Money Claims Research Articles

The Proper Procedure for the Enforcement of Money Claims in Digital Assets

The Proper Procedure for the Enforcement of Money Claims in Digital Assets

Designing a Logic Model for Mobile Maternal Health e-Voucher Programs in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: An Interpretive Review.

Despite the increasing transition from paper vouchers to mobile e-vouchers for maternal health in low- and middle-income countries, few studies have reviewed key elements for program planning, implementation, and evaluation. To bridge this gap, this study conducted an interpretive review and developed a logic model for mobile maternal health e-voucher programs. Pubmed, EMBASE, and Cochrane databases were searched to retrieve relevant studies; 27 maternal health voucher programs from 84 studies were identified, and key elements for the logic model were retrieved and organized systematically. Some of the elements identified have the potential to be improved greatly by shifting to mobile e-vouchers, such as payment via mobile money or electronic claims processing and data entry for registration. The advantages of transitioning to mobile e-voucher identified from the logic model can be summarized as scalability, transparency, and flexibility. The present study contributes to the literature by providing insights into program planning, implementation, and evaluation for mobile maternal health e-voucher programs.

Money and customer funds in the world of digital finance: Who really owns what?

This paper addresses the moneyness of fully backed digital currencies issued by the private sector in the form of electronic monies, stablecoins and ‘synthetic’ central bank digital currencies. Are these true monies or are they just services provided by FinTech companies to facilitate the use of funds? Furthermore, who actually owns the funds that back these monies? Distinguishing between money, claims on money, and money claims that eventually become money, this paper compares the development of the above types of digital currencies with bank deposits as these have evolved in the banking practice over the years. The paper points to the apparent inconsistent treatment between issuers of digital currencies and banks as issuers of deposit claims, and indicates how addressing this inconsistency could change the rules that govern the provision of digital currencies, reallocate the responsibilities associated with their issuance and use, and redesign the measures to protect stakeholder rights. The suggested measures call for existing regulations to be revisited in some important respects

프랜차이즈 가맹본부의 공동사용자성 여부

The main issue of this study is whether the franchisers are employer under the labor law for franchise workers. This study earlier reviewed the judicial precedents regarding the expansion of the employers from such conventional indirect employments as intrapreneuring system, subsidiaries and infrasubcontract (implicit labor contract theory, dispatched worker theory and actual dominance theory), and examined such theories intact to the franchise agreement. However, the judicial precedents are not deemed to be perfectly applied to the franchise structure where the employment and the use are separated completely from each other. Moreover, another problem is the obscure responsibility of the franchisees.<BR> In order to solve such problems, this study suggested a joint-employers theory so that the plural employers using the workers directly and indirectly can burden the vicarious liability. In case of the United States, such a theory is applied to the franchise businesses, which we need to refer to. Under U.S. legal principles, however, in the case of indirect employment, even those who are not a party to the labor contract shall be held liable under the employment and labor laws as joint employers.<BR> If such legal theory should be applied to the franchise relations, not the agreement between franchiser and franchisees but the fact whether the franchiser has determined important working conditions for the franchisee workers or has dominated them actually would be a criterion. If a joint-employer relation should be admitted, both franchiser and franchisees would be jointly responsible for the franchisee workers.<BR> However, the question remains whether Korea’s joint-employers theory can be extended to other issues other than money claims, as it is limited to matters concerning the payment of wages for workers. In the U.S., the Doctrine of joint-employers is widely applied not only to individual labor relations but also to collective labormanagement relations, so it is necessary for us to gradually expand the scope of the labor law.

La ejecución forzosa del acto administrativo en el derecho Español

This paper describes the legal framework for the enforcement of Administrative acts in the Spanish administrative Law, which is in Act 30/1992, on the Legal Regime of Public Administrations and of the Common Administrative Procedure. Administrative act is an act of will, desire, knowledge or judgment issued by an Administrative body, who has the privilege of enforceability (it is mandatory for its recipients) and enforcement (in case of reluctance on the recipients, the Administration, without recourse to third parties or Courts can enforce coercively).In the Spanish Administrative Law enforcement media are limited to four: constraint on capital, subsidiary execution, coercive penalties, and compulsion on people. For each type of administrative media, depending on its purpose, regulation tends to the use of a particular type of enforcement. For example, money claims are usually implemented through the constraint on capital; obligations to do, can be executed by the subsidiary execution or periodic coercive penalty payments; personal obligations almost always require a compulsion on people, etc. However, when various legal media may be possible to enforce the same act, the Administration prefers the use of the less harmful means, in a clear application of the fundamental right to liberty and property.Finally, some considerations are made about the implementation of administrative measures that may involve the entry into the home of recipients, and the game in those cases of the fundamental right to the inviolability of the home.

