Jacob Christensen

• Stefan Tangermann: Food price inflation: Biofuels, speculators or emerging market demand? | vox
  New research shows that India, China, and speculators are not the culprits in the food price explosion. During the 2005-2007 food price surge, 60% of the growth in global consumption of cereals and vegetable oils came from biofuels.
  (tags: economics energy biofuels publicpolicy)
• Economist – Digital libraries: Great minds think (too much) alike
  [James Evans] has found that as more journals become available online, fewer articles are being cited in the reference lists of the research papers published within them.
  (tags: reference academic publishing)
• Marc Flandreau: Will the dollar lose its throne? Economic fundamentals vs network effects | vox – Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists
  The importance economists assign to agglomeration economics stems from the mismatch in the first half of the 20th century between the dollar’s role in global commerce and the US’s share of the global economy.
  (tags: usa economics monetarypolicy)
• Ottaviano – Peri: Immigration and National Wages
  we find that immigration (1990-2006) had small negative effects in the short run…while it had small positive effects on native workers with no high school degree (+0.3%) and on average native wages (+0.6%) in the long run.
  (tags: economics immigration labourmarket research)

The Danish Central Bank tells us that nearly 50% of Danish mortgages are financed by interest only-loans these days. In the US, the popular name for this kind of mortgages is “exotic loans“.

The loans are particularly popular in financing private rented housing but obviously a lot of home-owners have also financed their houses and apartments this way. On the other hand, the Danish housing market has not been troubled with US-style sub-prime loans.

Wikipedia: Interest-only loan.

I think Ola Nordebo has a point: Whatever the merits of Barack Obama making a big speech in Berlin, the Siegessäule is a slightly tricky choice of venue.

For readers without intimate knowledge of Berlin’s monuments: The Siegessäule was erected to celebrate Prussian victories over Denmark (take that, Anders Fogh!), Austria and France. A certain Herr Hitler had the monument moved to its present place and after World War II, the French wanted to blow up the whole thing but had to settle with the removal of some of the reliefs from the base of the column. The were put back during the 1980s.

Or maybe somebody among Obama’s campaign staff has hit the jackpot: Now the Republicans can’t accuse Obama of being pro-French.