While some people are running to currency exchange booths to buy up dollars and euros, others are storming the stores.

Desperate Russians rushed to buy whatever they could before their money became worthless.

But people have bought their books in the millions, and film deals have followed.

Earlier this year, the price of gold fell considerably in India, prompting people in large numbers to rush to shops to buy the precious metal.

What happened next, of course, was that the dollar strengthened sharply, as investors, desperate for liquidity, fled into US Treasury securities.

It seems clear that the European Central Bank will be forced to buy far greater quantities of eurozone sovereign (junk) bonds.

That may work in the short term, but if sovereign default risks materialize as my research with Carmen Reinhart suggests is likely the ECB will in turn have to be recapitalized.

And the European Central Bank has begun to buy government bonds, including those of Greece, at prices well above those that would prevail in a free market.

Long term interest rates could be pushed significantly lower if the Federal Reserve were to undertake the unprecedented step of mammoth purchases of long term government bonds. But would the Fed take that unprecedented step without a severe domestic crisis?

Long term interest rates could be pushed significantly lower if the Federal Reserve were to undertake the unprecedented step of mammoth purchases of long term government bonds.

To diversify away from US dollar assets while maintaining its effective dollar peg, China started to buy Japanese yen and South Korean won, hurting their competitiveness.

The Kremlin thinks that now is the time to buy assets cheaply, using the current financial crisis to emerge as a powerful global economic player.

On realizing how much money could potentially be made in films, major corporations started buying up the remaining Hollywood studios, saving them from the oblivion which befell RKO in the 50s.

In this scenario, integration could at most take the form of colonization, under which banks from fiscally strong countries use their lower cost of capital to buy up banks in fiscally weak countries.

In retrospect, the Treasury should have identified all such entities and started buying common stock in them whether they liked it or not until the crisis passed.

But now we see Asian companies beginning to acquire valuable US owned economic assets witness India s Tata Group s proposed acquisition of Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford.

When employment and output threaten to decline, the central bank buys up government bonds for immediate cash, thus shortening the duration of the safe assets that investors hold. With fewer safe, money yielding assets in the financial market, the price of safe wealth rises.

When employment and output threaten to decline, the central bank buys up government bonds for immediate cash, thus shortening the duration of the safe assets that investors hold.

Second, trend chasers keep buying because the returns have been so good in the recent past, thus pushing the overvaluation to a height and duration that orthodox economists cannot explain.

If, say, the central bank starts buying long_term bonds from the private sector at below_market interest rates, this should help convince the public that the bank intends to stick to a future low interest_rate policy.

I'll visit a Zara or Hampamp M, or, now that I am in the United Kingdom for the summer, the amazing Primark and snap up items that are cute, effectively disposable, and so shockingly inexpensive that one does a double take.