Category Archives: Macroeconomic policy

S&P Negative Watch for US Flagged Financial Sector as Major Risk

Yes, I know I dissed the S&P report as fundamentally wrongheaded, but as we will discuss shortly, it contained some interesting commentary on the US financial sector that has gotten perilously little notice.

But I’d first like to address the way the media and some blogosphere commentators have hopelessly muddied the issues on the downgrade scaremongering. One is the “we depend on foreigners to fund our budget deficit” hogwash. As Michael Pettis pointed out, the idea that the US is funding its federal deficit from foreigners is a widespread misconstruction.

S&P Negative Watch Smackdown Wrap

One of the few upsides of the patently silly negative watch announcement for US Treasury bonds was that it elicited colorful and instructive commentary (see our view, along with Mark Thoma’s and Barry Ritholtz’s at the New York Times’ Room for Debate). Some sightings:

Satyajit Das: Voodoo Economics Redux

n the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, an economics teacher, played by Ben Stein, launches into an improvised soliloquy: “… Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before? The Laffer Curve. Anyone know what this says? It says that at this point on the revenue curve, you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as at this point. This is very controversial. Does anyone know what Vice President Bush called this in 1980? Anyone? Something-d-o-o economics. “Voodoo” economics.”

In the late twentieth century, US President Ronald Reagan discovered voodoo economics. In framing policy responses to the global financial crisis, central bankers and governments have increasingly embraced more exotic forms of voodoo.

Scott Fullwiler: Paul Krugman—The Conscience of a Neo-Liberal?

By Scott Fullwiler, Associate Professor of Economics at Wartburg College

The old saying that bad press is better than no press is definitely true in this case. Without the advent of the blogosphere, our work would likely never even be noticed by the likes of Paul Krugman, so the fact that he’s writing about us (here and here) this weekend at least means we’re doing better than that, even if his assessment of us is far less than glowing. At the same time, and particularly given that Krugman is so widely read, it’s imperative to at the very least set the record straight on where MMT and Krugman differ. I should note before I start that others have done very good critiques already that overlap mine in several places (see here, here, here, and here).

Krugman makes three incorrect assumptions about what MMT policy proposals actually are while also demonstrating a lack of understanding of our modern monetary system (as is generally verified by volumes of empirical research on the monetary system by both MMT’ers and non-MMTer’s). These are the following:

Assumption A: The size of the monetary base directly (or indirectly, for that matter) affects inflation if we’re not in a “liquidity trap”

Assumption B: MMT’s preferred fiscal policy approach or strategy—Abba Lerner’s functional finance—is Non-Ricardian

Assumption C: Bond markets alone set interest rates on the national debt of a sovereign currency issuer operating under flexible exchange rates

Assumptions A and C are central to the Neo-Liberal macroeconomic model. Assumption B is a common misconception about MMT and a common perception of Neo-Liberals about the nature and macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy (i.e., Neo-Liberals often believe that activist fiscal policy is Non-Ricardian).

While MMT’ers argue that all three assumptions are false, one does not need to necessarily agree. The point is that to critique MMT on the basis of assumptions that are inconsistent with MMT is to actually not critique MMT at all. It is a straw man.

Richard Alford: Fed Policy, Market Failures and Irony

By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. “..there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.” H L Mencken One […]

Marshall Auerback: The Economic Policy Behind Intervention in Libya Chases Its Own Tail

By Marshall Auerback, a hedge fund manager and portfolio strategist. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0

Any intentions of boosting the economy will be obliterated by our spending on military actions.

As my friend Chuck Spinney has noted in an exchange of emails, President Obama’s actions in Libya show that he has caved in to the “humanitarian interventionists” in his administration, as well as British/French/American post-colonial and oil interests. The result: yet another war with a Muslim country that has done nothing to us. Additionally, the fact that we are doing nothing to staunch the Saudi/Bahraini/Yemeni crackdowns smacks of hypocrisy and will hurt us even more on the Arab streets.

The Stigmatization of the Unemployed

One thing I have never understood in America is the way that people who lose their jobs become pariahs in the job market. We’ve now had a spate of commentary on the fact that official unemployment figures are looking a tad less dreadful by dint of the fact that increasing numbers of the long term unemployed have dropped out of the job market entirely. Even the conservative Washington Post woke up last week, Rip Van Winkle like, to take note of the growing number of long-term unemployed. Bizarrely, or perhaps as a fit illustration of the spirit of the day, the article was titled: “Hidden workforce challenges domestic economic recovery.” In other words, they are Bad People because if the economy ever picks up, they might come out of the woodwork and start looking for jobs!

