Central banks and inflation: where do we stand and how did we get here?

How did we get here and where are we going?

How Did We Get Here?

W hen we talk among ourselves about our business, we use lots of abbreviations and acronyms. We take a lot of things for granted. To understand what I’m talking about all you need to do is try to explain how you get paid to somebody. AWP, WAC, discount, PBM, RA, EOB, DIR, copay, insured amount, rebate, clawback, etc. This is the barrier we face when talking to legislators. We are in a complicat...

How did we get here?

I t is rare that science owes a debt to law. To lawmakers, surely, such as those who regularly make generous appropriations to the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. But law, in the sense of the process and products of litigation? It’s hard to imagine. But this special supplement is deeply in debt to law in just that sense. The funding that supports the research ...

Financial Regulation after the Crisis: How Did We Get Here, and How Do We Get Out?

Following the global financial crisis of 2007–09, regulatory authorities either are or should be engaging in a fundamental reconsideration of how they approach financial regulation and supervision. This paper briefly summarizes the present international consensus on regulation as embodied in the Basel framework. It looks at how we came to be in such a situation, and proposes a restart of the pr...

Inflation: Where Do We Stand?

Inflation is presently our most convincing scenario of the very early universe, not only because it is physically attractive, but also because it makes a series of definite predictions that can be tested concretely by means of astrophysical observations. In this short article, we quickly review what are these predictions and describe how the on-going high accuracy Cosmic Microwave Background (C...