Neke nove refleksije o građansko-trgovačkim specifičnostima novčanih obveza

Novčane obveze posebno su atraktivna pravna kategorija u građanskom i trgovačkom pravu. U ugovorima o kreditu, napose u ugovoru o potrošačkom kreditu to dolazi do posebnog izražaja. Novac ima, međutim, isključivo funkciju vrijednosti i irelevantno je u kojoj će valuti ugovorne strane to izraziti. Pad te vrijednosti zahtijeva potrebu “usklađivanja” koja se vrši na više načina. Vjerovnik nema pravo dobiti natrag veću glavnicu nego što ju je dao, ali ima pravo održati njenu realnu vrijednost. Isto pravo, dakako, ima i dužnik kada novčana kretanja idu prema vjerovniku, tj. kada novac aprecira

The Capital Structure of Nations*

When a nation can finance its investments via foreign-currency denominated debt or domestic-currency claims, what is the optimal capital structure of the nation? Building on the functions of fiat money as both medium of exchange, and store of value like corporate equity, our model connects monetary economics, fiscal theory and international finance under a unified corporate finance perspective. With frictionless capital markets both a Modigliani-Miller theorem for nations and the classical quantity theory of money hold. With capital market frictions, a nation's optimal capital structure trades off inflation dilution costs and expected default costs on foreign-currency debt. Our framing focuses on the process by which new money claims enter the economy and the potential wealth redistribution costs of inflation.

A Simple Fix for a Complex Problem? Comments on Morgan Ricks, The Money Problem: Rethinking Financial Regulation

Abstract The financial crisis of 2007–2009 left scholars and policy analysts scrambling to explain what went wrong. While a variety of stories have been told, none have seemed like they could account for the magnitude of the collapse in securities values, or the devastation the collapse caused to the performance of whole economies around the globe, nor could they offer a clear path to reform. Legislation passed to reform the financial system in the U.S. is extraordinarily complex, and still very controversial. Now, however, Morgan Ricks’ new book, The Money Problem: Rethinking Financial Regulation, cuts through the complexity to offer a relatively simple but compelling explanation – the crisis was a consequence of an old-fashioned run on the “bank”, which, in this case, was the shadow banking system rather than regular banks. The solution is the same as the solution that prevented major financial crises in the U.S. from the 1930s to 2007 – government insurance of “money claims” and stricter regulation of firms that are allowed to issue money-like claims.

Serving the creditors after insolvency filings: from value creation to value distribution

This paper provides original empirical evidence on the financial outcome of insolvency filings in Europe. We adopt a cross-country analysis of the determinants of recovery rates isolating three types of creditors (junior, senior, and new money claims). We investigate the structure of recoveries on a unique hand-collected sample of bankrupt firms in France, Germany, and the UK. We initially question value maximization, and study to which extent the legal provisions prevailing after insolvency filing can influence creditors’ overall recoveries. Three procedures differ significantly from our benchmark (UK liquidations). French continuation and UK receivership exert a positive influence onto total repayments, while such influence becomes negative under French liquidation. We relate this finding to the ability of the two former procedures to improve coordination among the creditors, monitoring of the debtor, and/or incentives to file early. We then analyze value distribution by examining competition between the categories of creditors. We show that the insolvency systems do not converge. Junior and senior creditors are better served under the German and the French continuation procedures than in any other bankruptcy path. At the opposite, the UK liquidation procedures fail to satisfactorily serve the junior/senior creditors. Still, nearly all the insolvency procedures support fresh financing by protecting quite well new money claims. Overall, we do not confirm any superiority of one family of insolvency system over another, but rather stress the importance of an appropriate design of the procedures, especially regarding the incentives they create before and after insolvency filing.

