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Adresseavisen

Adresseavisen (commonly known as Adressa) is a regional newspaper published daily, except Sundays, in Trondheim, Norway. The paper has been in circulation since 1767 and is one of the oldest newspapers in Norway after Norske Intelligenz-Seddeler which was launched in 1763.

Adresseavisen is owned by Polaris Media, in which Schibsted controls 29% of the shares.

History and profile
The newspaper was first published on 3 July 1767 as Kongelig allene privilegerede Trondheims Adresse-Contoirs Efterretninger, making it the oldest Norwegian newspaper still being published. The paper was founded as a classified advertising publication. The name of the newspaper was changed several times before its present name began to be used in 1927. Locally it is often referred to as Adressa. The newspaper is based in Trondheim and covers the areas of Trøndelag and Nordmøre.

Martinus Lind Nissen (1744–1795) was the founder and first editor of Adresseavisen. At his death, Nissen was succeeded by Mathias Conrad Peterson, a French-oriented revolutionary pioneering radical journalism in Norway. Later editors, however, have been more conservative. In Peterson's age the paper was renamed Trondhjemske Tidender (roughly Trondhjem Times) and began to look more like a modern newspaper. Changing names, owners and profile several times during the 19th century, the paper was named Trondhjems Adresseavis in 1890. Its first press picture was published in 1893. During the 1920s, the paper was nearly bankrupted, but it was saved by the new editor, Harald Houge Torp, who held the position until 1969.

Adresseavisen describes itself as conservative and is part of the Adresseavisen Media Group which owns several smaller local newspapers in the Trøndelag region. It also owns and operates a local radio station, Radio-Adressa, and a local TV station, TV-Adressa (prior to 30 January 2006: TVTrøndelag). In addition, the company owns the local newspapers Fosna-Folket, Hitra-Frøya, Levanger-Avisa, Sør-Trøndelag, Trønderbladet and Verdalingen. As of 2006 Schibsted had a share of the paper (31.7%). Stocks in Adresseavisen are traded on the Oslo Stock Exchange.

Adressavisen became the first Norwegian newspaper to use computer technology in 1967. Its website was launched in 1996. Gunnar Flikke was editor-in-chief from 1989 to 2006. Adresseavisen switched from broadsheet to tabloid format on 16 September 2006.

Circulation
Adresseavisen sold 87,000 copies in 2003, 79,789 in 2007 and 61,086 in 2014.

The online newspaper Adressa.no had an average of 155,000 daily readers in 2015.

Notable chief editors

 * Martinus Nissen (1767–1795)
 * Matthias Conrad Peterson (1795–1800)
 * Harald Torp (1927 – 1941, 1945 – 1969)
 * Jacob Skylstad (1941–1945)
 * Andreas Norland (1975–1977)
 * Kjell Einar Amdahl (1977–1996)
 * Gunnar Flikke (1989–2006)
 * Arne Blix (2007–2015)
 * Tor Olav Mørseth (2015–2017)
 * Kirsti Husby (2017 – incumbent)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Adresseavisen


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Treaty of Campo Formio

The Treaty of Campo Formio (today Campoformido) was signed on 17 October 1797 (26 Vendémiaire VI) by Napoleon Bonaparte and Count Philipp von Cobenzl as representatives of the French Republic and the Austrian monarchy, respectively. The treaty followed the armistice of Leoben (18 April 1797), which had been forced on the Habsburgs by Napoleon's victorious campaign in Italy. It ended the War of the First Coalition and left Great Britain fighting alone against revolutionary France.

The treaty's public articles concerned only France and Austria and called for a Congress of Rastatt to be held to negotiate a final peace for the Holy Roman Empire. In the treaty's secret articles, Austria as the personal state of the Emperor promised to work with France to certain ends at the congress. Among other provisions, the treaty meant the definitive end to the ancient Republic of Venice, which was disbanded and partitioned by the French and the Austrians.

The congress failed to achieve peace, and by early 1799 France and Austria were at war again. The new war, the War of the Second Coalition, ended with the Peace of Lunéville, a peace for the whole empire, in 1801.

Location
Campo Formio, now called Campoformido, is a village west of Udine in historical Friuli region in north-eastern Italy, in the middle between Austrian headquarters in Udine and Bonaparte's residence. The French commander resided at Villa Manin, the country mansion of Ludovico Manin, the last Doge of Venice, near Codroipo. The treaty was signed in an old house in the main square of the village, property of Bertrando Del Torre, a local merchant.

On 18 January 1798, Austrian troops entered Venice, and three days later, they held an official reception at the Doge's Palace, where Ludovico Manin was a guest of honour.

Terms
Beyond the usual clauses of "firm and inviolable peace", the treaty transferred a number of Austrian territories into French hands. Lands ceded included the Austrian Netherlands (most of modern Belgium). Territories of the Republic of Venice were divided between the two states: certain islands in the Mediterranean, including Corfu and other Venetian possessions in the Ionian Sea were turned over to the French.

The city of Venice with Terraferma (Venetian mainland), Venetian Istria, Venetian Dalmatia and the Bay of Kotor region were turned over to the Habsburg emperor. Austria recognized the Cisalpine Republic and the newly created Ligurian Republic, formed of Savoyard state and Genoese territories, as independent powers.

The Italian states formally ceased to owe fealty to the Holy Roman emperor, ending the formal existence of the Kingdom of Italy, which, as a personal holding of the emperor, had existed de jure but not de facto since at least the 14th century.

The treaty contained secret clauses signed by Napoleon and representatives of the Holy Roman emperor, which divided up certain other territories, and agreed to the extension of the borders of France up to the Rhine, the Nette, and the Roer. Free French navigation was guaranteed on the Rhine, the Meuse and the Moselle. The French Republic had been expanded into areas that had never before been under French control.

The treaty was composed and signed after five months of negotiations. It was basically what had been agreed earlier at the Treaty of Leoben in April 1797, but the negotiations had been spun out by both parties for a number of reasons. During the negotiating period the French had to crush a royalist coup in September. That was used as a cause for the arrest and deportation of royalist and moderate deputies in the Directory.

Napoleon's biographer, Felix Markham, wrote "the partition of Venice was not only a moral blot on the peace settlement but left Austria a foothold in Italy, which could only lead to further war." In fact, the Peace of Campo Formio, though it reshaped the map of Europe and marked a major step in Napoleon's fame, was only a respite. One consequence was the Peasants' War, which erupted in the Southern Netherlands in 1798 following the French introduction of conscription.

As a result of the treaty, Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette, a prisoner from the French Revolution, was released from Austrian captivity.

By passing Venetian possessions in Greece, such as the Ionian Islands, to French rule, the treaty had an effect on later Greek history neither intended nor expected at the time.

title: Treaty of Campo Formio


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Exchange rate

In finance, an exchange rate is the rate at which one currency will be exchanged for another currency. Currencies are most commonly national currencies, but may be sub-national as in the case of Hong Kong or supra-national as in the case of the euro.

The exchange rate is also regarded as the value of one country's currency in relation to another currency. For example, an interbank exchange rate of 141 Japanese yen to the United States dollar means that ¥141 will be exchanged for US$1 or that US$1 will be exchanged for ¥141. In this case it is said that the price of a dollar in relation to yen is ¥141, or equivalently that the price of a yen in relation to dollars is $1/141.

Each country determines the exchange rate regime that will apply to its currency. For example, a currency may be floating, pegged (fixed), or a hybrid. Governments can impose certain limits and controls on exchange rates. Countries can also have a strong or weak currency. There is no agreement in the economic literature on the optimal national exchange rate policy (unlike on the subject of trade where free trade is considered optimal). Rather, national exchange rate regimes reflect political considerations.

In floating exchange rate regimes, exchange rates are determined in the foreign exchange market, which is open to a wide range of different types of buyers and sellers, and where currency trading is continuous: 24 hours a day except weekends (i.e. trading from 20:15 GMT on Sunday until 22:00 GMT Friday). The spot exchange rate is the current exchange rate, while the forward exchange rate is an exchange rate that is quoted and traded today but for delivery and payment on a specific future date.

In the retail currency exchange market, different buying and selling rates will be quoted by money dealers. Most trades are to or from the local currency. The buying rate is the rate at which money dealers will buy foreign currency, and the selling rate is the rate at which they will sell that currency. The quoted rates will incorporate an allowance for a dealer's margin (or profit) in trading, or else the margin may be recovered in the form of a commission or in some other way. Different rates may also be quoted for cash, a documentary transaction or for electronic transfers. The higher rate on documentary transactions has been justified as compensating for the additional time and cost of clearing the document. On the other hand, cash is available for resale immediately, but incurs security, storage, and transportation costs, and the cost of tying up capital in a stock of banknotes (bills).

The retail exchange market
Currency for international travel and cross-border payments is predominantly purchased from banks, foreign exchange brokerages and various forms of bureaux de change. These retail outlets source currency from the interbank markets, which are valued by the Bank for International Settlements at US$5.3 trillion per day. The purchase is made at the spot contract rate. Retail customers will be charged, in the form of commission or otherwise, to cover the provider's costs and generate a profit. One form of charge is the use of an exchange rate that is less favourable than the wholesale spot rate. The difference between retail buying and selling prices is referred to as the bid–ask spread.

