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Recorded February 26, 1917 in New York. Not recommended when waking up on a hung-over morning.
Attempts at Liberty — Versuche über die Freiheit __________________________________________________________ A Bilingual Blog / Ein zweisprachiger Blog
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Little wonder that wood-pellet production has been described by conservation organisations as ‘an ecological catastrophe’. So the net result of giving Drax £450 million a year in subsidies to meet our EU ‘green’ target — and this sum is due to double when its conversion to biomass is complete — is that far from reducing the UK’s carbon emissions, we are actually increasing them while at the same time doing huge damage to the environment. And to make matters worse, we are all funding this lunatic exercise through hugely increased electricity bills.
Image credit. Zurück vom Fischfang. Back from fishing. |
By voluntarily issuing debt to match its net spending, government borrowing from the private sector reduces the risk that public deficits will be inflationary.
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As a matter of accounting, when one of the three sectors (government, non-government, and external) is in surplus, at least one of the other two must be in deficit. For the private sector to (net) save ( = build up, as a sector, a surplus of S - I > 0), at one other sector must be in deficit, which is, per quiz-assumption, not the case. Hence, under the stated conditions, the private sector cannot be saving / be in surplus.
A healthyly growing economy (with no episodes of exaggerated inflation) will tend to be accompanied by a growing money supply, both in the realtive short-term and over longer historical periods. What matters is not the money supply per se, but its relationship with the level of capacity utilization in the economy. If productivity gains are sensibly shared between capital (profits) and labour (wages), growth may be continuous, even in the face of full employment, and a growing, non-inflationary money supply will be observed.
In fact, I would expect economic growth in modern times to be credit-driven, and hence accompanied by an expanding money supply.
Government spending is not dependent on government borrowing from the private sector and hence, in principle, cannot be (inflation-)constrained by cautioning private lenders. Only subject to voluntary/political and resource constraints, the government can spend as much as it likes, on any projects it chooses to dedicate itself to. Whether its spending is inflationary or not, depends on the projects it chooses to support with its spending and the economy's level of activity at the time in question. Whether it borrows or not, the government may or may not embark on inflationary spending. If its decides to borrow, there will always be private bond investors happy to take advantage of a riskfree source of income. A borrowers' strike to prevent inflation is not likely.Ob Staatsausgaben inflationär wirken, ist eine Frage des Zustands der Wirtschaft. Private Investoren haben weder die Macht (funktional), noch das Interesse, durch Enthaltsamkeit am Anleihe-Markt die Staatsausgaben einzudämmen. Sie sind immer dankbarer Abnehmer einer risikolosen Einkommensquelle.
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Image credit. Let's see what's behind it. |
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“We must go round about to find the roots of our own beliefs. In the general mass of notions and sentiments that make up an ideology, those concerned with economic life play a large part, and economics itself (that is the subject as it is taught in universities and evening classes and pronounced upon in leading articles) has always been partly a vehicle for the ruling ideology of each period as well as partly a method of scientific investigation.”
Joan Robinson (1962), Economic Philosophy, Ch.1
Joan Robinson is right. Through her own excellent work, she has made a great effort at being critical of ideology. I would like to add that not only the ruling ideology (in reality a complicated compound, if identifiable at all) deserves careful ongoing scrutiny but any ideology, including the ideology of the dominated and those seeking liberation.Not everyone is prepared to search for his own ideological errors, to begin with; and every person, even the most self-critical one, has blind spots that make him incapable of seeing his own biases.This is why I am a strong believer in (the possibility of) mass political competition, i.e. democracy, which is not primarily a mechanism to rule but one to question one another and keep us inclined to compromise as we all are prone to going-over-the-top, owing to our susceptibility to ideological conceit.
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Remember the – Interview with Eugene Fama – that the New Yorker’s John Cassidy published on January 13, 2010.Eugene Fama is an economist at the University of Chicago and is most known for his work promoting the so-called efficient markets hypothesis.[...]The efficient markets hypothesis has been a core of mainstream macroeconomics and asserts that financial markets are driven by individuals who on average are correct and so the market allocates resources in the most efficient pattern possible. There are various versions of the EMH (weak to strong) but all suggest that excess returns are impossible because information is efficiently imparted to all “investors”. Investors are assumed to be fully informed so that they can make the best possible decisions.
Fama told John Cassidy that the financial crisis was not caused by a break down in financial markets and denied that asset price bubbles exist. He also claimed that the proliferation of sub-prime housing loans in the US “was government policy” – referring to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who he claims “were instructed to buy lower grade mortgages”.
