Blockchain technology may soon profoundly transform the economic, financial, and legal reality of entire societies and even systems of government. But is this new financial instrument (a new form of ”tender,” in the sense of money offered for payment) sensitive only to the rules of free-market economics, or also to human rights and sensibilities? Whose needs will determine the direction of change: those of ordinary people, or the financial elite?

The aim of the paper is to point out that the Monte Carlo simulation is an easy and flexible approach when it comes to forecasting risk of an asset portfolio. The case study presented in the paper illustrates the problem of forecasting risk arising from a portfolio of receivables denominated in different foreign currencies. Such a problem seems to be close to the real issue for enterprises offering products or services on several foreign markets. The changes in exchange rates are usually not normally distributed and, moreover, they are always interdependent. As shown in the paper, the Monte Carlo simulation allows for forecasting market risk under such circumstances.

The author summarizes the origin and development of the thaler since its emergence in Central Europe in the 1520s to the general spread of the term “thaler” for large silver coins in the 1540s as well as the attempts to replace the thaler with another type of coin in the Roman-German Empire under the Second and Third Imperial Coin Order. The year 1566 was a major turning point. The “imperial thaler” was redefined in metrological terms and the collection of custom duties in the North Sea straits was regulated, which (instead of gold coins) continued to be collected in silver thalers. This move spurred the expansion of the thaler coins in those countries of continental Europe that used the North Sea trade route. At that time, the thaler also became the equivalent for mutual conversions of the most important monetary systems. This is evidenced by the exchange rates from the end of the 16th century from Hamburg. In them, the ”imperial thaler” serves as a tool for the mutual conversion the seven major currencies used in the North Sea and Baltic trade areas (the Lübeck mark, the Hamburg pound, the Antwerp pound, the Amsterdam pound, the imperial Rhine gulden, the Lisbon milreis and the Polish gulden).

The Walters critique of EMU presumed that pro-cyclical country-specific real interest rates would incorporate significant macroeconomic instability in an environment of asymmetric shocks. The literature on optimum currency areas suggests a number of criteria to minimize this risk, such as market flexibility, high degrees of openness, financial integration or similarity in inflation rates. In this paper, we argue that an essential part of macroeconomic volatility in a monetary union’s member country also depends on the mechanism of forming expectations. This is mainly due to (i) the construction of ex ante countryspecific real interest rate, implying a strong or weak negative correlation with current inflation rate and (ii) anticipated (and hence smoothed) loss in competitiveness and boom-bust cycle. In a 2-region 2-sector New Keynesian DSGE model, we apply 5 different specifications of ex ante real interest rates, based on commonly considered types of expectations: rational, adaptive, static, extrapolative and regressive, as well as their hybrids. Our simulations show that rational expectations dominate the other specifications in terms of minimizing the volatility of the most macroeconomic variables. This conclusion is generally insensitive to which group of agents (producers or consumers) and which region (home or foreign) forms the expectations. It also turns out that for some types of expectations the Walters critique indeed applies, i.e. the system does not fulfil the Blanchard-Kahn conditions or the system’s companion matrix has explosive eigenvalues.