ECON 2020 Extra Credit

For 3/21 Last Monday's topic was the likely default on bonds by Russia. Somewhat amazingly, that didn't happen.  International sanctions cover as many accounts of the Russian government as they can find. It is believed that this is about 60% of them, leaving about $100,000,000,000 in various foreign currencies in foreign accounts that they can still access. And they used this to make interest payments on those bonds of just over $100,000,000.  They owe more payments on different bonds this week and next, both times in euros. They may yet default on those, or other later bond payments. To say this is macroeconomically weird and unique is an understatement. This would be like a thug in a movie sending their lawyer to the bank with a briefcase full of cash to pay off their Visa bill because UPS delivers to the secret hideout and Amazon only takes cards. In the real world, it was unusual, and here's how the events unfolded on Tuesday and Wednesday . There's a lot in those ...

All of my write-ups, and your links, for the short-answer extra credit questions on the ECON 2020 exams will appear here rather than in Canvas. *** You may have noticed: Canvas s*cks. On my end, this shows up as: Canvas, from the ground up, is not built to handle classes in which there's new content every semester that isn't used again the next semester. Like current events. Canvas, from the ground up, is not built to handle multiple sections of the same class that get updated. Canvas is good at copying a class from last semester to use again this semester. It's not good at adding one thing to a class this semester, and then sharing it with other classes. Again, like current events.