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Aristide Briand's first government represents an intriguing moment of convergence in French political history. Several strands of reformist political thinking had been developing since the end of the Dreyfus affair, and Rene Waldeck-Rousseau's government of 1899-1902 inspired many ideas that reemerged ten years later; the most important of these were the reforms of French society and of the republican state. Not all republicans would have seen the two strands as linked, but in the speeches of Aristide Briand and the personalities of his principal lieutenants, a reformist agenda emerged designed to unite a country recently divided over Dreyfus and the church. 'Young' intellectual movements, whose roots went back to the 1890s, supported the government with a theory of political reform that was modern and realist. The immediate failure of Briand's 'moment of hope' does not detract from the significance, in the long term, of his experiment in reconciliation.

A study has been made of the New Zealand public debt and of whether it should be denominated in domestic or foreign currencies. All net public debt is now in New Zealand dollars. An optimal debt portfolio should not have any nominal domestic debt. The dominance of demand or supply shocks is susceptible to the economic environment at any given time. More study will be needed to see effects of New Zealand's new economic environment on its public debt portfolio., This paper addresses the issue of whether New Zealand's public debt obligations should be denominated in domestic or foreign currency. Using the tax-smoothing approach of Bohn (1990), we estimate optimal [...]

Paul Jankowski, Shades of Indignation: Political Scandals in France, Past and Present (New York: Berghahn, 2008). Three essays, a trilogy of vices to be weighed against the classic trinity of [...]

By AVNER BEN-AMOS (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2000; pp. 425. 1555). AVNER Ben-Amos' study of French political funerals ends with a close-up of tears trickling down Helmet Kohl's cheeks during the [...]

This paper tests the rational expectations theory of the term structure using recent daily, weekly, and monthly observations on New Zealand interest rates. We find that for many maturities we cannot reject the expectations hypothesis using both short and long versions of the theory. These results are interpreted as further evidence that the failure of the expectations hypothesis in the United States is due to the specific interest rate smoothing behaviour of the Federal Reserve., 1. Introduction The rational expectations hypothesis of the term structure is one of the fundamental building blocks of financial and macroeconomic theory. It has important implications for predicting future movements [...]