“Can ‘It’ Happen Again?” Such was the title of a well-known paper written by economist Hyman Minsky in 1982. “It” referred to financial crises. His answer at the time was in the affirmative. And so it remains today. The crisis that started in August 2007 has affected economies in different ways and in different degrees.…

I need to confess to the reader that I have problems, but not solutions. Specifically, there are three problems. First, the rate of growth is decreasing in several countries: certainly in Europe, but also in Japan (my generation can still recall the years of the Japanese “miracle”), in the U.S. (what today is considered growth…

Finally the Volker rule is in place. The five U.S. financial regulatory agencies – yes five: the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission – agreed on the rule to…