Michael Woodford Boeken

The author was a company man. He'd risen through the ranks of giant Japanese firm Olympus to become CEO. But just weeks into the job in Tokyo he came across allegations of enormous fraud. Yet his every attempt at investigation was blocked. Then he did something Olympus didn't expect. He fought back. This title tells his story.

With the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, any pretense of a connection of the world's currencies to any real commodity has been abandoned. Yet since the 1980s, most central banks have abandoned money-growth targets as practical guidelines for monetary policy as well. How then can pure "fiat" currencies be managed so as to create confidence in the stability of national units of account?Interest and Prices seeks to provide theoretical foundations for a rule-based approach to monetary policy suitable for a world of instant communications and ever more efficient financial markets. In such a world, effective monetary policy requires that central banks construct a conscious and articulate account of what they are doing. Michael Woodford reexamines the foundations of monetary economics, and shows how interest-rate policy can be used to achieve an inflation target in the absence of either commodity backing or control of a monetary aggregate. The book further shows how the tools of modern macroeconomic theory can be used to design an optimal inflation-targeting regime--one that balances stabilization goals with the pursuit of price stability in a way that is grounded in an explicit welfare analysis, and that takes account of the "New Classical" critique of traditional policy evaluation exercises. It thus argues that rule-based policymaking need not mean adherence to a rigid framework unrelated to stabilization objectives for the sake of credibility, while at the same time showing the advantages of rule-based over purely discretionary policymaking.

Michael Woodfords Geschichte liest sich wie die Handlung eines John Grisham Buches und ist doch Realität: vom erfolgreichen CEO des japanischen Megaunternehmens Olympus zum Whistleblower, der schließlich gegen das Unternehmen agierte und dortige betrügerische Machenschaften an die Presse weitergab. In seinem Buch „Enthüllung“ ist diese Geschichte nun nachzulesen. Beginnend mit der E-Mail, die ihn zum ersten Mal auf den vertuschten Skandal aufmerksam machte, über die furchteinflößenden Gerüchte, dass sogar die Yakuza in die Machenschaften von Olympus verwickelt sei und ihn zum Schweigen bringen sollte, bis hin zu seinem mutigen Schritt alles offenzulegen. Das Besondere an Woodfords Buch ist nicht nur die Schilderung seiner eigenen dramatischen Erfahrung, sondern auch, dass er in „Enthüllung“ das Bild einer Unternehmenskultur zeichnet, in der blinde Loyalität gegenüber dem Chef über allem steht, sogar über ethischen und moralischen Prinzipien.