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The American economic system is the most successful yet developed, and consumer credit has played a vital role in that economy. Consumer credit has experienced tremendous growth, and has adjusted to the demands of changing life-styles, economic needs, and geographic distinctions, as well as to the different types of consumer goods which have become available with a minimal amount of government intervention. What government intervention there has been has involved restraint and restriction. There now exists the need to improve the consumer credit industry to enable the citizens of Virginia to continue to be able to obtain both the necessities and amenities of life.

The twenty-sixth annual report of the Bank for International Settlements was published on June II, 1956. In its survey of the year April 1, 1955—March 31, 1956, the report declared that the most important feature of 1955 was that the effect of an economic boom in North America had been superimposed on the powerful forces for expansion operating in western Europe. There was a definite need, however, for measures which would moderate the boom without weakening the forces tending to promote healthy economic growth. For this reason, direct internal or external controls had not been reapplied by the authorities and trade had been further liberalized, while restrictions on foreign payments had also been further relaxed. There had been a continuation of flexibility in credit policies pursued by the authorities who had employed methods of credit restraint, such as increased interest rates.

Since October 2009, the Greek sovereign debt problem has spiraled into crisis. By the end of last year, Greek national debt stood at 115% of GDP, and the deficit had been revised up from 6-8% to 13.6%. On April 27, 2010, international ratings agencies decreased Greek bonds to junk status. On May 1, Greece agreed to a series of austerity measures that convinced the previously reluctant Germany to support a bailout package for Europe but also set off massive strikes throughout Greece. An initial 110 billion euro bailout was replaced days later with a 750 billion euro ($100 trillion) bailout of which IMF will provide 250 billion euros and EU institutions the rest. Even this news did not prevent stock market drops worldwide. Spain too lost its AAA credit rating at the end of May, further fanning fears that the crisis could spread to the rest of Europe. Unfortunately, Greece faces two major obstacles to taking a truly proactive approach to recovering productivity. First, as a member of the Eurozone, which takes monetary policy out of national hands, Greece is unable to use monetary and fiscal measures in ways traditionally applied in such a situation. Second, this structural difficulty has been further exacerbated by the prevailing ideological approach to the European debt crisis, which has been framed in terms of restoring international creditworthiness and protecting foreign creditors, rather than in terms of ensuring employment and basic social needs for citizens.

Kalecki identifies demand restraint in industrialised and capital restraint in developing countries as the decisive barriers of world-wide growth. Thus, beyond others, it is a matter of financing to foster employment in both types of countries: a rational use of credit money on the international scale could finance additional imports of capital goods by developing countries, whereas industrialised countries could increase their output by trade balance surpluses. This question has been largely debated under various aspects, from the Stamp plan (1958) to the programme of the Commission on International Development Issues (1980). Even if this debate has been superseded by questions of the process and the institutions by which capital is allocated, of the appropriate business management and screening and monitoring, declining growth rates in the last twenty years show that the basic issue of production and distribution of additional real capital remains at stake. Besides institutional obstacles, capital restraint still remains the main bottleneck for development. Basic questions as how to create and use world-wide credit money has to be reconsidered instead of taking backfiring actions to manage actual financial crises. Additional international money supply by planned trade balance deficits of developing countries contributes to world-wide growth, whereas trade balance deficits of the United States are likely to prepare the next financial crises by an excessively increasing dollar supply. A revival of the debate of how to link SDR's and development financing surely requires to tackle a great number of additional questions, such as how to allocate trade balance deficits and surpluses and how to ensure the acceptance of this world credit money. All in all, it would be a serious attempt to break the money away from the handing down tradition and to transform it into a rationale by abstract reasons and well-founded instrument for economic development.