Retail foreign exchange trading
Retail foreign exchange trading is a small segment of the larger foreign exchange market where individuals speculate on the exchange rate between different currencies. This segment has developed with the advent of dedicated electronic trading platforms and the internet, which allows individuals to access the global currency markets. As of 2016, it was reported that retail foreign exchange trading represented 5.5% of the whole foreign exchange market ($282 billion in daily trading turnover).

Quotations
There is a market convention that rules the notation used to communicate the fixed and variable currencies in a quotation. For example, in a conversion from EUR to AUD, EUR is the fixed currency, AUD is the variable currency and the exchange rate indicates how many Australian dollars would be paid or received for 1 euro.

In some areas of Europe and in the retail market in the United Kingdom, EUR and GBP are reversed so that GBP is quoted as the fixed currency to the euro. In order to determine which is the fixed currency when neither currency is on the above list (i.e. both are "other"), market convention is to use the fixed currency which gives an exchange rate greater than 1.000. This reduces rounding issues and the need to use excessive numbers of decimal places. There are some exceptions to this rule: for example, the Japanese often quote their currency as the base to other currencies.

Quotation using a country's home currency as the price currency is known as direct quotation or price quotation (from that country's perspective) For example, €0.8989 = US$1.00 in the Eurozone and is used in most countries.

Quotation using a country's home currency as the unit currency (for example, US$1.11 = €1.00 in the Eurozone) is known as indirect quotation or quantity quotation and is used in British newspapers; it is also common in Australia, New Zealand and the Eurozone.

Using direct quotation, if the home currency is strengthening (that is, appreciating, or becoming more valuable) then the exchange rate number decreases. Conversely, if the foreign currency is strengthening and the home currency is depreciating, the exchange rate number increases.

Market convention from the early 1980s to 2006 was that most currency pairs were quoted to four decimal places for spot transactions and up to six decimal places for forward outrights or swaps. (The fourth decimal place is usually referred to as a "pip"). An exception to this was exchange rates with a value of less than 1.000 which were usually quoted to five or six decimal places. Although there is no fixed rule, exchange rates numerically greater than around 20 were usually quoted to three decimal places and exchange rates greater than 80 were quoted to two decimal places. Currencies over 5000 were usually quoted with no decimal places (for example, the former Turkish Lira). e.g. (GBPOMR : 0.765432 - : 1.4436 - EURJPY : 165.29). In other words, quotes are given with five digits. Where rates are below 1, quotes frequently include five decimal places.

In 2005, Barclays Capital broke with convention by quoting spot exchange rates with five or six decimal places on their electronic dealing platform. The contraction of spreads (the difference between the bid and ask rates) arguably necessitated finer pricing and gave the banks the ability to try to win transactions on multibank trading platforms where all banks may otherwise have been quoting the same price. A number of other banks have since followed this system.

Exchange rate regime
Countries are free to choose which type of exchange rate regime they will apply to their currency. The main types of exchange rate regimes are: free-floating, pegged (fixed), or a hybrid.

In free-floating regimes, exchange rates are allowed to vary against each other according to the market forces of supply and demand. Exchange rates for such currencies are likely to change almost constantly as quoted on financial markets, mainly by banks, around the world.

A movable or adjustable peg system is a system of fixed exchange rates, but with a provision for the revaluation (usually devaluation) of a currency. For example, between 1994 and 2005, the Chinese yuan renminbi (RMB) was pegged to the United States dollar at RMB 8.2768 to $1. China was not the only country to do this; from the end of World War II until 1967, Western European countries all maintained fixed exchange rates with the US dollar based on the Bretton Woods system. But that system had to be abandoned in favor of floating, market-based regimes due to market pressures and speculation, according to President Richard M. Nixon in a speech on August 15, 1971, in what is known as the Nixon Shock.

Still, some governments strive to keep their currency within a narrow range. As a result, currencies become over-valued or under-valued, leading to excessive trade deficits or surpluses.

Exchange rate classification

 * From the perspective of bank foreign exchange trading:
 * Buying rate: Also known as the purchase price, it is the price used by the foreign exchange bank to buy foreign currency from the customer. In general, the exchange rate where the foreign currency is converted to a smaller number of domestic currencies is the buying rate, which indicates how much the country's currency is required to buy a certain amount of foreign exchange.
 * Selling rate: Also known as the foreign exchange selling price, it refers to the exchange rate used by the bank to sell foreign exchange to customers. It indicates how much the country's currency needs to be recovered if the bank sells a certain amount of foreign exchange.
 * Middle rate: The average of the bid price and the ask price. Commonly used in newspapers, magazines or economic analysis.

 * According to the length of delivery after foreign exchange transactions:
 * Spot exchange rate: Refers to the exchange rate of spot foreign exchange transactions. That is, after the foreign exchange transaction is completed, the exchange rate in Delivery within two working days. The exchange rate that is generally listed on the foreign exchange market is generally referred to as the spot exchange rate unless it specifically indicates the forward exchange rate.
 * Forward exchange rate: To be delivered in a certain period of time in the future, but beforehand, the buyer and the seller will enter into a contract to reach an agreement. When the delivery date is reached, both parties to the agreement will deliver the transaction at the exchange rate and amount of the reservation. Forward foreign exchange trading is an appointment-based transaction, which is due to the different time the foreign exchange purchaser needs for foreign exchange funds and the introduction of foreign exchange risk. The forward exchange rate is based on the spot exchange rate, which is represented by the "premium", "discount", and "parity" of the spot exchange rate.

 * According to the method of setting the exchange rate:
 * Basic rate: Usually choose a key convertible currency that is the most commonly used in international economic transactions and accounts for the largest proportion of foreign exchange reserves. Compare it with the currency of the country and set the exchange rate. This exchange rate is the basic exchange rate. The key currency generally refers to a world currency, which is widely used for pricing, settlement, reserve currency, freely convertible, and internationally accepted currency.
 * Cross rate: After the basic exchange rate is worked out, the exchange rate of the local currency against other foreign currencies can be calculated through the basic exchange rate. The resulting exchange rate is the cross exchange rate.

Other classifications

 * According to the payment method in foreign exchange transactions:

 * Telegraphic exchange rate
 * Mail transfer rate
 * Demand draft rate

 * According to the level of foreign exchange controls:

 * Official rate: The official exchange rate is the rate of exchange announced by a country's foreign exchange administration. Usually used by countries with strict foreign exchange controls.
 * Market rate: The market exchange rate refers to the real exchange rate for trading foreign exchange in the free market. It fluctuates with changes in foreign exchange supply and demand conditions.

 * According to the international exchange rate regime:

 * Fixed exchange rate: It means that the exchange rate between a country's currency and another country's currency is basically fixed, and the fluctuation of exchange rate is very small.
 * Floating exchange rate: It means that the monetary authorities of a country do not stipulate the official exchange rate of the country's currency against other currencies, nor does it have any upper or lower limit of exchange rate fluctuations. The local currency is determined by the supply and demand relationship of the foreign exchange market, and it is free to rise and fall.

 * Whether inflation is included:

 * Nominal exchange rate: an exchange rate that is officially announced or marketed which does not consider inflation.
 * Real exchange rate: The nominal exchange rate eliminating inflation

Factors affecting the change of exchange rate

 * 1) Balance of payments: When a country has a large international balance of payments deficit or trade deficit, it means that its foreign exchange earnings are less than foreign exchange expenditures and its demand for foreign exchange exceeds its supply, so its foreign exchange rate rises, and its currency depreciates.
 * 2) Interest rate level: Interest rates are the cost and profit of borrowing capital. When a country raises its interest rate or its domestic interest rate is higher than the foreign interest rate, it will cause capital inflow, thereby increasing the demand for domestic currency, allowing the currency to appreciate and the foreign exchange depreciate.
 * 3) Inflation factor: The inflation rate of a country rises, the purchasing power of money declines, the paper currency depreciates internally, and then the foreign currency appreciates. If both countries have inflation, the currencies of countries with high inflation will depreciate against those with low inflation. The latter is a relative revaluation of the former.
 * 4) Fiscal and monetary policy: Although the influence of monetary policy on the exchange rate changes of a country's government is indirect, it is also very important. In general, the huge fiscal revenue and expenditure deficit caused by expansionary fiscal and monetary policies and inflation will devalue the domestic currency. The tightening fiscal and monetary policies will reduce fiscal expenditures, stabilize the currency, and increase the value of the domestic currency.
 * 5) Speculation: If speculators expect a certain currency to appreciate, they will buy a large amount of that currency, which will cause the exchange rate of that currency to rise. Conversely, if speculators expect a certain currency to depreciate, they will sell off a large amount of the currency, resulting in speculation. The currency exchange rate immediately fall. Speculation is an important factor in the short-term fluctuations in the exchange rate of the foreign exchange market.
 * 6) Government market intervention: When exchange rate fluctuations in the foreign exchange market adversely affect a country's economy, trade, or the government needs to achieve certain policy goals through exchange rate adjustments, monetary authorities can participate in currency trading, buying or selling local or foreign currencies in large quantities in the market. The foreign exchange supply and demand has caused the exchange rate to change.
 * 7) Economic strength of a country: In general, high economic growth rates are not conducive to the local currency's performance in the foreign exchange market in the short term, but in the long run, they strongly support the strong momentum of the local currency.