A Declaratory Theory of State Accountability

Debate persists over the meaning of the Eleventh Amendment and the degree to which it supports the lines drawn by the Supreme Court on fraught questions of state sovereign immunity and accountability. Scholars disagree both as to the legal and historical accuracy of the Court’s expansive conception of sovereign immunity and as to the proper scope of the Ex parte Young action, the primary tool for ensuring state accountability. Characterized as a body of law devoid of principle and subject to arbitrary stops in reasoning, the doctrine has yet to strike a balance between immunity and accountability that enjoys anything close to a consensus. In this Essay, we propose to blend current law and scholarship into a new, historically grounded, declaratory theory of state accountability. Our account builds on the willingness of federal courts to entertain applications for declaratory relief and their reluctance to entertain money claims against the states. We argue that the states should take responsibility for money claims, at least in cases where Congress cannot abrogate state immunity. We suggest a framework within which states give preclusive effect to federal declarations in follow-on suits brought by individuals who seek monetary relief in accordance with state law. Such an approach would honor a surprisingly strong tradition of reliance on declaratory judgments as a tool of government accountability, would preserve state control over the purse strings, and would give state governments a role in securing the effectiveness of judgments against the states comparable to that played by Congress and the executive branch in connection with judgments against the federal government.

Simplification of Debt Collection in the EU (European Order for Payment Procedure and European Small Claims Procedure) Italian Report

After a cursory glance at the Italian procedures for the recovery of money claims, domestic and cross-borders, this essay expands on a few aspects of the implementation of Regulation (CE) No. 1896/2006 and on the failed implementation of Regulation (CE) No. 861/2007.

The Jurisdiction of the Court of Federal Claims and Forum-Shopping in Money Claims Against the Federal Government

Over the past decade, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has issued a series of opinions clarifying the jurisdictional priority of the Court of Federal Claims (CFC) under the Tucker Act over claims against the United States that are means to a monetary end, even if cleverly or mistakenly drafted as suits for injunctive or declaratory relief under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) that could be filed in District Court. Because the APA expressly excludes judicial review in District Court when an “adequate remedy” lies in another court, the CFC retains its traditional and exclusive jurisdiction to hear claims against the Federal Government that are adequately remedied by a money judgment. This venerable understanding was disturbed by an aberrational decision a decade ago in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. In Cobell v. Babbitt, the District Court assumed authority under the APA to adjudicate claims for mis-management of government-established financial accounts for the distribution of profits derived from Native American resources held in trust by the United States. The District Court aggressively extended the Supreme Court’s 1988 decision in Bowen v. Massachusetts — a unique case arising from the Federal-State administration of the Medicaid health care program that the Supreme Court had found unsuited for review in the CFC. To add to the jurisdictional chaos, several tribes then filed breach of trust claims in the District Court seeking an accounting and restitution, while simultaneously filing parallel breach of trust lawsuits in the CFC that forthrightly sought money damages. In early 2011, in United States v. Tohono O’odham Nation, the Supreme Court held that money judgment lawsuits filed in the CFC must be dismissed if parallel litigation for specific relief is pending in the District Court. Reading 28 U.S.C. § 1500 as “a robust response” to the burdens of duplicative litigation against the United States, the Court held that a plaintiff may not maintain one lawsuit in the CFC while a second lawsuit is proceeding in another court that arises out of the same operative facts, even if the two lawsuits seek wholly different relief. In rejecting the plaintiff’s claim of hardship in that case, the Tohono Court observed that the plaintiff “could have filed in the CFC alone and if successful obtained monetary relief to compensate for any losses caused by the Government’s breach of duty.” In the aftermath of Tohono, attempted detours from the CFC in what essentially are money claims should be coming to an end. Recent rulings in both the Supreme Court and the Federal Circuit confirm that, when “[a]t bottom it is a suit for money,” then “the Court of Federal Claims can provide an adequate remedy, and it therefore belongs in that court.”

