Electronic Money: The Powerpoint File

UPDATE January 10, 2018: My presentation "Breaking Through the Zero Lower Bound" has evolved into a pair of presentations "21 Misconceptions about Eliminating the Zero Lower Bound (or Any Effective Lower Bound on Interest Rates)" and "Implementing Deep Negative Interest Rates: A Guide." The links are the latest versions of the presentations, as I gave them at Boston University on November 16, 2018. 

Videos: 

For more on this topic (including a 5-minute interview), see my bibliographical post “How and Why to Eliminate the Zero Lower Bound: A Reader’s Guide.”

Other than presentations at the University of Michigan, where I worked for 29 years, and the University of Colorado Boulder, where I am now, here is a list of places I have or am scheduled to give these presentations or closely related presentations:

  • Bank of England, May 20, 2013

  • Bank of Japan, June 18, 2013

  • Keio University, June 21, 2013

  • Japan’s Ministry of Finance, June 24, 2013

  • University of Copenhagen, September 5, 2013

  • National Bank of Denmark, September 6, 2013

  • Ecole Polytechnique (Paris), September 10, 2013

  • Paris School of Economics, September 12, 2013

  • Banque de France, September 13, 2013

  • Federal Reserve Board, November 1, 2013

  • US Treasury, May 19, 2014

  • European Central Bank, July 7, 2014

  • Bundesbank, July 8, 2014

  • Bank of Italy, July 11, 2014

  • Swiss National Bank, July 15, 2014

  • Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory Conference in Tokyo, August 20, 2014

  • Princeton University, October 13, 2014

  • Federal Reserve Bank of New York, October 15, 2014

  • New York University, October 17, 2014

  • European University Institute (Florence), October 29, 2014

  • Qatar Central Bank and Texas A&M University at Qatar joint seminar, November 17, 2014

  • International Monetary Fund, May 4, 2015

  • London conference on “Removing the Zero Lower Bound on Interest Rates” sponsored by the Imperial College Business School, the Brevan Howard Centre for Financial Analysis, the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and the Swiss National Bank, panel on Economics, Financial, Legal and Practical Issues, May 18, 2015

  • Bank of England: Keynote Address for “Chief Economists’ Workshop– The Future of Money,” May 19, 2015

  • Bank of Finland, May 20, 2015

  • Sveriges Riksbank, May 21, 2015

  • Uppsala University, May 25, 2015

  • Norges Bank, May 28, 2015

  • Bank of Canada, June 11, 2015

  • Reserve Bank of New Zealand, July 22, 2015

  • New Zealand Treasury, August 5, 2015

  • Lake Forest University, September 1, 2015

  • Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, September 3, 2015

  • American Economic Association Meetings, San Francisco, January 4, 2016

  • IMF, European Section, June 3, 2016

  • Brookings Institution, Hutchins Center Conference, June 6, 2016

  • St. Louis Fed Conference, September 23, 2016

  • Bank of Japan, September 27, 2016

  • Bank of Thailand, September 29, 2016

  • Bank Indonesia, October 3, 2016

  • Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, October 5, 2016

  • Bank of Korea, October 6, 2016

  • Bank of Japan, October 7, 2016

  • Minneapolis Fed Conference, October 18-19, 2016

  • Sveriges Riksbank (Stockholm), October 31-November 1, 2016

  • Austrian National Bank November 2-4, 2016

  • Bank of Israel, November 6-7, 2016

  • Brussels Conference on “What is the impact of negative interest rates on Europe’s financial system? How do we get back?” sponsored by the European Capital Markets and Institute (ECMI), the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) and the Brevan Howard Centre for Financial Analysis, November 9, 2016

  • Czech National Bank, November 10-11, 2016

  • European Central Bank, November 14-16, 2016

  • Bank of International Settlements, November 17, 2016

  • Swiss National Bank, November 18, 2016

  • Kansas City Fed, December 20, 2016

  • Bank of Canada/Central Bank Research Association Conference, July 20, 2017

  • Denver Association of Business Economists, August 16, 2017

  • De Nederlandsche Bank (Amsterdam), September 28, 2017

  • Bruegel Conference (Brussels), October 2, 2017

  • Bank of Spain, October 3-5, 2017

  • Bank of Portugal, October 9-10, 2017

  • Harvard University, November 12-13, 2018

  • Brown University, November 14, 2018

  • MIT, November 15, 2018

  • Boston University, November 16, 2018

  • Bundesbank, October 28, 2020 (virtual)

  • Reserve Bank of Australia, November 16, 2020 (virtual)

(If you want to know more about the personal side of these trips, see my post “Electronic Money: The Travelogue.”)

Below is what I had to say in two early entries in this post that went beyond simply giving the itinerary of my worldwide, multi-year “Breaking Through the Zero Lower Bound” tour:

June 17, 2013: I went to the Bank of England to talk about how to eliminate the zero lower bound back in May. Tomorrow I will give this presentation (download) at the Bank of Japan:

I think my online readers will also find it interesting. It includes arguments that I have not made online yet in any detail.

The associated paper is very preliminary (in particular, it has very long quotations about the history of thought that need to be cut down to size, and needs to be revised along the lines of the Powerpoint file), but here is the current draft of the paper “Breaking Through the Zero Lower Bound” (download).

Update, June 29, 2013: My electronic money presentations on June 18 at the Bank of Japan, June 21 at Keio University and June 24 at Japan’s Ministry of Finance were well-received. The fact of my seminar makes the part of the  International Herald Tribune’s summary of Leika Kihara’s (gated) article “Japan policy appears set, like it or not” that I have italicized false:

The central bank is said to have no new stimulus plan in the works, nor is it pondering alternative measures.

Though I argue in my presentation that an electronic yen policy is superior to the massive quantitative easing that I advocated for Japan on June 29, 2012, because an electronic yen allows monetary policy to steer the economy without inflation, some version of an electronic yen is also the plausible fall-back policy if massive quantitative easing does not work.

For the record, the type of quantitative easing I advocated for Japan involved massive purchases of corporate stocks and bonds–“assets chosen to have nominal interest rates as far as possible above zero.” Purchases of corporate stocks and bonds should be much more powerful than purchases of Japanese government bonds. Though the Bank of Japan has the legal authority to purchases corporate stocks and bonds, there is a concern (perhaps misplaced) about the possible consequences of the risk for the Bank of Japan’s net worth. An alternative would be for Japan to push further in increasing the risky asset holdings in the Government Pension Investment Fund. That would be in line with what I write in my column “Why the US Needs Its Own Sovereign Wealth Fund.”