Emerging markets
Research on target zones has mainly concentrated on the benefit of stability of exchange rates for industrial countries, but some studies have argued that volatile bilateral exchange rates between industrial countries are in part responsible for financial crisis in emerging markets. According to this view the ability of emerging market economies to compete is weakened because many of the currencies are tied to the US dollar in various fashions either implicitly or explicitly, so fluctuations such as the appreciation of the US dollar to the yen or deutsche Mark have contributed to destabilizing shocks. Most of these countries are net debtors whose debt is denominated in one of the G3 currencies.

In September 2019 Argentina restricted the ability to buy US dollars. Mauricio Macri in 2015 campaigned on a promise to lift restrictions put in place by the left-wing government including the capital controls which have been used in Argentina to manage economic instability. When inflation rose above 20 percent transactions denominated in dollars became commonplace as Argentinians moved away from using the peso. In 2011 the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner restricted the purchase of dollars leading to a rise in black market dollar purchases. The controls were rolled back after Macri took office and Argentina issued dollar denominated bonds, but when various factors led to a loss in the value of the peso relative to the dollar leading to the restoration of capital controls to prevent additional depreciation amidst peso selloffs.

Fluctuations in exchange rates
A market-based exchange rate will change whenever the values of either of the two component currencies change. A currency becomes more valuable whenever demand for it is greater than the available supply. It will become less valuable whenever demand is less than available supply (this does not mean people no longer want money, it just means they prefer holding their wealth in some other form, possibly another currency).

Increased demand for a currency can be due to either an increased transaction demand for money or an increased speculative demand for money. The transaction demand is highly correlated to a country's level of business activity, gross domestic product (GDP), and employment levels. The more people that are unemployed, the less the public as a whole will spend on goods and services. Central banks typically have little difficulty adjusting the available money supply to accommodate changes in the demand for money due to business transactions.

Speculative demand is much harder for central banks to accommodate, which they influence by adjusting interest rates. A speculator may buy a currency if the return (that is the interest rate) is high enough. In general, the higher a country's interest rates, the greater will be the demand for that currency. It has been argued that such speculation can undermine real economic growth, in particular since large currency speculators may deliberately create downward pressure on a currency by shorting in order to force that central bank to buy their own currency to keep it stable. (When that happens, the speculator can buy the currency back after it depreciates, close out their position, and thereby make a profit.)

For carrier companies shipping goods from one nation to another, exchange rates can often impact them severely. Therefore, most carriers have a CAF charge to account for these fluctuations.

Purchasing power of currency
The real exchange rate (RER) is the purchasing power of a currency relative to another at current exchange rates and prices. It is the ratio of the number of units of a given country's currency necessary to buy a market basket of goods in the other country, after acquiring the other country's currency in the foreign exchange market, to the number of units of the given country's currency that would be necessary to buy that market basket directly in the given country. There are various ways to measure RER.

Thus the real exchange rate is the exchange rate times the relative prices of a market basket of goods in the two countries. For example, the purchasing power of the US dollar relative to that of the euro is the dollar price of a euro (dollars per euro) times the euro price of one unit of the market basket (euros/goods unit) divided by the dollar price of the market basket (dollars per goods unit), and hence is dimensionless. This is the exchange rate (expressed as dollars per euro) times the relative price of the two currencies in terms of their ability to purchase units of the market basket (euros per goods unit divided by dollars per goods unit). If all goods were freely tradable, and foreign and domestic residents purchased identical baskets of goods, purchasing power parity (PPP) would hold for the exchange rate and GDP deflators (price levels) of the two countries, and the real exchange rate would always equal 1.

The rate of change of the real exchange rate over time for the euro versus the dollar equals the rate of appreciation of the euro (the positive or negative percentage rate of change of the dollars-per-euro exchange rate) plus the inflation rate of the euro minus the inflation rate of the dollar.

Real exchange rate equilibrium and misalignment
The Real Exchange Rate (RER) represents the nominal exchange rate adjusted by the relative price of domestic and foreign goods and services, thus reflecting the competitiveness of a country with respect to the rest of the world. More in detail, an appreciation of the currency or a high level of domestic inflation reduces the RER, thus reducing the country's competitiveness and lowering the Current Account (CA). On the other hand, a currency depreciation generates an opposite effect, improving the country's CA.

There is evidence that the RER generally reaches a steady level in the long-term, and that this process is faster in small open economies characterized by fixed exchange rates. Any substantial and persistent RER deviation from its long-run equilibrium level, the so-called RER misalignment, has shown to produce negative impacts on a country's balance of payments. An overvalued RER means that the current RER is above its equilibrium value, whereas an undervalued RER indicates the contrary. Specifically, a prolonged RER overvaluation is widely considered as an early sign of an upcoming crisis, due to the fact that the country becomes vulnerable to both speculative attacks and currency crisis, as happened in Thailand during the 1997 Asian financial crisis. On the other side, a protracted RER undervaluation usually generates pressure on domestic prices, changing the consumers' consumption incentives and, so, misallocating resources between tradable and non-tradable sectors.

Given that RER misalignment and, in particular overvaluation, can undermine the country's export-oriented development strategy, the equilibrium RER measurement is crucial for policymakers. Unfortunately, this variable cannot be observed. The most common method in order to estimate the equilibrium RER is the universally accepted Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) theory, according to which the RER equilibrium level is assumed to remain constant over time. Nevertheless, the equilibrium RER is not a fixed value as it follows the trend of key economic fundamentals, such as different monetary and fiscal policies or asymmetrical shocks between the home country and abroad. Consequently, the PPP doctrine has been largely debated during the years, given that it may signal a natural RER movement towards its new equilibrium as a RER misalignment.

Starting from the 1980s, in order to overcome the limitations of this approach, many researchers tried to find some alternative equilibrium RER measures. Two of the most popular approaches in the economic literature are the Fundamental Equilibrium Exchange Rate (FEER), developed by Williamson (1994), and the Behavioural Equilibrium Exchange Rate (BEER), initially estimated by Clark and MacDonald (1998). The FEER focuses on long-run determinants of the RER, rather than on short-term cyclical and speculative forces. It represents a RER consistent with macroeconomic balance, characterized by the achievement of internal and external balances at the same time. Internal balance is reached when the level of output is in line with both full employment of all available factors of production, and a low and stable rate of inflation. On the other hand, external balance holds when actual and future CA balances are compatible with long-term sustainable net capital flows. Nevertheless, the FEER is viewed as a normative measure of the RER since it is based on some "ideal" economic conditions related to internal and external balances. Particularly, since the sustainable CA position is defined as an exogenous value, this approach has been broadly questioned over time. By contrast, the BEER entails an econometric analysis of the RER behaviour, considering significant RER deviations from its PPP equilibrium level as a consequence of changes in key economic fundamentals. According to this method, the BEER is the RER that results when all the economic fundamentals are at their equilibrium values. Therefore, the total RER misalignment is given by the extent to which economic fundamentals differ from their long-run sustainable levels. In short, the BEER is a more general approach than the FEER, since it is not limited to the long-term perspective, being able to explain RER cyclical movements.

Bilateral vs. effective exchange rate
Bilateral exchange rate involves a currency pair, while an effective exchange rate is a weighted average of a basket of foreign currencies, and it can be viewed as an overall measure of the country's external competitiveness. A nominal effective exchange rate (NEER) is weighted with the inverse of the asymptotic trade weights. A real effective exchange rate (REER) adjusts NEER by appropriate foreign price level and deflates by the home country price level. Compared to NEER, a GDP weighted effective exchange rate might be more appropriate considering the global investment phenomenon.

Parallel exchange rate
In many countries there is a distinction between the official exchange rate for permitted transactions within the country, and a parallel exchange rate (or black market, grey, unregulated, unofficial, etc. exchange rate) that responds to excess demand for foreign currency at the official exchange rate. The degree by which the parallel exchange rate exceeds the official exchange rate is known as the parallel premium. Unofficial transactions of this nature may be illegal.

Uncovered interest rate parity model
Uncovered interest rate parity (UIRP) states that an appreciation or depreciation of one currency against another currency might be neutralized by a change in the interest rate differential. If US interest rates increase while Japanese interest rates remain unchanged then the US dollar should depreciate against the Japanese yen by an amount that prevents arbitrage (in reality the opposite, appreciation, quite frequently happens in the short-term, as explained below). The future exchange rate is reflected into the forward exchange rate stated today. In our example, the forward exchange rate of the dollar is said to be at a discount because it buys fewer Japanese yen in the forward rate than it does in the spot rate. The yen is said to be at a premium.