Proposal for a “Dual Scheme” model of statutory adjudication for the Australian building and construction industry

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to outline a proposal for a Dual Scheme model of statutory adjudication for the Australian building and construction industry.Design/methodology/approachThe paper deals with the security of payment problem in the Australian construction industry and the legislative response to that problem in New South Wales and elsewhere more generally. The paper highlights deficiencies in current adjudication schemes in Australia and proposes a revised methodology of adjudication by means of the proposed Dual Scheme model. The Dual Scheme is explained in detail and examples are given showing how the Dual Scheme would work in practice.FindingsThe Dual Scheme of adjudication allows for adjudication of “progress claims” (just as they are adjudicated now under the “Defined Scheme”), but also provides for separately adjudicated “money claims” in a similar way to that done under the “Non‐specific Scheme”. Both parties to a construction contract can take advantage of adjudication under a Non‐specific Scheme whilst simultaneously maintaining the relative time and cost benefits of the Defined Scheme in dealing with progress payment claims. Implementation of the proposed Dual Scheme would require new legislation.Originality/valueThe Dual Scheme is not a proposal to merely amalgamate two existing models of adjudication in Australia. Rather, it is a Dual Scheme incorporating the philosophy of two disparate systems of adjudication framed in a companionable form. It is hoped that the Dual Scheme may act as a common starting point for eventual agreement between the various interested groups as to what a national scheme of statutory adjudication in Australia will resemble in the future. The Dual Scheme proposal may be of interest in other jurisdictions where statutory adjudication for the construction industry has been introduced or is being contemplated.

Evaluation of contract in ISTCs

Nick Black questions whether our paper on Scotland's only Independent Sector Treatment Centre (ISTC), in which cataract surgery, knee and hip replacement, and other treatments are delivered to NHS patients by for-profit companies in mainly private facilities is the first independent evaluation.1 Our study is the first and only independent evaluation of public money paid for an ISTC contract in the UK; it showed that in Scotland's only ISTC, the company Netcare may have been paid up to £3 million for treatment that had not been provided to patients in the first year of the contract worth £6 million a year. In contrast, Black's study,2 to which we refer, was a questionnaire survey of patient-reported outcomes of 1895 patients treated in NHS hospitals and 769 patients treated in six ISTCs. This week the Scottish health minister responded to our academic evaluation by deciding not to renew the contract with Netcare and to return the services to the NHS. This is in sharp contrast to England where the £5 billion ISTC programme is still unevaluated, on account of the contracts remaining commercial in confidence. Academic scrutiny of value for money claims cannot be undertaken. Furthermore, unlike Scotland any evaluation of the ISTC programme in England is further hampered by lack of data, and incomplete and poor quality data returns. Although all ISTCs are required to submit hospital episode statistics on all NHS patients treated, the Healthcare Commission (HCC) found that during 2005–2006 fewer than half of them returned any data.3 Of the data returned, 43.4% were missing primary procedure codes and 7.6% had invalid primary procedure codes.4 For 2006–2007, 18.8% of episodes were missing primary procedure codes and 1.3% were invalid.4 Patients attending such centres are healthier and better off than those attending the NHS. Black et al. have shown that patients attending ISTCs are routine and straightforward elective cases – that is, with fewer complications and co-morbidities than other NHS patients – the HCC has shown that ISTCs also treat a lower proportion of patients in the lowest socioeconomic group than the rest of the NHS.3 The contribution of ISTCs to reducing waiting times and improving access cannot be evaluated without complete data on all patients. While patient-reported outcomes are an important aspect of healthcare evaluations they provide a partial picture of access and quality of care. It is unfortunate that the government in England has thus far failed to place the contract data in the pubic domain or to ensure the completeness and quality of routine data on all NHS patients. Unlike Scotland, the lack of data means that policy of using private for-profit companies in the NHS is not subject to proper informed public and parliamentary scrutiny. It's time that England took a leaf from the Scottish health minister's book.

Macroeconomic Variables and Stock Index in India: An Empirical Analysis

This paper attempts to unravel the relationship between the macroeconomic variables and the capital market in Indian context. It considers the monthly data of. several economic variables such as foreign exchange reserves, claims on private sector, wholesale price index, call money rate, index of industrial production, exchange rate and 'broad money'. with those obtained earlier between April 1986 and March 2005. It tries to reveal the relative. influence of these macroeconomic variables on the Sensitive index of the Bombay Stock Exchange. Compared to the earlier attempts. this paper applies the technique of multiple regression analysis and compares tM results. Although there have been some periods of fluctuations. certain variables like foreign exchange reserves, exchange rate, index of industrial production. money supply (M3) and claims on private sedor have considerable influence on the stock market movement. However. a few variables like interest rate and wholesale price index have shown very negligible influence on the stock market. The study conflrms the traditional belief that real economic variables continue to affect the stock market in the post-reform era in India and also highlights the insignificance of certain variables with respect to stock market. The study will be of immense use for the national policy makers, researchers. corporate managers and regulators.

