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One argument for floating the Chinese renminbi (RMB) is to insulate China's monetary policy from the US effect. However, we note that both theoretical considerations and empirical results do not offer a definite answer on the link between exchange rate arrangement and policy dependence. We examine the empirical relevance of the argument by analyzing the interactions between the Chinese and US interest rates. Our empirical results, which appear robust to various assumptions of data persistence, suggest that the US effect on the Chinese interest rate is quite weak. Apparently, even with its de facto peg to the US dollar, China has alternative measures to retain its policy independence and de-link its interest rates from the US rate. In other words, the argument for a flexible RMB to insulate China's monetary policy from the US effect is not substantiated by the observed interest rate interactions.

Much scholarly effort over the last two to three decades has been spent debating cosmopolitanism and attacking or refurbishing its older understanding as something owned by the West and a marker of civilization that others should strive for. The criticisms, however, have tended to emphasize the Eurocentric origins and constitutive cultural exclusionism of cosmopolitanism more than anything else. A second and newer origin of cosmopolitanism that is more commonly referenced today as cosmopolitanism's modern foundation is one in which we find an inextricable imbrication of three Cs: conquest, commerce, and cosmopolitanism. Global commerce was the condition of possibility of cosmopolitanism, but what had long structured global commerce was a composite of rapacity, enslavement, violence, domination, and some good. The author proposes that the contemporary study of cosmopolitanism reacquaint itself with what continues to make it possible as aspiration, if not reality for all: global commerce and its conditions. To make commerce legible in cosmopolitanism, he asserts, is to accommodate the talk of profit, loss, assets, accumulation, interests, interest rates, and the likes in our theorizations. Using this analogy, the author speculates on what sort of "cosmopolitan interest rates" might be assigned to the social and economic debts owed to the descendants of slaves who suffered great loss at the hands of cosmopolitan global commerce. He concludes that it is a rate of interest that says to live as a social being is to be obligated in any number of ways to one another and the overall optimal health of that sociality.

The eight years' interval from 1929 to 1937 was one of the most eventful periods in modern economic history. In common with other indices of economic conditions, rates of interest returns were affected by the world-wide collapse in the years immediately after 1929, and by the recovery movement which has persisted from about 1933. Among Canadian interest rates the outstanding development was the extensive decline after 1932 in the return obtainable from most of the important types of loan investment. Two significant features of this decline were, first, the decreases in certain rates which had been relatively stable for several decades and, second, the unprecedented divergence between rates of return on short and long term bonds of high grade. These developments are broadly illustrated in table I and in a chart accompanying this article.The remarkable changes in recent years in rates of interest returns are primarily attributable to the influence of unparalleled "easy money conditions" induced in the first instance by the economic collapse and later intensified by governmental policies of an emergency nature. These were pursued in Canada and most other countries; and were designed to modify some phases of the disequilibria produced by the depression and to promote recovery. Data presented in this paper will trace the behaviour of interest rates in Canada since 1929 as indicated by returns obtainable from time to time on several types of loan investment which are popular with institutional and private investors. Limitation of space prevents an exhaustive analysis of this subject; and the scope of the two papers to follow renders unnecessary anything but incidental reference to the causes of changes in rates.