The Department of Justice's theory of liability in its case attacking the non–discrimination provisions in American Express's merchant contracts contends that point–of–sale competition on the price of making a purchase with a credit card is an instrument creating economic efficiency. That is, the economy would run more efficiently, and consumers would be better off, if merchants were free to charge variable prices for different types of credit cards. After all, charging different prices for using different types of payment mechanisms appears to be just another form of presumptively positive price competition. The Second Circuit rejected that conclusion, recognizing that in credit card markets competition already occurs at multiple points. American Express must compete to: • convince cardholders to apply for and use its cards; and • convince merchants to accept its cards./p> The question, the Second Circuit correctly recognized, is whether adding a third type of competition – for cardholders to use the card when merchants pass through their card acceptance fees – would make American Express's card network more efficient? By prohibiting merchants who accept American Express cards from discriminating against the brand, the card company imposed a unilateral vertical restraint. Such restraints are often deemed to be reasonable under the antitrust laws because they may "stimulate inter–brand competition." This is because an upstream provider, like American Express, has little interest in reducing its downstream sales. It would only impose a vertical restraint if that restraint efficiently helped it to sell more products. Only when an upstream or downstream provider has market power enabling it to impose restraints that harm consumers by raising price or lowering quality does a vertical restraint violate the antitrust laws. The Department of Justice's theory postulated that the non–discrimination provisions in American Express's merchant agreements harmed consumers by effectively requiring merchants to increase their prices to cover higher credit card fees for all customers because merchants could not pass the cost of accepting American Express directly to American Express's own customers. The Second Circuit acknowledged the potential for consumer harm would exist if American Express charged merchants supra–competitive prices and pocketed the excess as rents. But the court held that the government failed to prove that rivalry on the price consumers pay to use a credit card at the point of sale would increase efficiency in credit card markets. As the Second Circuit explained, credit card markets are two–sided. In order to prove harm to consumer welfare in a two–sided market, an antitrust plaintiff needs to show that a restraint makes the overall system less efficient. That is, do consumers overall pay more for less because of the restraint. A card network like American Express must compete for both cardholders and merchants. One therefore cannot demonstrate that price increases on one side of the market are inefficient without examining how those prices impact competition on theincreased revenue from the merchant side to offer a better card product to its cardholders and compete more effectively with other card networks, like Visa, for cardholder loyalty. The Second Circuit did not definitively decide whether American Express's non–discrimination provisions were pro– or anticompetitive. It simply concluded that two–sided market economics made the question more complex than the government plaintiffs acknowledged in trying the case. And based on the record evidence, the court couldn't tell whether the non–discrimination provisions made the market more or less efficient.Since the plaintiff bears the burden of proving harm to competition, i.e. a reduction in efficiency to the overall market, the government plaintiffs had failed to prove their case. Part I reviews the economics of two–sided markets and provides reasons to conclude that non–discrimination provisions in credit card markets are efficient. Part II explains that a market's two–sided nature does not guarantee that participants in that market will charge competitive prices. Card systems with market power could set merchant fees at supra–competitive levels, leaving the market less efficient. This Part then contrasts Visa's and MasterCard's fees in the 1990s and early 2000s–which were challenged by merchants in a class action–with American Express's current fees. It concludes that the factors giving the merchants a plausible case against Visa and MasterCard do not support the government plaintiffs in their case against American Express. Part III addresses a systemic concern expressed in a recent New York Times editorial about how a decision in American Express's favor might impact the future enforcement of antitrust claims against dominant firms. This Part concludes that those concerns are unfounded. The Sherman Act has two principle sections. Truly dominant firms would remain subject to scrutiny under Section 2 of the Sherman Act, and Section 1 vertical restraint cases already require proof of consumer harm no different from what the Second Circuit required in its decision favoring American Express.

Austria's economic progress during the last twenty years has been most impressive, comparing favourably with other industrialised countries. Major credit is ascribed to the social partnership between labour and management, which extends to all areas of social and economic concern. Its most significant manifestation has been the adoption, in 1957, of an incomes policy, of voluntary wage and price restraint. The results have been: significant improvements in the standards of living; full employment; modest inflation; and an enviable record of industrial peace. The social partnership is supported by an understanding with the government, which allows the two major interest groups considerable freedom to carry out their commitments to wage and price restraint.

The significance of debt relations is constantly growing in the present-day world, so do economic problems related to debt. Credit relationships on market are usually treated as morally neutral despite the fact that debt generates a number of moral contradictions. This paper suggests an understanding of debt that draws on the anthropological theory of gift. It enables to expose the moral content of the utilitarian market exchange as compared to gift exchange and to differentiate between various forms of debt. This approach is used for analyzing consumer credit and for demonstrating that debtor's behavior is paradoxically determined by striving to avoid the moral obligations of debt. The main moral imperatives are indicated that govern consumer credit - independence and necessity, calculativeness and quantification. This article demonstrates that making the borrower responsible for growing debt makes credit burden increasing rather than restraints it.

Modern Austrian economists employ the Austrian Theory of Capital as an analytical construct with which to interpret policy-induced business cycles and suggest an appropriate remedy. The argument is that the structure of production, particularly the degree of capital intensity or "length of the production period" among different sectors of a non-collectivized economy, depends on the level of interest rates. Low interest rates encourage greater capital intensity in production while high interest rates reduce the degree of capital intensity or roundaboutness. Thus a greater capital intensity encouraged by an artificially low rate of interest created by a central bank's credit inflation must be followed by increased unemployment of labor when interest rates rise again to reflect the ensuing price inflation and the credit inflation stops. Restraint on central bank credit creation is thus prescribed as the remedy for fluctuations in output and employment in the business cycle.

In this paper we analyse a case of adverse selection in the credit market to show that, in the presence of a monopolistic bank, bad firms can be beneficial to accumulation and growth. Two main implications are drawn: first, even if classical diminishing returns on technology are ruled out, growth declines over time. Second, any attempt to make banks more capable of discriminating between bad and good firms will resolve itself into a restraint to growth.

ABSTRACT The paper examines some aspects of the monetary controversies which took place in several countries during the nineteenth century. In Brazil advocates of the gold standard and monetary restraint, known as metalistas, prevailed over papelistas, whose major desire was monetary expansion and credit creation. It will be argued that previous treatments of monetary debates in nineteenth-century Brazil have overlooked a crucial point, namely, the defence (or otherwise) of convertibility of the mil-réis. This has led to erroneous interpretations of the ideology underlying monetary management in the period.