Transgender Tales: Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex and Other Stories of Popular Culture, Sex, and Law

Citing the repeated attention to transgendered characters in today's popular culture, this review essay focuses on Jeffrey Eugenides's Pulitizer-Prize winning novel, Middlesex, whose engaging and delightful protagonist-narrator was mistakenly classified at birth and reared as a girl, only to experience at adolescence gradual transformation into a male. The protagonist's particular medical problem and the story that Eugenides weaves around it allow exploration of two primary threads: First, this essay examines what the protagonist's fictional story adds to the true story of the man now known as David Reimer. Reimer became a notorious test case in the nature-versus-nurture debate about gender after Dr. John Money directed his distraught parents to rear their baby boy as a girl following the accidental loss of his penis. Money publicly proclaimed the treatment successful - promoting the belief that the Reimer family had a well-adjusted daughter and reinforcing the views of scholars who emphasize the social construction of gender. Although the family's later disclosures were utterly inconsistent with Money's claims, Middlesex helps tease out important nuances that Money's eventual disrepute has obscured. In particular, this essay's juxtaposition of the novel and the true story illuminates several prominent issues in family law and policy, including family secrecy, parental autonomy, parental reliance on (often mistaken) experts, and prevailing understandings of sex and gender. Second, this essay analyzes what Middlesex's protagonist and the other transgendered figures in popular culture contribute to the ongoing conversation about legal sex-based classifications, including the male-female requirement for marriage. After a critical examination of both the vocabulary used to discuss sex and gender and the challenges that those like the novel's protagonist pose for the conventional hierarchy, the focus shifts to the law's sex-equality norms, specifically the anti-stereotyping analysis prominent in equal protection doctrine and various modern family laws. Under today's laws, what precisely is the difference between a wife and a husband, beyond pure anatomy? Although recent litigation about transsexuals' marriage claims mostly have failed to take anti-stereotyping analysis to its logical conclusion (despite the arguments of some strategists), nonetheless popular culture and contemporaneous legal developments have brought the current prohibitions on same-sex marriage to the brink of collapse. Assuming that marriage is here to stay (an assumption some feminists contest), the pathbreaking opinion of the majority of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health offers one glimpse of how the law might rethink marriage without an opposite-sex requirement. Yet marriage is just one context that tests the law's commitment to gender equality. The essay concludes with three thought experiments about how the law might treat sex and gender in the future - consistent with the continuing erosion of the traditional understanding revealed through the lens of Middlesex. Although this essay confronts serious and important questions, throughout it maintains a somewhat playful tone that seems fitting for a review of this particular work of fiction and for an exploration of popular culture's mainstreaming of transgender issues.

The Government’s Plans on Civil Justice

The Labour Government's plans for reform of civil justice and of legal aid were announced by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine of Lairg, in his keynote address at the Law Society's Annual Conference held in Cardiff on Saturday 18 October 1997.1 In summary, the package of reforms of civil justice proposed by Lord Woolf2 was to be implemented; there was to be a radical shake-up of legal aid and, in particular, legal aid for most money claims would be abolished on the ground that even poor people could be expected to make conditional fee agreements. Lord Irvine's speech was given just two days before the publication of the Middleton Report.3 Sir Peter Middleton, a former Treasury mandarin, had been asked by Lord Irvine to conduct a lightning review4 of the existing reform proposals on civil justice and legal aid and to advise. His 83-page report broadly endorsed the Woolf package. It also endorsed many of the plans for reform of legal aid proposed by the previous Government, including in particular, a system to achieve control of overall expenditure.5 The writer has consistently opposed the Woolf reforms,6 though that critical position has been a somewhat lonely one. By contrast, the Labour Government's plans for reform of civil legal aid have been widely criticised by lawyers' and consumers' bodies alike. This note is an assessment of the Government's proposals on civil justice.7 In these reforms the Government is simply adopting the ongoing work on implementation that was put in hand by the previous Lord Chancellor Lord Mackay, and that was continued by Lord

Household Saving in an Era of Financial Turmoil, 1975–1984

The structure of savings media has changed greatly in the 1975-1984 period. How have savers responded to these changes? The question is answered by an analysis of annual movement of gross and net additions to financial assets held by households in the form of fixed­ money claims. Gross financial saving is disaggre­ gated by type of institution and debt securities, and household liabilities are shown by type of debt. Net financial saving as a percentage of disposable per­ sonal income yields a savings rate that differs from the rate reported in national income accounts. In the study period, shifts between the various savings media have not been systematically related to yield differentials, a finding that calls for explanation. The article stresses the insights into savers' behavior that can be obtained from the analysis of household financial assets and pleads for greater attention to changes in these assets as a measure of consumer saving.