UIRP showed no proof of working after the 1990s. Contrary to the theory, currencies with high interest rates characteristically appreciated rather than depreciated on the reward of the containment of inflation and a higher-yielding currency.

Balance of payments model
The balance of payments model holds that foreign exchange rates are at an equilibrium level if they produce a stable Current account (balance of payments)current account balance. A nation with a trade deficit will experience a reduction in its foreign exchange reserves, which ultimately lowers (depreciates) the value of its currency. A cheaper (undervalued) currency renders the nation's goods (exports) more affordable in the global market while making imports more expensive. After an intermediate period, imports will be forced down and exports to rise, thus stabilizing the trade balance and bring the currency towards equilibrium.

Like purchasing power parity, the balance of payments model focuses largely on tradeable goods and services, ignoring the increasing role of global capital flows. In other words, money is not only chasing goods and services, but to a larger extent, financial assets such as stocks and bonds. Their flows go into the capital account item of the balance of payments, thus balancing the deficit in the current account. The increase in capital flows has given rise to the asset market model effectively.

Asset market model
The increasing volume of trading of financial assets (stocks and bonds) has required a rethink of its impact on exchange rates. Economic variables such as economic growth, inflation and productivity are no longer the only drivers of currency movements. The proportion of foreign exchange transactions stemming from cross border-trading of financial assets has dwarfed the extent of currency transactions generated from trading in goods and services.

The asset market approach views currencies as asset prices traded in an efficient financial market. Consequently, currencies are increasingly demonstrating a strong correlation with other markets, particularly equities.

Like the stock exchange, money can be made (or lost) on trading by investors and speculators in the foreign exchange market. Currencies can be traded at spot and foreign exchange options markets. The spot market represents current exchange rates, whereas options are derivatives of exchange rates.

Manipulation of exchange rates
A country may gain an advantage in international trade if it controls the market for its currency to keep its value low, typically by the national central bank engaging in open market operations in the foreign exchange market, or through preventing the exchange of foreign currency for domestic notes. The People's Republic of China has been periodically accused of exchange rate manipulation, notably by Donald Trump during his successful campaign for the US presidency.

Other nations, including Iceland, Japan, Brazil, and so on have had a policy of maintaining a low value of their currencies in the hope of reducing the cost of exports and thus bolstering their economies. A lower exchange rate lowers the price of a country's goods for consumers in other countries, but raises the price of imported goods and services for consumers in the low value currency country.

This practice is known as "modern mercantilism", namely lowering the exchange rate below its real and fair price, to increase the competitiveness of trade and exports, and encourage economic growth. Rodrik said that this practice was quite effective in encouraging economic growth in developing countries but at the expense of other deficit countries.

In general, exporters of goods and services will prefer a lower value for their currencies, while importers will prefer a higher value.

title: Exchange rate


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Basel-Stadt

Basel-Stadt or Basel-City (Kanton; Chantun Basilea-Citad; Canton de Bâle-Ville; Canton Basilea Città) is one of the 26 cantons forming the Swiss Confederation. It is composed of three municipalities with Basel as the capital. It is traditionally considered a "half-canton", the other half being Basel-Landschaft, its rural counterpart.

Basel-Stadt is one of the northernmost and lowest cantons of Switzerland, and the smallest by area. The canton lies on both sides of the Rhine and is very densely populated. The largest municipality is Basel, followed by Riehen and Bettingen. The only canton sharing borders with Basel-Stadt is Basel-Landschaft to the south. To the north of Basel-Stadt are France and Germany, with the tripoint being in the middle of the Rhine.

Together with Basel-Landschaft, Basel-Stadt was part of the Canton of Basel, who joined the Old Swiss Confederacy in 1501. Political quarrels and armed conflict led to the partition of the canton in 1833.

Basel-Stadt is Switzerland's seventh-largest economic centre and has the highest GDP per capita in the country, ahead of the cantons of Zug and Geneva (in 2018). In terms of value, over 94% of Basel City's goods exports are in the chemical and pharmaceutical sectors. With production facilities located in the neighbouring Schweizerhalle, Basel accounts for 20% of Swiss exports.

History
The canton of Basel-Stadt was created when the historic canton of Basel was divided in 1833, following political quarrels and armed conflict in the canton. Some of these were concerned with the rights of the population in the agricultural areas. They ultimately led to the separation of the canton of Basel-Landschaft from the city of Basel on 26 August 1833. Since then, there has been a movement for reunification. This movement gained momentum after 1900 when many parts of Basel-Landschaft became industrialized. The two half-cantons agreed in principle to reunite, but in 1969, and again in September 2014, the people of Basel-Landschaft voted against this proposal in favour of retaining their independence.

Geography
The canton of Basel-Stadt is located in the north of Switzerland. Basel is located at the so-called 'knee' of the Rhine, at the point where from the west the little Birsig joins the Rhine from the left, and where the Rhine itself switches from flowing in a westerly direction to a northerly flow. It is the second flattest canton, with a height difference of only 277 metres between the Rhine and St. Chrischona.

Bettingen, Riehen and a part of Basel city lie on the east bank of the Rhine, bordered on three sides by the German state of Baden-Württemberg. The rest of the canton lies on the west bank of the Rhine.

The area of the canton is 37 km2, making Basel-Stadt the smallest canton in Switzerland. It is sometimes likened to a city-state.

Basel-Stadt borders Basel-Landschaft to the south, the only adjacent canton. To the north, it borders Germany (Baden-Württemberg) and France (Grand Est). The three countries meet in the middle of the Rhine, about 150 metres north of the Dreiländereck monument.

Municipalities
There are three municipalities:

Politics
The canton of Basel-Stadt shares its political structure and administration with the municipality of Basel.

Basel-Stadt is a half-canton. This means that the canton only sends one representative to the Council of States. The capital of the canton Basel-Stadt is the city of Basel. The present constitution of the canton dates from 1889. Since 1966 women were allowed to vote in Canton, as the first German speaking canton.

The parliament of the canton is the Grand Council, which has 100 members, who are elected for four years at a time. There are eight different political parties represented in the parliament; the largest party is the Social Democratic Party, with 32 seats.

The executive of the canton (Regierungsrat) is made up of seven members.

The canton has a sister state status with Massachusetts.

Federal election results

 * FDP before 2009, FDP.The Liberals after 2009
 * "*" indicates that the party was not on the ballot in this canton.
 * Part of the FGA
 * Part of the POCH
 * Part of the GPS

Historical population
The historical population is given in the following table: The population of the canton (as of ) is. , the population included 56,106 foreigners, or about 30.29% of the total population. The population is nearly evenly split between Roman Catholics (25%) and Protestants (27%). About 10% of the population was classed as adhering to another religion, while 36% did not belong to an organized religion.

Economy
The economic area of Basel is considered to be the second largest economic centre in Switzerland, after Zurich. The chemical industry and the pharmaceutical industry are of greatest significance in the canton. There are a number of multinationals in the city of Basel, attracting workers from both cantons of Basel and the areas across the border in France and Germany. Banking and finance are important as is the service sector in general. Small and middle-sized businesses employ a significant number of people, both in the city as the two municipalities. The canton is also known for its banking sector, and for being the worldwide seat of the Bank for International Settlements.

Economically, the neighbouring lands in Germany and France are not separated from the area of the canton of Basel-Stadt. Good transport links across the border, as well as supportive local governments, facilitate this link.

The fact that three nation-states come together in one spot near Basel (Dreiländereck) helps attract tourists. The site is clearly identified and a popular destination for primary school classes. The carnival attracts a large number of people from across Switzerland and the neighbouring countries.

In 2014, there were 104 workers in Basel-Stadt who worked in the primary sector (the total for all of Switzerland is 3.3%). In the same year the secondary sector employed 36,441 or about 19.0% of the total workforce. Of those in the secondary sector, nearly half of the workers were involved in the production of pharmaceutical products. The tertiary sector employed 154,896 or about 80.9% of the total, which is slightly higher than 74.9% nationwide. Of those in the tertiary sector, health care, education and retail sales made up about a quarter. Some of the other major tertiary fields included job placement (5.1%), management and business consulting (4.1%), public administration (3.9%), architectural and engineering offices (3.7%) and financial services (3.5%).

Transport
There is an international airport at Basel-Mulhouse, actually located 4 km inside French territory but with customs-free access from the city. The canton is well connected by both trains and motorways to the rest of Switzerland and the neighbouring areas in France and Germany.

Basel is a major railway station of Switzerland, connected to Paris and Berlin with direct fast trains.

There is a port at Basel for ships on the Rhine. This port is of great significance to landlocked Switzerland, as it offers the country's only direct connection to the sea. The port benefits from good connections to both rail and road.

Culture
The Carnival of Basel (Basler Fasnacht) is a major cultural event in the year. The carnival is one of the biggest in Switzerland and attracts large crowds, despite the fact that many of its central traditions are played out in the early morning starting at 4am (Morgestraich) and followed by a continuous run of festivities for 72 hours.

The Autumn Fair in Basel (Basler Herbstmesse) is the biggest in Switzerland.