When it was pointed out that these agencies were a small part of the market as a whole and that the “the subprime mortgage bond business overwhelmingly a private sector phenomenon”, Fama claimed that the collapse in housing prices was nothing to do with the escalation in sub-prime mortgages but rather:What happened is we went through a big recession, people couldn’t make their mortgage payments, and, of course, the ones with the riskiest mortgages were the most likely not to be able to do it. As a consequence, we had a so-called credit crisis. It wasn’t really a credit crisis. It was an economic crisis.
John Cassidy checked if he had heard it right asking “surely the start of the credit crisis predated the recession?” to which Fama replied:I don’t think so. How could it? People don’t walk away from their homes unless they can’t make the payments. That’s an indication that we are in a recession.Once again he was prompted to think about that – “So you are saying the recession predated August 2007″, to which Fama replied:Yeah. It had to, to be showing up among people who had mortgages.He was then asked “what caused the recession if it wasn’t the financial crisis”?(Laughs) That’s where economics has always broken down. We don’t know what causes recessions. Now, I’m not a macroeconomist so I don’t feel bad about that. (Laughs again.) …Fama asserted that “the financial markets were a casualty of the recession, not a cause of it”.Later, in defending the efficiency of financial markets, Fama wondered how many economists:… would argue that the world wasn’t made a much better place by the financial development that occurred from 1980 onwards. The expansion of worldwide wealth—in developed countries, in emerging countries—all of that was facilitated, in my view, to a large extent, by the development of international markets and the way they allow saving to flow to investments, in its most productive uses. Even if you blame this episode on financial innovation, or whatever you want to blame, would that wipe out the previous thirty years of development?.And despite him confessing that he is “not a macroeconomist” he wasn’t backward in using his position to write a stringent macroeconomic attack on the US government fiscal plans, which all the evidence now shows saved millions of jobs. Not enough jobs were saved but without the stimulus, the world would have still been wallowing in the depths of Great Depression 2.0.
The logic he used came straight out of the introductory mainstream macroeconomics textbooks and he didn’t have the guile to realise it was both operationally flawed (as a description of what actually happens) and empirically bereft (none of the major predictions of the model ever come to fruition).
Image credit. A beautiful portrait of me at a time when my economic library was less than complete. |
... to be absolutely clear what a paradox of thrift entails. It was one of the fallacies of composition that Keynes and others considered established a prima facie case for considering the study of macroeconomics as a separate discipline. Prior to that the neo-classical (the modern mainstream) had ignored the particular characteristics of the macro economy that require it to be studies separately.They assumed you could just add up the microeconomic relations (individual consumers add to market segment add to industry add to economy). They overcame the unresolvable aggregation problem by fudging it and assuming that there was a representative firm or representative industry (that all sub-units behaved like). But in fact, because of this fudge, the mainstream had no aggregate theory anyway.But as a consequence they just assumed that what held for an individual would hold for all individuals. This led the mainstream opponents to expose the most important error of the mainstream reasoning – they simply ignored the Fallacy of Composition that was endemic to analyses that tried to reason generally from the specific.The paradox of thrift was one such example. Accordingly, if an individual tried to increase his/her individual saving (and saving ratio) they would probably succeed if they were disciplined enough. But if all individuals tried to do this at the same time, then the impact of lost consumption on aggregate demand (spending) would be such that the economy would plunge into a recession.As a result, incomes would fall and individuals would be thwarted in their attempts to increase their savings in total (because saving was a function of income). So what works for one will not work for all. This was overlooked by the mainstream.Paul Krugman captured it in this way in his New York Times blog When consumers capitulate:… one of the high points of the semester, if you’re a teacher of introductory macroeconomics, comes when you explain how individual virtue can be public vice, how attempts by consumers to do the right thing by saving more can leave everyone worse off. The point is that if consumers cut their spending, and nothing else takes the place of that spending, the economy will slide into a recession, reducing everyone’’s income. In fact, consumers’ income may actually fall more than their spending, so that their attempt to save more backfires — a possibility known as the paradox of thrift.The term paradox of thrift entered the nomenclature during the Great Depression as Keynes and others saw this particular problem as providing a prima facie case for government deficit spending (the something else that “takes the place of that spending”).But recognising the importance of the fallacy of composition in mainstream economics at the time was a devastating blow to its credibility. How short our memories are? How the mainstream ideas that were discredited so comprehensively in that period have been able to reassert themselves as the dominant discourse is another story (of puzzling dimensions).
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As I have noted many times, the costs of recession are both immediate and long-term. The immediate impacts are the lost incomes from rising unemployment as output gaps widen.