Creditor Protection in the European Community

I would like in this article to examine and offer an answer to the following question. What measures has the E.C. adopted on creditor protection and what measures is it now preparing in this field? To deal adequately with this one must define creditor. Workers, members (i.e. shareholders) of companies and consumers are creditors. It would be too much to deal with every aspect of protection for all of these. So far as consumers are concerned a brief reference to the Commission's Consumer Protection Programme' will have to suffice, but I shall deal in more detail with the proposal for a Directive on consumer credit. Protection of workers is covered, e.g., by the Directive on collective redundancies, which contains provisions concerning change of an employer and insolvency of an employer2. Here I shall discuss in particular measures which relate to the protection of creditors in general, that is to say, creditors who have money claims, and not measures which apply to particular social groups. The measures I have in mind can be divided according to either form or content. The most important fields in which they are found are the law of procedure, bankruptcy and insolvency law, company law and the law relating to securities. The matter of form depends on the legal instrument used: Directives and Conventions must be considered first. Directives do not have to be transformed verbatim into national law. They are not uniform law and they do allow for flexibility in adapting national law. Directives are expressly prescribed for the purpose of company law by Article 54(3)(g) and Article 56(2) of the E.E.C. Treaty. Under those Articles the Council and the Commission carry out the duty imposed upon them to guarantee freedom of establishment, in particular -

On a Theorem of Arrow: Comment

The paper of K. Nagatani [1] will be useful in correcting a possible misunderstanding in reading my article on the allocation of risk-bearing [2]. I asserted (Section 3) that any optimal allocation of risk-bearing can be achieved by . . . a competitive system involving securities payable in money (emphasis added). The italicized word, can is somewhat ambiguous. As Nagatani notes, my construction requires each economic agent to be aware of what commodity prices, ps, will prevail for each possible state of nature. My construction, therefore, is a contingent-market version of the old idea of perfect foresight. With uncertainty present, it is not required that the future be known in order to achieve optimal allocation, only that commodity prices be known conditional on the state of nature; such knowledge is needed to give meaning to conditional contracts payable in money. Nagatani suggests that since the ex post commodity markets do not exist at the time of writing the contracts for money claims, no individual can in fact know what prices those markets will lead to. Hence, each individual will form a probability distribution for prices holding in each state of nature before trading in money claims, and the outcome will not be the same as it would be if contingent commodity contracts were traded directly. Let me suggest two interpretations which would justify my position. One is an equilibrium interpretation of ex post commodity prices. Clearly, if the correct ex post prices are believed in at the time the money claims markets are operating, they will in fact be achieved if the appropriate state of nature occurs; that is the way they are arrived at in my construction. This does not explain the process by which they are discovered on the market. One story which accomplishes this is to assume that the world consists of a succession of identical lotteries. In each, the allocation takes place in two stages, first a money claims market and then, when the state is revealed, a system of commodity markets. Which state actually occurs in each drawing is a random event with known probabilities. After a sufficiently long period, the commodity prices conditional on each possible state will become known, and the construction given by me will be the equilibrium outcome of this process (I have not investigated its stability). An alternative interpretation is that the definition of a state of the world includes a statement of the prices that will prevail. The money claims, then, are payable conditional on the occurrence of specified possible price vectors. In fact, many contracts in the real world which have some contingent features in them are payable in amounts which are functions of the ex post prices, the returns on common stocks for example. The second interpretation obviously eliminates a good many difficulties; there can be no uncertainty about the prices that will prevail in a given state if those prices are made part of the very definition of the state. But it must be admitted that there are some difficulties with this interpretation. Implicitly, at least, the uncertainties in the model are exogenous to the economic system; but prices are endogenous to it, and this might complicate our understanding of the model.