Will Ireland Threaten to Default?

We were surprised that Ireland capitulated so quickly to pressure from its Eurozone confreres and accepted a punitive bailout of its government, when it was in fact its banks that were a mess. As we noted in November:

Note that the Irish government is still holding out for a banking-system-only bailout, even if the funds are channeled through the government. Since I am not aware of any IMF bailout being done on this format, it’s likely to be a sticking point if the Irish refuse to back down (recall that the government itself is under no immediate funding pressure; they have six months before they need to go to market, which is an eternity in crisis-land).

The other major bone of contention is Ireland’s super-low corporation tax, which served as a significant incentive for multinationals to set up shop in Ireland. The Germans and French are insistent that it be increased to balance the budget. The Irish objections here are plausible, particularly since the low rates are a cornerstone of their national strategy (do you want 12.5%, the current corporate tax rate, of a decent sized number or 25% of a vastly smaller number?). The Irish have made it clear that they are non-negotiable on this point, and as keenly as the rest of the eurozone would like to beat Ireland back into line, I doubt they’d be willing to risk negotiations failing over this issue.

Fast forward, the Irish agree to a deal, the ruling party suffers substantial losses precisely for accepting the terms demanded by the eurozone and the IMF, and the new incumbents are much less willing to play nicely with counterparties who are engaging in what amounts to “every man out for himself” behavior, no matter what spin is put on their demands.

EU Puts Periphery Countries on the Rack

For those of you unfamiliar with medieval implements of torture, the rack was believed to be quite effective in extracting information, but generally by having a potential victim watch it in use, with the obvious threat that he was next unless he cooperated. The rack was not only terribly painful, but like most old school methods of torture, often crippled those who survived. (Civilized people, which now clearly excludes our President and those in influential positions in the Pentagon, now recognize that torture is good only for producing phony confessions). It was also employed in particularly gory executions, such as drawing and quartering.

The Eurozone seems to be using similar medieval methods on its debt-laden periphery countries with far less clear understanding that serious damage to the subject is a likely outcome.

This Is How QE Really Works

QE2 Is Equivalent to Issuing Treasury Bills. In actual fact, all QE2 does is drain the real economy of interest income by swapping an interest-bearing government liability for a non-interest bearing government liability. This decreases aggregate demand in the economy. So the real economy effects of QE are to slightly lower aggregate demand. This is offset by changing interest rate expectations, which alter private portfolio preferences and risk premia, leading to credit growth, leverage and speculation, forces which should pump up the real economy. The Fed had intended to lower interest rates via the lowered risk premia. To date, the Fed has lowered risk premia. But this has also provided the tender for speculation and leverage. Moreover, the Fed has also raised inflation expectations to boot, causing interest rates to rise and working at cross-purposes with the lowered risk premia. Thus, QE2 has only been successful insofar as it has increased business credit and raised asset prices. In my view, QE2 has been a bust as it adds volatility to the system and will have negative unintended consequences down the line.

Spiralling into the Moussaka

From the morning links

Explosive growth of unemployment recorded in Greece, with a total number of unemployed is at 733,645, according to data from the Greek Statistical Authority (ELSTAT) that were released Wednesday.

The percentage of registered unemployed reached 14.8% in December 2010 an increase of one percentage point compared with November.

Richard Koo: How the West is Repeating Japan’s Mistakes

Richard Koo’s book The Holy Grail of Economics is the definitive work on what he calls “balance sheet recessions”. He explain, among other things, why QE2 is not likely to be successful.

Bernanke Blames the Global Financial Crisis on China

They must put something in the water at the Fed, certainly the Board of Governors and the New York Fed. Everyone there, or at least pretty much everyone who gets presented to the media, seems to have an advanced form of mental illness, namely, an pronounced inability to admit error. While many in public life suffer from this particular affliction, it appears pervasive at the Fed. Examples abound including an overt ones like an article attempting to bolster the party line that no one, and hence certainly not the central bank, could have seen the housing bubble coming, or subtler ones, like a long paper on the shadow banking system that I did not bother to shred because doing it right would have tried reader patience Among other things, it endeavored to present the shadow banking system as virtuous (a necessary position since the Fed bailed it out) because it was all tied to securtization and hence credit intermediation. That framing conveniently omits the role of credit default swaps and how they multiplied the worst credit risks well beyond real economy exposure levels and concentrated them in highly geared financial firms.

Another example of the “it is never the Fed’s fault” disease reared its ugly head in the context of the G20 meetings.

Budgeting, Australian Style

Even if you don’t get all the political and business references, I suspect you’ll appreciate this video. Hat tip readers hum and Hubert: