Doha
Dr Miles Kimball, professor of economics and survey research at the University of Michigan, USA, will present a talk, "How Subordinating Paper Money to Electronic Money Can End Recessions and End Inflation," at Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ) on Monday.
The lecture is hosted by the Liberal Arts Programme at TAMUQ.
Dr Troy Bickham, chair, Liberal Arts Programme, said: “We are very excited about hosting Dr Kimball for this lecture as it highlights the broad interests of our students and further underlines that social sciences, arts and humanities are an important part of engineering education at Texas A&M.”
Kimball writes the blog Confessions of a Supply Side Liberal and earned a PhD from Harvard University in 1987. His expertise is in the areas of macroeconomics, economics of uncertainty, cognitive economics and labour. Research includes business cycle theory, utility theory, economics of uncertainty, survey measures of preference parameters, economics of happiness, origins of preferences, consumption, labour supply, risk aversion, investment, and technology shocks.
In his abstract, Kimball said that it has long been taken for granted that paper currency earns a zero interest rate, making it difficult to lower other interest rates more than a fraction of a percent below zero. But the ability to vary the paper currency interest rate along with other key interest rates makes it possible to stimulate investment and net exports as much as needed to revive the economy even when inflation, interest rates and economic activity are quite low, as they are currently in many countries.
An electronic money standard can be much more stable than a paper currency standard because under an electronic money standard, zero inflation is consistent with economic stabilisation. For Qatar, this creates an opportunity to raise its status as a financial centre by making a transition to a fixed exchange rate of the Electronic Qatari Riyal with real (inflation-adjusted) U.S. dollars instead of with nominal U.S. dollars. That would automatically make all securities denominated in the Electronic Qatari Riyal into inflation-protected securities from the perspective of U.S. investors.
Moderating the talk and discussion will be Dr Khalid Rashid Alkhater, director of research and monetary policy at Qatar Central Bank (QCB) and a member of the Monetary Policy Committee and the Investment Committee at QCB.
