In sociology and in economics, the term conspicuous consumption describes and explains the consumer practice of buying and using goods of a higher quality, price, or in greater quantity than practical. In 1899, the sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined the term conspicuous consumption to explain the spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury commodities specifically as a public display of economic power—the income and the accumulated wealth—of the buyer. To the conspicuous consumer, the public display of discretionary income is an economic means of either attaining or of maintaining a given social status.
Full-reserve banking is a system of banking where banks do not lend demand deposits and instead only lend from time deposits. It differs from fractional-reserve banking, in which banks may lend funds on deposit, while fully reserved banks would be required to keep the full amount of each customer's demand deposits in cash, available for immediate withdrawal.
Digital currency is any currency, money, or money-like asset that is primarily managed, stored or exchanged on digital computer systems, especially over the internet. Types of digital currencies include cryptocurrency, virtual currency and central bank digital currency. Digital currency may be recorded on a distributed database on the internet, a centralized electronic computer database owned by a company or bank, within digital files or even on a stored-value card.
Money creation, or money issuance, is the process by which the money supply of a country, or an economic or monetary region, is increased. In most modern economies, money is created by both central banks and commercial banks. Money issued by central banks is a liability, typically called reserve deposits, and is only available for use by central bank account holders, which are generally large commercial banks and foreign central banks. Central banks can increase the quantity of reserve deposits directly, by making loans to account holders, purchasing assets from account holders, or by recording an asset, such as a deferred asset, and directly increasing liabilities. However, the majority of the money supply used by the public for conducting transactions is created by the commercial banking system in the form of commercial bank deposits. Bank loans issued by commercial banks expand the quantity of bank deposits.
International economics is concerned with the effects upon economic activity from international differences in productive resources and consumer preferences and the international institutions that affect them. It seeks to explain the patterns and consequences of transactions and interactions between the inhabitants of different countries, including trade, investment and transaction.
The Latin American debt crisis was a financial crisis that originated in the early 1980s, often known as La Década Perdida, when Latin American countries reached a point where their foreign debt exceeded their earning power, and they could not repay it.
Olivier Jean Blanchard is a French economist and professor. He is Robert M. Solow Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics, and as the C. Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Stephen A. Zarlenga was a researcher and author in the field of monetary theory, trader in stock and financial markets, and advocate of monetary reform.
Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Nodes in the peer-to-peer bitcoin network verify transactions through cryptography and record them in a public distributed ledger, called a blockchain, without central oversight. Consensus between nodes is achieved using a computationally intensive process based on proof of work, called mining, that secures the bitcoin blockchain. Mining consumes large quantities of electricity and has been criticized for its environmental impact.
The Chicago plan was a monetary and banking reform program suggested in the wake of the Great Depression by a group of University of Chicago economists including Henry Simons, Garfield Cox, Aaron Director, Paul Douglas, Albert G. Hart, Frank Knight, Lloyd Mints and Henry Schultz. Its main provision was to require 100% reserves on deposits subject to check, so that "the creation and destruction of effective money through private lending operations would be impossible". The plan, in other words, envisaged to separate the issuing from the lending of money. This, according to its authors, would prevent the money supply from cyclically varying as bank loans were expanded or contracted. In addition, the payment system would become perfectly safe. No great monetary contraction as that of 1929-1933 could ever occur again.
Jón Danielsson is an economist working as professor of finance (reader) at the London School of Economics. His work focuses on artificial intelligence, financial risk forecasting, financial regulation, international finance, and systemic causes of financial instability. Danielsson has also written on cryptocurrencies, and the consequences of novel technologies for the financial system. Danielsson is the author of several books on finance and risk analysis, and is active in both domestic and international policy debates on financial regualtion.
A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or crypto is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it.
The bitcoin protocol is the set of rules that govern the functioning of bitcoin. Its key components and principles are: a peer-to-peer decentralized network with no central oversight; the blockchain technology, a public ledger that records all bitcoin transactions; mining and proof of work, the process to create new bitcoins and verify transactions; and cryptographic security.
Vitaly Dmitrievich Buterin, better known as Vitalik Buterin, is a Canadian computer programmer and co-founder of Ethereum. Buterin became involved with cryptocurrency early in its inception, co-founding Bitcoin Magazine in 2011 and Dark Wallet in 2013 together with Amir Taaki and Cody Wilson In 2015, Buterin deployed the Ethereum blockchain with Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio, and Joseph Lubin.
A blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of records (blocks) that are securely linked together via cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data. Since each block contains information about the previous block, they effectively form a chain, with each additional block linking to the ones before it. Consequently, blockchain transactions are irreversible in that, once they are recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without altering all subsequent blocks.
Monero is a cryptocurrency which uses a blockchain with privacy-enhancing technologies to obfuscate transactions to achieve anonymity and fungibility. Observers cannot decipher addresses trading Monero, transaction amounts, address balances, or transaction histories.
A distributed ledger is a system whereby replicated, shared, and synchronized digital data is geographically spread (distributed) across many sites, countries, or institutions. In contrast to a centralized database, a distributed ledger does not require a central administrator, and consequently does not have a single (central) point-of-failure.
A central bank digital currency is a digital currency issued by a central bank, rather than by a commercial bank. It is also a liability of the central bank and denominated in the sovereign currency, as is the case with physical banknotes and coins.
Enrica Detragiache is the head of the Germany Desk of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the assistant director of the IMF's European division. She formerly taught Economics at Johns Hopkins University, and has published over 70 research papers and articles. Her research covers topics such as labour migration, financial crises, development economics, and corporate finance.
The environmental impact of bitcoin is significant. Bitcoin mining, the process by which bitcoins are created and transactions are finalized, is energy-consuming and results in carbon emissions, as about half of the electricity used in 2021 was generated through fossil fuels. Moreover, bitcoins are mined on specialized computer hardware with a short lifespan, resulting in electronic waste. The amount of e-waste generated by bitcoin mining is comparable to that generated by the Netherlands. Scholars argue that bitcoin mining could support renewable energy development by utilizing surplus electricity from wind and solar. Bitcoin's environmental impact has attracted the attention of regulators, leading to incentives or restrictions in various jurisdictions.
