

the asymptotix of the basel accords

The asymptotic Basel II Tier One Capital formula

The Basel II Capital Accord seeks to improve on the existing rules by aligning regulatory capital requirements more closely to the underlying risks that banks face. One of the risk types described in the Capital Accord is credit risk. Banks need to hold capital to cover the credit risk on their credit portfolio.

Drupal 6 Views 2 custom handler for a dynamic select list

The current Drupal project has a network directory, that uses manual entries of data. During a multiple-step migration we have a temporary system where we instead synchronise data from a separate system (ColdFusion and a combination of SQL server and Oracle).

Tomorrow, summer is over in Euroland

If anyone of you thought this Summer was quieter than last year, then it's not due to less hazards for the EU leaders, it's rather that they are more skilled than last year in the profession as holidaymakers. We could for instance see Pedro Passos Coelho swim in Algarve relatively anonymously, but he was eventually caught up by some road toll protestors.

What is all this Basel regulation stuff about, anyway?

Back in the mists of time (about 10 years ago) it must have been; that was the question I was asked to answer; I did a lot of work so the client must have been seriously interested;-

What the bloody hell is this Basel Thing Anyway?

Kapital has transitioned to the state (ref. AMA) Political Economix & Rational Expectations

What we have to realize is that ‘capital has transitioned to the state’[1]; through the bail-outs and bail-ins, QE’s & SLS’s, LTRO’s & EFSFs; TARPs & twists; capital has transitioned to the state; it has happened, it is ‘what it is’; de-facto (not de-jure); capital has crossed the great libertarian 'blood brain barrier' and it did it @ a ridiculously low price with the greatest irony of all, no central planning!

Stress Tests - A New Modeling Paradigm & a Pragmatic Approach

I have been reviewing the papers from a recent conference;-

The ESRB at 1

SUERF/Deutsche Bundesbank/IMFS Conference

& I think there is a crystallisation of a theme at that conference reflected in one particular presentation which articulates a narrative that we have been developing here on asymptotix in regard to Stress testing over the last 2 or 3 years.

A European Monetary Fund/ EU Stabilization Bank / The Eurozone Problem and Proposed Solutions

When asymptotix first developed a European Stabilization Bank proposal, our thinking was just “common sense”, maybe driven a little by some experience not only of capital markets but of Public Sector policy development and specifically of the EU. It is possible that when I myself first wrote “The Lunatix are on the Grass: A new Bretton Woods proposition for Europe” I was thinking in a sort of “Kydland & Prescott[1]” / “Political Economics” [2] way. I was schooled in all that stuff way back when in the Adam Smith School in Glasgow.  That blog led us into the Stabilization Bank (SB) paper; but really we were driven by only one method; Structured Common Sense! And with the blogs we are always in a hurry; “it’s just a blog after all” !?! In fact a lot of this blog post here, I have said before in summer 2010 or summer 2011; it is GroundHog Day  every day in Van Rompuy space! But in blog-land I have no editor!

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