Postmodernism Explained

Dennis R Redmond dredmond at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU
Fri Nov 5 03:17:16 PST 1999


I finally figured out where all that stuff about postmodern undecidability/indeterminacy came from: central bankers. Here's Wim "Double Dutch" Duisenberg explaining the ECB's rate hike (http://www.ecb.int/key/st991104.htm):

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Question: Second question: the ECB, in the last few days, seems to have gone the extra mile to prepare the market for today's move. Can we - in contrast to what you did in April, for instance, where markets were very much surprised by the move - can we expect the ECB to do that extensive lobbying in the future as well?

Duisenberg: I don't know. The surprise in April was a surprise not so much about the fact of moving, but about the size. The fact that we were moving in April was already widely discounted in the markets. The size may have been a surprise. And I would like to repeat that it is not our policy to catch markets by surprise. We do want to be predictable. We do want to be credible which doesn't rule out that, on some occasion in the future, we may be forced to surprise markets. That can then even be a part of policy. On the other hand, it is not our policy to do so. So what you can expect, that was your question, will there be a continued policy of going the other mile, as you put it, I would say: No, but then I don't know.

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Anyone who can make heads or tails of this will get my vote for next year's Nobel Prize in Literary Analysis.

-- Dennis



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