The RealCredit advanced payment system is a computer program that has the ability to perform secure credit and debit card transactions. The program communicates over the Internet to a central server operated by RealCredit, which in turn communicates with the acquiring banks.
This document gives a roadmap and specifics for implementing the RealCredit payment system into a Windows based application, from a web application through to a billing platform.
This report uses international comparisons to understand U.S. inflation dynamics since 1960. We decompose each G-7 country’s inflation path into a time-varying trend plus a transitory component, each with time-varying volatility. The level and volatility of trend inflation display coincident hump-shaped patterns that allow us to date the start of the Great Inflation in the late 1960s and a synchronized Inflation Stabilization in the mid 1980s. This temporal clustering narrows the set of G-7-wide economic developments which could have triggered the excessive monetary policy accommodation that was the ultimate source of the Great Inflation.
The latest global financial crisis has provided abundant examples of a sudden breakdown of credit relationships when poorly informed investors revised their previously held views. The aggregate magnitude of the ensuing negative financing shock to real economic activity was big enough to make the financial crisis go over into a severe worldwide recession. Although, initially, only a minority of financial institutions was affected by adverse balance sheet developments, businesses seemed to have difficulty finding a replacement for their original lender when the latter became either distressed or overcautious. In an ideal (“Modigliani-Miller”) world of competitive and efficient financial intermediation often used as a convenient shortcut in macro models, there is no place for such effects. Although more recent DSGE-with-financial-frictions models assign a prominent position to the financial sector, they usually rely on a properly functioning financial intermediary as a propagator of real shocks. However, the latest global crisis, particularly the extent of credit decline at its peak, has uncovered a certain deficit of attention in macro modeling, to improperly functioning financial intermediaries as a shock source. The bulk of the existing macro literature is preoccupied with orderly market operation, conceding but a modest space to shortcomings, both on the capital provider and capital consumer sides.
On the other side, the theory of financial intermediation in its present state does not offer enough possibilities to compare relative strength of impact of its various phenomena of interest (such as agency, imperfect competition, institutional design, etc.) in a common setting relevant to macro theorists. Finally, asset pricing theory, once it has to depart from its well-fathomed Walrasian foundation, provides a lot of ambiguous messages about markets for producer liabilities, which are still to be integrated into the conventional macroeconomic paradigm.
