Last time I mentioned the election in Honduras I said that Xiomara Castro had won, but that her victory might well be contested. I have proved too pessimistic. The National Party has in fact conceded the election results and stepped aside. Castro will be sworn in on January 27. Ah, I remember when things worked that smoothly in transfers of power in The United States. Where will things go now? Well ... the new President is a professed socialist, but I suspect that is mostly a matter of the marketing power of that label. [Yes, I know, it's marketing power in the US still seems negative outside of Vermont. Honduras is a different place, folks.] What we know is that she has demanded a new deal from the International Monetary Fund in terms of her country's debt. I can hardly blame her and I have to observe that she doesn't have a great hand to play there. The IMF is simply a surrogate for global bond markets, and they are a stronger force than any momentum generated by an...
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October 1, 2016 was an important day for international money (monies) and an important day in the history of the People's Republic of China. The International Monetary Fund added the Chinese yuan to a basket of currencies that it uses for its loans, known as the Special Drawing Rights currencies. The SDR list also includes the US dollar, the Japanese yen, the British pound, and the euro. That's it. Full stop. With the addition of the yuan there are bow as many SFR currencies as there are veto power countries in the UN Security Council. One confusing fact about the yuan is semantic: it seems to be used as a synonym with "renminbi." Actually, the yuan is the base unit, the renminbi is the currency, in much the same way that the "pound" is the base unit of the British "sterling." But over the last few decades, "pound" has become the most customary term in any context, and "sterling" is finding itself moving into the linguisti...