The canton of Basel is renowned for two of its biscuits. The Basler Läckerli is a hard biscuit made of honey, almonds, candied peel and Kirsch, and is enjoyed as a speciality all year round. The Basler Brunsli is made of almonds and generally enjoyed at Christmas all around Switzerland.

The Basel Messe convention center is the location of several international events. The largest are Art Basel, an art show for modern and contemporary works, and BaselWorld, a major watch and jewellery show.

Famous cultural ambassadors of Basel are the Top Secret Drum Corps and the Basel Boys Choir.

title: Basel-Stadt


text:
Buttigliera Alta

Buttigliera Alta is a town and comune  in the Metropolitan City of Turin about 25 km from Turin in the Susa valley in Piedmont, northern Italy. It is not far to Avigliana, of which it once was a part.

History
It first became an autonomous fief in 1619 when Giovanni Carron received the fiefs of Buttigliera, Uriola, and Case Nicola - as well as the title of Count - from Duke Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy.

From that point in time the history of Buttigliera was intimately tied with the history of the Carron family. The last member of the family, Clementina Carron, died in April 1912.

In the 20th century, the FIAT group established one of its metallurgical factories in Ferriera, a frazione of Buttigliera Alta.

Main sights

 * The nearby Sacra di San Michele. It is located at the entrance to the Susa Valley.
 * The preceptory of Sant'Antonio di Ranverso.

Twin towns

 * 🇫🇷 Jougne, France

title: Buttigliera Alta


text:
SAR

SAR or Sar may refer to:

Places

 * Sar (river), Galicia, Spain
 * Sar, Bahrain, a residential district
 * Sar, Iran (disambiguation), several places in Iran
 * Sar, Tibet, Tibet Autonomous Region of China
 * Šar Mountains, in southeastern Europe
 * Syrian Arab Republic, sometimes abbreviated as SAR
 * Special administrative regions of China

Business and finance

 * Parabolic SAR (stop and reverse), a method of technical stock analysis
 * Saudi riyal, currency code SAR
 * Stock appreciation right, an employee reward

Computing

 * Segmentation and reassembly, in data networks
 * Service Archive or SAR, a file format related to JAR
 * Shift Arithmetically Right (SAR), an x86 instruction
 * Storage Aspect Ratio of a digital image
 * sar (Unix), or system activity report, a Unix/Linux performance report utility

Law enforcement

 * Search and rescue
 * Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, US
 * Suspicious activity report, by a financial institution to an authority

Medicine, psychology, and biology

 * Scaffold/matrix attachment region or scaffold-attachment region, DNA sequences
 * Sexual Attitude Reassessment
 * Specific absorption rate, of RF energy by the human body
 * SAR supergroup, a clade within eukaryotes
 * Structure–activity relationship, of biological effect of a molecule
 * Systemic acquired resistance, of a plant to a pathogen

Science and technology

 * Sar (astronomy), 9 years 5 days, a period separating eclipses
 * SAR 21, Singapore Assault Rifle – 21st century
 * SAR-87 (Sterling SAR-87), 1980s military assault rifle
 * Sodium adsorption ratio, an irrigation water quality parameter
 * Spent Acid Regeneration of sulfuric acid
 * Submarine Advanced Reactor program of USS Triton
 * Successive Approximation Register of a successive-approximation ADC
 * Synthetic-aperture radar, imaging radar
 * IPCC Second Assessment Report
 * Semi-automatic rifle

Organizations

 * SAR Academy, yeshiva in Riverdale, New York, US
 * SAR High School, the high school of SAR Academy
 * SAR Records, an American record label
 * Scholars at Risk, a network supporting academic freedom
 * School for Advanced Research in anthropology and related fields, Santa Fe, New Mexico, US
 * Sigma Alpha Rho, a high school fraternity, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US
 * Society for Artistic Research
 * Sons of the American Revolution, US organisation

Railways

 * Saudi Arabia Railways, national railway company of Saudi Arabia
 * Savage Alberta Railway, Alberta, Canada, reporting mark
 * South Australian Railways, 1854–1978
 * South African Railways, now part of Transnet Freight Rail

Military

 * Sandfontein Artillery Regiment, an artillery regiment of the South African Army
 * State Artillery Regiment, an artillery regiment of the South African Army

Other uses

 * Sar (surname)
 * Sar, an uthra (angel) in Mandaeism
 * Sar language, a Bongo–Bagirmi language of southern Chad
 * Sample of Anonymised Records, based on the UK population census
 * Special administrative region, territorial entity designation
 * Student Aid Report, sent to applicants of U.S. federal financial aid for college
 * Subject access request, in data protection law
 * Super Animal Royale, a 2021 video game developed by Pixile Studios

title: SAR


text:
Talk:Historical capitals of China

Mukden
What about Mukden? olivier 12:44 Feb 7, 2003 (UTC)
 * Have Mukden/Shenyang ever been the capital, other than being the capital of Qing before entering Zhongyuan? — Instantnood 09:37, May 11, 2005 (UTC)

Dadu / Khanbaliq
What is the Mongolian name for Beijing during the Yuan/Mongolian Empire? --Kaihsu Tai 18:28, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC) ?? or Khanbalik Khanbaliq was the Mongol name.

"Peking"
Note that "Peking" does not appear in any form on this list. Wetman 20:24, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC) The term Peking is actually an old Romanization of Beijing. The term Peking was used when the Postal system was used for the Romanization of Chinese words, while Beijing is the modern Pinyin Romanization. See Chinese has own writing system, which consists of multiple Chinese characters that have to have their pronounciation memorized. The thing though is that, at least the English version of, Wikipedia is    primarily written in the Latin alphabet, so we need to use  Romanization to convert Chinese characters, which are also used to write names, to Latin letters. Romanization is the process of converting words not written in Latin letters to the Latin alphabet. Now Romanization can sometimes be alright, but some methods do produce mistakes and pronounciation oddities. This is one of those instances where Romanization was incorrect. The Chinese people actually called the city Beijing (Bay-jing), but it was translitterated by the postal system to Peking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIIs6WoufX4   -Michael Ly from Vietnam

Chengtu
The ROC government moved to Canton, then Chungking. Some sources are saying that it moved to Chengtu (Chengdu) on November 30, 1949 when Chungking fell to communist control, before finally relocated to Taipei. Does "briefly" mean half a month? — Instantnood 17:37, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Is this a list or no?
I tried to move this to "List of historical capitals of China" but someone thought this is not a simple list. Why is that? --Ideogram 22:47, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

 * Maybe because the normal way of doing such moves (when it is not clear; this article contains a lot of text while some list articles have none, or just a one-sentence intro), is to propose them at the "Discussion" page of that article first. That way, it shows that you're a member of our community, particularly when there are long-term editors on a specific page that you are newly coming to, who have good ideas for the reasons they edited the page the way it is.  Of course, there is always room for good new ideas.  Badagnani 23:05, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

 * So I'm discussing it now. --Ideogram 23:11, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

 * Looking at the article it appears that it is an actual text article, with a list included. There are many WP articles like this.  A strict list would not have text beyond perhaps a one-sentence introduction.  Badagnani 23:15, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

 * Then it should be split into an article and a true list. --Ideogram 23:21, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Why? It's fine the way it is. SchmuckyTheCat 23:32, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

 * Object to splitting - the article seems very fine, and useful, as it is. The small amount of text amplifies the list--one stop shopping.  Badagnani 23:22, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

 * Fine, it's not important enough to me to argue about. --Ideogram 23:39, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

 * It is a list, should need a clean up, should there be a column for modern provinces, like Chu Kingdom was based in Fuzhou, Fujian? maybe not, just a thought.--Visik (talk) 12:17, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Controversy
I think it is very unfair that Beijing was singled out here. Its not like as if Nanjing didn't have its faults either. Unlike Beijing, Nanjing was a city surrounded by water on three sides, thus easily vulnerable to artillery and naval bombardments. Besides, Beijing being the capital, served as a northern base, helped keep the frontier regions in check as well as introducing some degree of economic equity between the North and South.

Just my 2 cents. -Shenzhou12 (talk) 03:02, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Most of the rulers in China's history were northern Chinese. Beijing already had developed infrastructure such as the Great Wall, political system, Grand Canal, seaport in Bohai and closer to the seat of governments of other countries such as Japan, Korea...etc.

Thats how mandarin became the language of the courts. The culture of the Northern Chinese holds sway in China. Southern China was mainly indigenous people who were subsequently assimilated into Chinese culture and became the modern people in Guangdong, Fujian and Zhejiang.--Visik (talk) 12:15, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Nanjing would be the logical capital in terms of food and water supply but wouldn't Xian and Luoyang be considered more elligible because of their historical significane and the fact they are in the center of the country?--Queen Elizabeth II's Little Spy (talk) 03:27, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

 * I'd like to know who wrote that section as well. Full of weasel words and highly biased.