Also, working hours usually decline, participation rates fall and productivity slumps.
Hysteresis:The longer term costs are then realised as the growth path flattens out due to the interruption to capacity building as investment stalls and the skill atrophies in the labour force.Imposing fiscal austerity during a downturn — [a major feature of the Euro as demanded in the Maastricht Treaty] — magnifies these short- and long-run costs. Which is why it is lunacy to invoke discretionary fiscal deficit cuts in the name of some misguided notion of intergenerational fairness (reducing debt burden for children type misguided notions).The fiscal austerity ensures that the grandchildren suffer diminished prospects relative to what might have been.My early work in the mid-1980s, which was a critique of the neo-liberal mainstream arguments about ‘natural rates of unemployment’ was focused on developing the concept of hysteresis.
This is the idea that where you [are] is a product of where you have been. It is an important concept in economics because it undermines the mainstream notion that the long-run is independent of the short-run.For the layperson, this might be represented by the claim that pursuing some low inflation target no matter how much unemployment is created is not a problem because in the ‘long-run’ the unemployment will be at the ‘natural rate’ anyway. Of[ ]course[,] the notion is nonsense.The long-run is thus never independent of the state of aggregate demand in the short-run. There is no invariant long-run state that is purely supply determined. History is a series of interlinked (co-dependent) short-runs.By stimulating output growth now, governments also help relieve longer-term constraints on growth – investment is encouraged and workers become more mobile.The problem compounds though, because the supply-side of the economy (potential) is influenced by the demand path taken and the longer is a recession (that is, the output gap), the broader the negative hysteretic forces become.At some point, the productive capacity of the economy starts to fall towards the sluggish demand-side of the economy and the output gap closes at much lower levels of economic activity.The following diagram is a stylised representation of how the demand-side and supply-sides interact following a recession to which helps us understand the long-run losses that arise if recessions are not prevented.Unlike the mainstream macroeconomics approach, which assumes that the ‘long-run’ is supply-determined (by technology and population growth) and invariant to the demand conditions in the economy at any point in time, the diagram shows that the supply-side of the economy responds to particular demand conditions.In terms of the following diagram, the potential output path is denoted by the green solid line noting the dotted green segment is tantamount to our red line in the above graph.The potential output is the level of real output it would be forthcoming if all the available collective capacity (including Labour and equipment) was being fully utilised.The diagram assumes, for simplicity, that potential real GDP assumes some constant growth in productive capacity driven by a smooth investment trajectory up until the point where it starts to flatten out.If we assume that at the peak the economy was working at full capacity – that is, there was no output gap – then we can tell a story of what happens following an aggregate demand failure. The solid blue line is the actual path of real GDP.You can see that the output gap opens up quickly as real GDP departs from the potential real GDP line. The area A measures the real output gap for the first x-quarters following the Trough.As the economy starts growing again as aggregate demand starts to recover (perhaps on the back of a fiscal stimulus, perhaps as consumption or net exports improve) after the Trough, the real output gap start[s] to close.However, the persistence of the output gap over this period starts to undermine investment plans as firms become pessimistic about the future state of aggregate demand.At some point, investment starts to decline and two things are observed: (a) the recovery in real output does not accelerate due to the constrained private demand; and (b) the supply-side of the economy (potential) starts to respond (that is, is influenced) by the path of aggregate demand takes over time.Remember investment has dual characteristics. It adds to demand (spending) in the current period but adds to productive capacity in the future periods. It thus influences aggregate demand (now) and aggregate supply (later) – and that interdependency is crucial for understanding hysteresis.As the recession endures, the capital stock of a nation either remains static or in extreme cases (such as in Greece) it will contract.The pessimism by firms begins to reduce the potential real output of the economy (denoted by the divergence between the solid green line and the dotted green line).The area B denotes a declining output gap arising from both these demand-side and supply-side effects. At some point, actual real output reaches potential real output – meaning the output gap is closed – but the overall growth rate is much lower than would have been the case if the economy has continued on its previous real output potential trajectory.The entrenched recession [has] thus not only caused major national income losses while the output gap was open but is also made that the growth in national income possible in this economy is much lower and the nation, in material terms, is poorer as a consequence.Moreover, the inflation barrier (that is, the point at which nominal aggregate demand is greater than the real capacity of the economy to absorb it) occurs at lower actual real output levels.The estimated costs of the recession and fiscal austerity are much larger than the mainstream will ever admit.The point of the diagram is thus that the supply-side of the economy (potential) is influenced by the demand path taken.Those who advocate austerity and the massive short-term costs that accompany it fail to acknowledge these inter-temporal costs.
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