Category Archives: The dismal science

Bill Black: Two EU Finance Ministers Throw Their Bosses and Nations Under the Bus

The finance ministers of Italy and Serbia have just publicly thrown their heads of state and their nations under the bus. In a testament to the crippling effect of the belief that “there is no alternative” (TINA) to austerity, these finance ministers have insisted on bleeding economies that are in desperate need of fiscal stimulus. Their pursuit of economic malpractice is so determined that they eagerly sought out opportunities to embarrass the democratically elected head of state in Serbia when he dared to support competent economic policies.

Ignacio Portes: Paul Singer v. Argentina – Where Did All That Debt Come From?

With Argentina’s payment to the holders of its restructured debt on June 30th in limbo at the Bank of New York Mellon, blocked by Federal Judge Thomas Griesa, and the 30 day grace period to official default ticking away, financial pundits have taken a keen interest in the biggest debt struggle in memory.

Some have been very critical of both the judge’s interpretation of the pari passu clause that created this mess and, more importantly, of his damaging precedent. But no one seems able to resist adding digs at Argentina, even when generally supporting its position in the litigation.

Philip Pilkington: Beware the Scholastics! Thoughts on the Economics Curriculum Reform Movement

With the Rethinking Economics student movement in full swing the topic of economics curriculum reform is once again on the table. For those of you who read this blog and are uncomfortable with this: sorry, you’ve already lost that debate, you just haven’t realised it yet. The question is now which direction this curriculum reform will take.

Randy Wray: “Debt-Free Money” – A Non Sequitur in Search of a Policy

Yves here. I must confess that I am at a loss to understand the deep emotional reactions some readers have to MMT. It’s like raging at a thermometer because it shows you your body temperature. Virtually all of the complaints about MMT are based on a failure to understand what it says about how money works. MMT is descriptive of our current system, and it also has a message that progressives (the real kind, not the Democratic fauxgressive kind) ought to welcome, that the Federal government as a sovereign does not need to run a balance budget, and that a balanced budget is in fact destructive when the economy is as slack as it is now. That means the government not only can but should spend more, which is in contrast to all those barmy arguments about how we can’t spend to [fill in your priorities, have national health care, improve our infrastructure, feed low income kids in school, etc.]. If you don’t like the Federal government directing that much spending, there’s a remedy for that too: revenue sharing, which was instituted under that great liberal Richard Nixon, who though the Federal government raised revenues more efficiently than state and local governments, but state and local government were better at setting spending priorities.

MMT provides a basis for rejecting neoliberalism and austerity, and people who ought to embrace it are instead being told falsehoods about it and are becoming skeptical. That assures that the current crop of looters can continue their work unperturbed.

However, MMT does require that you turn the conventional stories about money inside-out. It takes some mental rewiring to understand it, and that degree of reorientation seems to be a big reason for the heated reactions.

Capital is Not Back: On Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital in the 21st Century’

Yves here. This article pokes at a topic near and dear to my heart, which is the generally reverential treatment of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. It appears to be a classic example of the cognitive bias called halo effect, in which people have a tendency to see things as all good or all bad. Because there is a lot to recommend Piketty’s work, for instance, the fact that it is exceptionally written, that it has made inequality into one of the hottest topics in economics, and that Piketty has done an admirable and exhaustive job of finding and analyzing the returns on certain types of income producing assets are all highly commendable.

But as readers may know, one of my pet peeves is that Piketty has made a very strong claim, in the form of his formula r>g, or the rate of return on capital (which he also calls “profit”) exceeds the growth rate of the economy, when his data falls short of what would be necessary to prove that assertion.

BIS Warns About Destabilizing Low Interest Rates

The financial media is all atwitter (no pun intended) over the Bank of International Settlement’s just released annual report, since it shook a stern finger at central banks for keeping super low interest rates and warned them about the difficulty of renormalizing without kicking up a lot of upheaval.

Randy Wray: The Rise of Monetary Cranks and Fixing What Ain’t Broke

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, we all wax “desperate with imagination”, looking for explanation. For solution. For retribution!

The financial system is rotten. Our banking regulators and supervisors failed us in the run-up to the crisis, they failed us in the response to the crisis, and they are failing us in the reform that we expected in the aftermath of the crisis.

Why Did GDP Fall So Dramatically Last Quarter?

Robert Pollin, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, gives a good high-level discussion of why the GDP results for last quarter were such a train wreck. Remember that analysts and economists were blindsided; no one expected to see GDP fall at that rate. As we wrote, the tendency among pundits has been to treat the results as of not much concern, since that period is past and some of plunge can be attributed to one-off factors, most importantly, abnormally cold weather. Pollin explains why this explanation is insufficient.

Why the Rich Aren’t Job Creators

This is a short talk by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer, who among other things, was the first non-family investor in Amazon. Hanauer in very simple and effective terms debunks the “rich are job creators” myth. Even though the video is going viral (now at over 1 million views on YouTube, it is important enough that I wanted to make sure NC readers saw it and circulated it.

Hanauer’s remarks illustrates the degree to which propaganda has overcome commercial common sense.

Randy Wray: Modern Monetary Theory – The Basics

How economists that are otherwise sympathetic to modern monetary theory nevertheless misconstrue some of its fundamental observations. For instance, those like Paul Krugman who are generally of the Keynesian persuasion like MMT’s “deficit owl” approach. Krugman acts as if he would really like to stop worrying about the deficit so that he could advocate an “as much as it takes” approach to government spending. The problem is that he just cannot quite get a handle on the monetary operations that are required. Won’t government run out? What, is government going to create money “out of thin air”? Where will all the money come from?

Why Banks Must Be Allowed to Create Money

Ann Pettifor has penned an effective rebuttal of the Chicago Plan, which has been taken up in the UK as “Positive Money”. Its advocates call for private banks to have their ability to create money taken from them, and put in the hands of a committee, independent of the state, that would decide on the level of money creation. Banks would be restricted to lending money that they already have on deposit.

Pettifor explains how the enthusiasm for the Chicago Plan rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of money and confusion about its relationship to credit. While readers may not like the notion that credit, and therefore money creation, is best left in the hands of banks, the problem is much like the one that Churchill articulated about democracy: it looks like the worst possible system until you consider the alternatives.

Philip Pilkington: ‘Uncertainty’ in Contemporary DSGE Modelling – Not Even Wrong

Yves here. This post might seem a smidge technical for generalist readers, but have faith. Pilkington uses DSGE models, a widely used type of macroeconomic forecasting model, to demonstrate the prevalence of intellectual bankruptcy in economics. As he writes,

The level of scholarship in contemporary economics is absolutely shocking. Contemporary theorists just pick up on buzzwords that they hear in the media and then assume that they have understood them. Then they scramble to build some arcane model or other in which they assure others that they have captured the meaning of the buzzword in question. The mathematics then becomes a cloak hiding the fact that they have never bothered to actually think through the concepts they are using.

This is frighteningly similar to something I wrote:

That was one of the scary things I finally figured out during my last visit to DC. I thought people constructed policy first and then reduced it to soundbites to sell it. I came to realize that most people in DC reason from soundbites (as in their analysis and policy design is constructed from soundbites from the get-go).

More Finance, More Growth? More Finance, More Crises?

Contrary to conventional wisdom in economics, a bigger role for finance, also known as “financial deepening,” has gone well beyond the point of maximum return. It is promoting more crises rather than more growth.