 * 71.241.74.20 (talk) 03:09, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Misdirect?
Later Jin redirects to Qing Dynasty.ZFT (talk) 00:49, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Chinese Imperial City Planning By Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt
http://books.google.com/books?id=in68DmD8YVoC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Rajmaan (talk) 19:53, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Suggest adding a column for "Equivalent Modern City Name" to the Chronology table that lists ancient historical capitals. Suggestion
It is somewhat difficult for a newcomer to Chinese history, to identify where the ancient capitals are, especially when name changes occur from one historical period to another. Is it possible to add a column to the "Chronology" table, that lists the name of the modern city that is situated where the ancient historical capital was located? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ivanlee44 (talk • contribs) 07:49, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Details provided during the period from 1945 to our days
I believe that the details about this period should form a subject of a different entry. As it is, the presentation appears to an unprejudiced eye (I am no communist) as putting on equal footing the PRC and Taiwan, which would evidently be a biased report of the political situation. Affection for Taiwan China, should not reach the point where reality is distorted. In rough terms, the capital of China since 1948 has been Beijing. Taipeh may be added for their claims to govern China, but including the numerous cities, which were once used as cover names to try hiding the fact that Nationalists were loosing ground, looks more like a hoax now after some 70 years. Does it not? — Preceding unsigned comment added by LEMEN (talk • contribs) 13:15, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Map of ancient and medieval capitals
See the image's talk pages here and at commons. In short, it needs to be replaced or split: it includes some but not all regional capitals (regional capitals should be omitted or put into a separate image); it includes one but not all alternate capitals (we shouldn't bother showing all alternate capitals but if we include Shengdu we should include all the others); it includes some but not all alternate names (for clarity's sake it should just show the current names and explain the historic ones in the running text); it omits the Qin capital Xianyang; etc. — Llywelyn II   16:40, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Requested move 27 May 2024

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: not moved. – robertsky (talk) 02:55, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

Historical capitals of China → Capital of China – While it's in the process of being moved, I'm gonna add the constitutional context like other country related capitals do. Silence of Lambs (talk) 00:46, 27 May 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. Safari Scribe Edits! Talk! 01:59, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

 * Oppose - The current title accurately reflects the fact that the article is historical in nature. The proposed title seems more appropriate for an article about the present-day capital of China. Phlar (talk) 02:11, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Oppose per @Phlar Killuminator (talk) 22:36, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

title: Talk:Historical capitals of China


text:
John Gregg

John Gregg may refer to:

Politicians

 * John Gregg (Guildford MP) (died 1431 or after), English MP for Guildford
 * John Gregg (Texas politician) (1828–1864), American politician from Texas who was killed in action during the American Civil War
 * John R. Gregg (born 1954), American politician from Indiana

Religion

 * John Gregg (bishop of Cork) (1798–1878), Anglican Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross, 1862–1878
 * John Gregg (archbishop of Armagh) (1873–1961), Anglican Archbishop of Armagh 1939–1959

Others

 * John Irvin Gregg (1826–1892), United States Army general
 * John Robert Gregg (1867–1948), Irish-born American inventor of Gregg shorthand
 * John P. Gregg (1876–1963), head football coach at Louisiana State University, 1899
 * John William Gregg (1880–1969), American landscape architect
 * John Gregg (1899–1986), companion of philanthropist Robert Allerton
 * John Gregg (baker) (1909–1964), British founder of Greggs bakery
 * John Gregg (actor) (1939–2021), Australian actor
 * John Gregg (loyalist) (1957–2003), Ulster loyalist, member of the UDA

title: John Gregg


text:
Norman Lamont

Norman Stewart Hughson Lamont, Baron Lamont of Lerwick, (born 8 May 1942) is a British politician and former Conservative MP for Kingston-upon-Thames. He served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1990 until 1993. He was created a life peer in 1998. Lamont was a supporter of the Eurosceptic organisation Leave Means Leave.

Early life
Norman Stewart Hughson Lamont was born in Lerwick, in the Shetland Islands, on 8 May 1942, where his father Daniel Lamont OBE was the islands' surgeon. In 1953, he moved south with his parents to Grimsby, Lincolnshire, after his father took up a position at Scartho Road Infirmary. He was privately educated at Loretto School, Musselburgh, Scotland, and read economics at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he was Chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association and President of the Cambridge Union Society in 1964.

Corporate career
Before entering Parliament, Lamont worked for N M Rothschild & Sons, the investment bank, and became director of Rothschild Asset Management.

Lamont currently, in addition to his role as a working peer, is a director of and a consultant to various companies in the financial sector. He is a director of the hedge fund company RAB Capital, Balli Group plc (commodities trading house), and he is an advisor to Rotch Property Group. He is also a director of a number of investment funds. In December 2008 he joined the board of Phorm, an online behavioural advertising company, and he is a non-executive director of Balli Group PLC and the Honorary President of the British Romanian Chamber of Commerce, and Chairman of the British Iranian Chamber of Commerce.

Member of Parliament
Lamont stood as a candidate for Member of Parliament in the June 1970 general election for Kingston upon Hull East. He was defeated by John Prescott, who went on to become Tony Blair's Deputy Prime Minister. Two years later, on 4 May 1972, Lamont won a by-election to become MP for Kingston-upon-Thames.

Junior Minister
Lamont served in successive governments under Margaret Thatcher and John Major for a total of 14 years, in the Departments of Energy, Industry, Defence and the Treasury. In 1986, he moved to the Treasury, first as Financial Secretary to the Treasury, then Chief Secretary to the Treasury (succeeding John Major in the latter job on Major's promotion to Foreign Secretary in July 1989) under Chancellor Nigel Lawson, whom he tried unsuccessfully to persuade not to resign from the government on the morning of 26 October 1989 – Lawson resigned that evening. Lamont remained as Chief Secretary to the Treasury under Major's Chancellorship. In this position, he acquiesced in Major's decision to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) at a central parity of 2.95 Deutschmarks to the Pound, although neither he nor any other Cabinet ministers were involved or informed about the decision before it had been made.

The decision to join the ERM was announced on Friday 5 October 1990, the last trading day before the week of the Conservative party conference. Shortly afterwards he successfully managed Major's election campaign to succeed Margaret Thatcher as party leader and Prime Minister. In her memoirs, Thatcher listed Lamont along with six other Cabinet ministers as a potential successor to her. During the leadership election, Lamont clashed angrily in private with Lawson who preferred Michael Heseltine as Thatcher's successor, phoning Lawson up to remind him of his caustic remarks made about Heseltine's economic policies. Lamont eventually slammed the phone down on Lawson in temper, though he later wrote to Lawson to offer an apology.

On 16 May 1991, Lamont stated in parliament that "Rising unemployment and the recession have been the price that we have had to pay to get inflation down. That price is well worth paying." The remark is regularly, but not always approvingly, recalled by commentators and other politicians. Seven months before Lamont made the statement, inflation (as measured by the annual change in the Retail Price Index) reached 10.9%. In May 1991, inflation fell to 6.4%. A year after the Major government was reelected in the 1992 general election, winning the most votes of any political party in British electoral history, inflation fell to 4.3%, falling to 1.3% a year later. However the economy continued to contract until the third quarter of 1991. After economic growth resumed, the economy grew rapidly and by the third quarter of 1993, GDP was greater than the pre-recession peak in the second quarter of 1990.

Chancellor of the Exchequer
Lamont replaced Major as Chancellor in Major's new Cabinet, thereby inheriting Major's exchange rate policy. In his memoirs, Lamont recalls a senior Treasury civil servant answering his question on why Britain had joined the ERM by replying, "It's politics," to which Lamont replied, "I don't think I would have given up the flexibility of the exchange rate." In public, Lamont justified the decision to join the ERM in terms of the government's counter-inflation strategy. In the House of Commons debate shortly after the pound joined the ERM, he argued that under a regime of floating exchange rates, the consequences of depreciating the currency had been short-lived in terms of output and competitiveness, "but have been lasting in terms of inflation. That is one of the reasons why the Government concluded that it would be right to join the ERM."

Fiscal policy
By the time Lamont was appointed Chancellor, the Conservative government's principal economic objective was to regain control of inflation. The Thatcher government had been elected in 1979 on a manifesto that had listed restoration of sound money as its first priority. Having peaked at 21.9% in 1980, inflation (as measured by the 12-month increase in the Retail Prices Index) fell to 3.3% at the beginning of 1988. However controlling inflation through the targeting of the growth of the domestic money supply, as proposed in that manifesto, turned out to be more problematic than its authors had envisaged and during his time as Chancellor, Lawson had increasingly been drawn instead to targeting the exchange rate to provide an external monetary anchor. From its low point in February 1988, inflation rose with apparent inexorability: of the 31 months until it peaked at 10.9% in October 1990, there were only four months when inflation fell. In response, interest rates were progressively increased, doubling from 7.4% in June 1988 to 15% in October 1988, being cut by one point to 14% when the pound entered the ERM, the level of interest rates Lamont inherited as chancellor. As a result, the economy began to slow, contracting by 1.1% in the third quarter of 1990 and shrinking a further 0.7% in the final quarter of the year. Thus Lamont's period as Chancellor started with inflation at its highest level since 1982 and the economy in recession.

Asked at his first appearance as chancellor at the Treasury Select Committee whether he agreed with his predecessor's view on the depth and duration of the recession and not wishing to contradict Major, Lamont replied that "there are reasons why one could believe that it will be relatively short-lived and relatively shallow." In October 1991, based on CBI and Institute of Directors business surveys, he said "what we are seeing is the return of that vital ingredient – confidence. The Green shoots of economic spring are appearing once again." The comment was widely criticised as premature. However, Gavyn Davies, then chief economist at Goldman Sachs, wrote in a newspaper article at the time of Lamont's removal from the Treasury that the "Green shoots" speech had turned out to be "remarkably prescient. From that moment onwards, output stopped declining, and within a few months, it started to rise. Estimates of Gross Domestic Product show the trough of the recession occurring in the fourth quarter of 1991, with sustained growth resuming in the third quarter of 1992, when GDP grew 0.4% compared to the second quarter.

Negotiating the Maastricht Treaty
On succeeding Thatcher, the Major government had to decide its position on the negotiations on European Economic and monetary union (EMU); this would lead to the Maastricht Treaty. It had been Thatcher's opposition to EMU which triggered the end of her premiership. Like Thatcher, Lamont was a long-standing opponent of EMU and the European single currency. In his memoirs, Lamont wrote that he was "horrified" when Ted Heath in 1972 announced Britain that it was accepting the Werner Plan for monetary union. Newly appointed as Chancellor, Lamont therefore supported Major's idea of Britain negotiating an opt-out from the single currency. Negotiations on the economic aspects of the proposed treaty began in earnest at the end of 1990 with monthly meetings of European finance ministers. At an Intergovernmental Conference held in Rome on 15 December 1990, Lamont declared, "I remain unconvinced that the potential benefits of a single currency are as great as its supporters allege."

In a minute to the Cabinet's Defence and Overseas Policy committee the following month, Lamont set out his three objectives for the negotiations: first, to ensure that Britain did not have to join the single currency; second, to ensure the opt-out was legally water-tight; and third, to ensure that during the period in the run-up to the single currency, there should be no binding obligations on Britain. In meeting the third of these, Lamont had to overcome the resistance of the prime minister and the foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, who told Lamont: "I can't see what you are so worked up about. We are in the ERM. What difference does it make if it is in the Treaty?" Lamont decided to ignore their objections. At the next negotiating meeting on the treaty, he told his fellow European finance ministers that Britain would not accept membership of the ERM as a treaty obligation. As a result, the meeting agreed to remove it.

Lamont decided that the best way of securing the first two of his negotiating objectives was for Britain to draw up a protocol listing those parts of the treaty from which Britain would be exempted. When Wim Kok, the Dutch finance minister chairing the finance ministers' negotiations at Maastricht, decided that the meeting should review the British opt-out line-by-line, Lamont said the text was not negotiable. After Kok persevered, Lamont walked out of the meeting. In his absence, the protocol was endorsed without amendment.

Exchange Rate Mechanism exit
Within the constraints of the ERM, sterling interest rates were cut seven times in 1991, falling from 14% to 10.5% in September, with inflation halving from 9.0% to 4.5% over the course of the year, leaving real interest rates just 0.5% lower. The scope for swifter cuts in interest rates was squeezed by an event that few had anticipated when Britain joined the ERM: based on OECD indices of consumer prices, inflation in Germany, which had been 2.7% in 1990, rose to 5.1% in 1992, whilst in Britain inflation fell from 7.0% to 4.3%. In response, the Bundesbank increased its discount rate from 6.0% in 1990 to 8.75% in July 1992, creating the conditions for the turbulence the ERM was to experience later that autumn.

Despite the Conservatives' surprise victory in the April 1992 general election, for these reasons, the ERM policy proved increasingly unsustainable and collapsed on Black Wednesday, when Lamont was forced to withdraw the pound from the ERM despite assuring the public that he would not do so just a week earlier. He faced fierce criticism at the time for his apparent insouciance in the face of the collapse of the stated central plank of his economic policy. Later that month, at a press conference in the garden of the British embassy in Washington, DC in response to a question as to why he appeared so cheerful, Lamont commented that it was a beautiful morning, adding, "My wife said she heard me singing in the bath this morning," a response which led to the story that he was singing in the bath with happiness at leaving the ERM. After Major left office and published his memoirs, Lamont publicly denied Major's version of events, claiming that Major had effectively opted out of his responsibilities and left Lamont to carry the can for that day's actions. On the evening of Black Wednesday and for days after, Major contemplated resigning, drafting a statement to that effect, but wrote Lamont a note instructing him not to resign.

Major's verdict on the ERM was that it was the medicine that cured Britain of inflation; "it hurt but it worked." Speaking a few days after Black Wednesday, the Governor of the Bank of England, Robin Leigh-Pemberton, argued that "the decision to join the ERM two years ago in the circumstances; that, having joined, we were right to endeavour to stick it out; and that, in the circumstances which evolved, we were right to withdraw." Lamont's view expressed in his memoirs was more nuanced: without the discipline of the ERM, the Major government would have given up on the fight against inflation before Black Wednesday; ERM membership delivered a sharp break in Britain's inflation performance; the judgment of the markets that the higher rates needed to maintain Britain's membership was undoubtedly correct; "the ERM was a tool that broke in my hands when it had accomplished all that it could usefully do." Sir Alan Budd, the Treasury's Chief Economic Adviser during the period and later appointed by Gordon Brown to the Monetary Policy Committee, in an economic assessment of Britain's membership of the ERM, has written, "although it was certainly a political disaster, the case can be made that it was an economic triumph and marked the turning point in our macro-economic performance."

During the autumn of 1992, Lamont became a press target in a string of largely fabricated stories: that he had not paid his hotel bill for "champagne and large breakfasts" from the Conservative Party Conference (in fact his bill had been forwarded on for settlement); that he was in arrears on his personal Access credit card bill (true); that in June 1991 he had used taxpayers' money to handle the fall-out from press stories concerning a sex therapist, who was using a flat he owned (the Treasury contributed £4,700 of the £23,000 bill which had been formally approved by the Head of the Civil Service and the Prime Minister; there was never any suggestion that he had ever met her); and that he had called at a newsagent in a seedy area of Paddington late at night to purchase champagne and cheap "Raffles" cigarettes. The last story turned out to have been partly invented (Lamont only purchased three bottles of wine).

Post-ERM chancellorship
Following Britain's exit from the ERM, Lamont had two major tasks: to replace the ERM with a new framework for monetary policy, and to address the sharp increase in government borrowing caused by the recession and the rapid fall in inflation. In a letter to the Chairman of the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee in October 1992, Lamont set out a new basis for the conduct of monetary policy centred on inflation targeting. He set a target range for inflation excluding mortgage interest rate payments of 1–4%, falling into the lower part of the range by the end of the Parliament. In assessing progress toward meeting the inflation target, there was a target for the growth of narrow money (M0) and monitoring ranges for the growth of broad money (M4). Decisions on interest rates would also take account of house and asset price inflation and the exchange rate. Transparency and market credibility would be enhanced by the publication of a monthly monetary assessment and the Bank of England was asked to produce a quarterly inflation report. These innovations marked a decisive break with the past and a necessary step toward central bank independence. Inflation targeting was the basis on which the Bank of England was made independent by the Blair government in 1997, the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee being made accountable for achieving the government's inflation target.

The new framework enabled interest rates to be cut from the 10% that they had been within the ERM to 6% by January 1993. Inflation continued to fall. In June 1993, the first month after Lamont had left the Treasury, Britain recorded its lowest monthly rate of inflation since February 1964. According to Alan Budd, the Treasury's Chief Economic Adviser during the period, the important step of central bank independence could only have been successful once monetary stability had been achieved; "In 1997 the Bank of England was not asked to succeed where politicians had failed; it was asked to maintain the rate of inflation, namely 2.5%, that it inherited." In Budd's view, the essential elements of the new framework and its success in achieving low and stable inflation were the establishment of an inflation target and the institution of monthly meetings with the governor of the Bank of England to discuss interest rates. The new framework, according to Budd, "worked extraordinarily well." "Credit must be given to those, principally Norman Lamont, who designed and implemented it."

Lamont's second task was to reduce government borrowing, which was rising sharply because of the twofold impact of the ERM on the public finances. The loss of output had reduced tax revenues and increased public spending as unemployment rose. The sharp falls in inflation further reduced tax revenues compared to previous forecasts at the same time as increasing public spending after inflation, because public spending is planned in cash terms which becomes worth more in real terms if inflation falls. The March 1993 budget forecast a Public Sector Borrowing Requirement for 1993-94 of £50bn, equivalent to 8% of GDP. In terms of the Public Sector Net Cash Requirement, the definition currently in use to measure the UK government deficit, the actual deficit for 1993–94 of 6.9% was the highest since 1975–76 at 9.2% but just over half the 13.3% deficit projected for 2009–10 in the April 2009 budget.

To reduce government borrowing, the March 1993 budget announced a rising wedge of tax increases – £0.5bn in the first year, £6.7bn in the second, rising to £10.3bn in the third, the aim being to give markets confidence that government borrowing was under control without damaging the recovery. Although the budget provoked a fierce reaction in some parts of the press, its reputation improved with the passage of time. After the 2009 budget, the Sunday Times editorialised that Lamont's budget had been so badly received that he was out of his job within two months, "but it fixed the public finances and set up the prosperity of the 1990s and beyond" and Derek Scott, Tony Blair's economic adviser from 1997 to 2003, wrote that Lamont was "rightly praised" for putting in place the post-ERM framework, that stage of Lamont's career being "due for rerating since, in addition to designing a proper framework for monetary policy (later consolidated by Bank of England independence in 1997), he also took most of the tough decisions on spending and tax to put the public finances on the road to recovery." Sir Alan Walters, whose opposition to the ERM as Mrs Thatcher's economic adviser triggered Nigel Lawson's resignation as chancellor, wrote on the buoyant state of the British economy in 2001 that "all the difficult and correct decisions that produced this happy state of affairs were taken and implemented by Norman Lamont, who thus showed himself, in his Mark 2 post ERM version, to be not only the most effective but also the bravest Chancellor since the War."

Resignation
During the Newbury by-election in May 1993, Lamont was asked at a press conference whether he most regretted claiming to see "the green shoots of recovery" or "singing in his bath". He replied by quoting the Edith Piaf song "Je ne regrette rien", a dry response which raised a laugh at the press conference but which played poorly when quoted later on the television that evening and afterwards. When called to defend him on Newsnight his friend the former Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt caused further merriment by claiming that Lamont could do an excellent impersonation of a Scops owl (whose cry, Lamont later explained, "sounds like a tennis ball emitter").

Three weeks after the government's massive loss in the by-election, on 27 May 1993, Lamont was sacked (technically resigning from the government because he declined a demotion to become Secretary of State for the Environment), throwing (by his own account) Major's letter of regret at his departure unopened into the wastepaper basket, and giving a resignation speech in the House of Commons on 9 June, that made clear his feeling that he had been unfairly treated, saying that the government "gives the impression of being in office but not in power"; the then Party Chairman Norman Fowler dismissed the speech as "dud, nasty, ludicrous and silly". Major and Lamont agree that Lamont had offered his resignation immediately after Black Wednesday and that Major pressed him to remain in office. Lamont came to the view that Major had sought his survival in office as a firebreak against the criticism of the ERM policy rebounding on himself.

Post-chancellorship
In the following years, Lamont became a fierce critic of the Major government. He is now regarded as a staunch euro-sceptic. In March 1995 he voted with the Labour Party in a vote on Europe, and later that year he authored Sovereign Britain in which he envisaged Britain's withdrawal from the European Union, and was talked of as a potential leadership challenger to John Major; in the event, it was John Redwood who challenged for the leadership. Lamont supported Redwood's campaign, which was managed by David Evans MP. He is the current vice president of the euro-sceptic Bruges Group.

Despite departing under a cloud, Lamont defends his budget record to this day. The 1991 budget, in which he seized the opportunity presented by Thatcher's resignation to restrict mortgage interest tax relief to the basic rate of income tax and also cut the rate of corporation tax by two percentage points, was greeted by positive coverage in The Economist which dubbed him a Nimble Novice. In the 1992 budget, his proposal to advance to a 20% basic rate of income tax through a combination of a narrow initial band, a cut in tax on deposit interest and curtailment of tax allowances was hailed as an elegant way of combining populism with progressivism, though events were later to lend support to Nigel Lawson's view that this approach was strategically inept. His final budget in 1993 was more sympathetically received by financial specialists than John Major's 1990 budget or Kenneth Clarke's budget of November 1993. Lamont attributes the large public sector borrowing requirement (i.e. fiscal deficit) of these years to the depth of the recession triggered by his inability to cut interest rates sooner within the ERM.

The day after his dismissal from the Treasury, Sir Samuel Brittan wrote in the Financial Times that history was likely to record him as one of the better Chancellors, citing his structural reforms of taxation, his determination to give priority to securing and maintaining low inflation and the delayed tax increases in his final budget. "He leaves behind an economy with a faster growth rate than that of any other of the main G7 countries and an underlying rate of inflation lower than in most." According to Ruth Lea, writing 12 years later on the factors behind the subsequent performance of the British economy, Lamont had introduced path-breaking macro-economic reforms including inflation targeting and the first steps towards an independent Bank of England and had begun a programme of fiscal consolidation, which transformed the public finances. "These macro economic reforms, along with the Thatcher economic reforms of the 1980s, effectively transformed the British economy."

Brexit
In the period after his resignation, Lamont became the first leading politician to raise the prospect of Britain withdrawing from the European Union. Shortly before the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, the journalist Matthew d'Ancona wrote that someone must have dared to make the initial leap to retrieve the "frozen thesis" from its glacial prison. "In the case of Brexit, it was Norman Lamont, the former chancellor of the exchequer, who dragged the idea back from the snowy wastes."

At a private meeting of the Conservative Philosophy Group in 1994, he argued that withdrawal from the European Union was an option that should be restored to the range of serious possibilities, d'Ancona, who attended the meeting, wrote. Later that year at the Conservative Party conference in Bournemouth, Lamont addressed a fringe meeting of the Selsdon Group. "When we come to examine the advantages of our membership today of the European Union they are remarkably elusive. As a former Chancellor, I can only say that I cannot pinpoint a single concrete advantage that unambiguously comes to this country because of our membership of the European Union," Lamont told the group. He rejected the argument made by Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, who had claimed that the debate in Europe was turning Britain's way. "We deceive the British people and we deceive ourselves if we claim that we are winning the argument in Europe ... There is not a shred of evidence at Maastricht or since then that anyone accepts our view of Europe."

Lamont implicitly challenged the view expressed by John Major, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: "It has recently been said that the option of leaving the Community was 'unthinkable.' I believe that this attitude is rather simplistic." He stopped short of arguing Britain should unilaterally withdraw from the European Union "today," but warned: "the issue may well return to the political agenda." Instead, he outlined an alternative to membership of a federal EU. "This means looking at all the options ranging from membership of an outer tier to participating solely in the European Economic Area. One day it may mean contemplating withdrawal."

1997 election
In boundary changes enacted for the 1997 general election, Lamont's constituency of Kingston upon Thames was split up. The northern parts were merged with Richmond and Barnes to form Richmond Park, and the southern parts merged with the larger Surbiton to form Kingston and Surbiton. Lamont lost the contest for the candidacy for the new seat to the incumbent Surbiton MP Richard Tracey. He then embarked on a high-profile search for a new constituency and was eventually adopted as the Conservative candidate for the new seat of Harrogate and Knaresborough in Yorkshire. The move was seen as an attempt to parachute in an outsider, with Lamont seeming like an opportunist next to the Liberal Democrat candidate, Phil Willis, a local teacher and long-time local politician. When the general election came, his unpopularity, and that of the Conservatives in general, led a massive tactical voting campaign in the constituency and the Liberal Democrats won the seat. He was not recommended for a peerage in John Major's resignation honours, but the following year William Hague recommended him, and Lamont was made a life peer as Baron Lamont of Lerwick, of Lerwick in the Shetland Islands, on 24 July 1998.

After Parliament
In 1998, the former military dictator of Chile, General Augusto Pinochet visited Britain to obtain medical treatment. This prompted a debate about whether he should be arrested and put on trial over his human rights record. Lamont joined with Margaret Thatcher in defending Pinochet, calling him a "good and brave and honourable soldier". His stance was highly criticised.

He attempted to be selected as a candidate for the 1999 European Parliament election, but was unsuccessful.

In February 2005, it was reported in The Times that Lamont and John Major had held up the release of papers concerning Black Wednesday under the Freedom of Information Act. The two wrote to the paper to deny the reports. Later it emerged that the source of the story had been Damian McBride, then a Treasury civil servant who as a result of this became a special adviser to the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown. McBride in 2009 resigned from a similar position in 10 Downing Street following publication of emails indicating a plan to smear leading Conservative politicians.

In October 2006, he complained that the new party leader David Cameron (Lamont's political adviser around the time of Black Wednesday) lacked policies. In late 2008, Cameron asked Lamont, together with fellow former chancellors Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson and Kenneth Clarke, to provide him with strategic political and economic advice as Britain's banking and fiscal position worsened.

In June 2007, Lamont became honorary patron of the Oxford University History Society, one of the university's largest societies, and he was, from 1996 to 2008, chairman of Le Cercle, a secret anti-Communist group which meets bi-annually in Washington, DC. In 2008, he became the president of the Economic Research Council, Britain's oldest economics-based think tank.

In February 2015, Lamont resigned as a director of Phorm Corporation Limited, an internet personalisation technology company.

Yanis Varoufakis said Lamont provided him with "counsel", and "advice" and was "a pillar of strength" while he unsuccessfully negotiated Debt relief with the troika during his six months as Greek Finance Minister in 2015.

title: Norman Lamont