The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014.
The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014.
The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014.
The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014.
The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014. The book will be about 180 pages long. Given the time constraints I plan to devote most of my blog time over the next 3 months to the production of the book. I will of-course break that pattern when there is a major data release and/or some influential person says something stupid or something sensible. I hope the daily additions will be of interest to you all. A lot has to be done! Because the drafting has to be tighter than the normal stream of consciousness that forms my usual blogs, the daily quotient is likely to be shorter.
The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014. The book will be about 180 pages long. Given the time constraints I plan to devote most of my blog time over the next 3 months to the production of the book. I will of-course break that pattern when there is a major data release and/or some influential person says something stupid or something sensible. I hope the daily additions will be of interest to you all. A lot has to be done! Because the drafting has to be tighter than the normal stream of consciousness that forms my usual blogs, the daily quotient is likely to be shorter.
The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014. The book will be about 180 pages long. Given the time constraints I plan to devote most of my blog time over the next 3 months to the production of the book. I will of-course break that pattern when there is a major data release and/or some influential person says something stupid or something sensible. I hope the daily additions will be of interest to you all. A lot has to be done! Because the drafting has to be tighter than the normal stream of consciousness that forms my usual blogs, the daily quotient is likely to be shorter.
The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014. The book will be about 180 pages long. Given the time constraints I plan to devote most of my blog time over the next 3 months to the production of the book. I will of-course break that pattern when there is a major data release and/or some influential person says something stupid or something sensible. I hope the daily additions will be of interest to you all. A lot has to be done! Because the drafting has to be tighter than the normal stream of consciousness that forms my usual blogs, the daily quotient is likely to be shorter.
The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014. The book will be about 180 pages long. Given the time constraints I plan to devote most of my blog time over the next 3 months to the production of the book. I will of-course break that pattern when there is a major data release and/or some influential person says something stupid or something sensible. I hope the daily additions will be of interest to you all. A lot has to be done! Because the drafting has to be tighter than the normal stream of consciousness that forms my usual blogs, the daily quotient is likely to be shorter.
The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014. The book will be about 180 pages long. Given the time constraints I plan to devote most of my blog time over the next 3 months to the production of the book. I will of-course break that pattern when there is a major data release and/or some influential person says something stupid or something sensible. I hope the daily additions will be of interest to you all. A lot has to be done! Because the drafting has to be tighter than the normal stream of consciousness that forms my usual blogs, the daily quotient is likely to be shorter. I also have some happy new year comments at the end today! But if you get bored before then – Happy New Year!
I am not doing much work today. But I was organising some snippets that I collected last week and I thought I would pass this one on – it doesn’t need much analysis – it is from the chief economist at the European Central Bank, Peter Praet who gave an – Interview with La Stampa – last weekend. While the interview was focused on Italy specifically, he presented the sort of message that we are used to getting from him and the ECB in general. A sort of warped triumphalism – extolling the success of the Euro and the role played by the ECB in achieving that success. And then, as is often the case, straying from the brief as a central banker and lecturing all and sundry on the need for more fiscal discipline (meaning increase the vandalism quotient)! It makes me laugh that when it suits them these central bankers cry that they should be independent from government but then at other times of convenience they assume they can use their “official independence” to lecture governments on how to behave. Anyway, Praet thinks the Eurozone is a big success and the policy makers have some “major” and “enormous achievements” under their belts. The interview was in English but not a dialect I understand.
The Financial Times article (December 19, 2013) – The long farewell to quantitative easing – concluded such: “Quantitative easing has demonstrated to politicians everywhere that it is possible to finance government deficits simply by printing money, a fact which had become obscure in the developed economies in previous decades. The umbilical link, previously unchallenged, between running a budget deficit and the requirement to sell bonds has been broken in the mind of the political system. Who knows what the long-term effects might be”. While mistakenly thinking crediting reserve accounts is activating any printing press it is true that there is no requirement to sell bonds to run government deficits. Today I am updating my analysis of the latest flow of funds data in the US. The US Federal Reserve recently put out the latest – Z.1 Financial Accounts of the United States – aka the Flow of Funds, Balance Sheets and Integrated Macroeconomic Accounts. If the FT author had have been studying this and related data he would have known years ago that there was no functional relationship between government net spending and its habit of issuing debt to the private sector. The former is financially unconstrained while the latter is just a system of corporate welfare. But recently, the government has given the game way by being the dominant purchaser of its own debt. Hysterical (as in comical) when you think about it!
The Governor of the RBA appeared before the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics yesterday (December 18, 2013). He told the Committee that the economic growth that we experienced leading up to the crisis in 2008 was unlikely to be repeated but his assessment was largely ideological in nature – in the sense that he implicitly eschewed a fundamental re-appraisal of the policy structures in the economy and the way in which national income is distributed. He thus rejected (tacitly) a return to fiscal activism claiming the public “debt dynamic” militated against that. He admitted the limits of monetary policy as an expansionary force. And he implicitly ignored the fact that the on-going failure of real wages to keep track of productivity growth meant that if household consumption expenditure was to grow it would see a return to increasing private debt to unsustainable levels, as occurred in the decade leading up to the crisis. He acknowledged that households were much more cautious now given the heavy debt levels they were carrying but didn’t acknowledge that this meant that the fiscal surpluses of that era were also unsustainable and that deficits were needed to offset the drain from the external deficits and the cautiousness of the private domestic sector. The journalists thus published all the wrong headlines and stories and the public is none the wiser. We remain locked into a neo-liberal option set that will deliver sub-trend growth and rising unemployment. The Governor even had the audacity to say that the unemployment rate (at 5.8 per cent) was low by historical standards, which in itself is false (depending on where history starts) and ignores the fact that our broad labour wastage exceeds 15 per cent of the willing labour force at present.
I have been travelling today a lot and so haven’t had much time to write. I have been reading early (1970s and 1980s) documents in recent days relating to the debate that preceded the establishment of the Eurozone. I have read them before, at the time they were released in many cases, but they provide a salutary reminder of how the political and economic reality in Europe diverged with catastrophic consequences for millions of people that live there. There was ample analysis and supporting evidence in the late 1970s to tell us that the creation of a common monetary union in the form that was eventually agreed in the 1990s would fail. But even now, with that failure for all to see, the same dynamics that predicate against any reforms that might create a strong federal fiscal capacity, are present in the discussions surrounding the creation of a Single Supervisory Mechanism to regulate banks and protect their depositors. The Germans, exhibiting all their irrational paranoia about inflation, are using their political weight to influence the design of the banking policy and the likely outcomes are looking decidedly deficient. They are doomed to fail if subjected to a stern test.
This is the first part in what might be several blogs. I will see where my curiosity takes me. Today I want to invoke that well-known piece of inductive reasoning the – Duck Test. We all should know how that goes. But consider this reasoning. We have an institution that is 100 per cent government owned. It borrows millions and its liabilities are 100 per cent guaranteed by the federal government. It spends, I mean lends millions each year at very low rates to all manner of firms, organisations and even builds infrastructure. It also takes equity positions (provides capital) to a range of enterprises. It pays no tax having the same status as the central bank. It is not a duck but looks very much like a government fiscal entity. Welcome to the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (Reconstruction Credit Institute) or as it is now known the – KfW. This bank was created in 1948 as a German vehicle to faciliate the infrastructure rebuilding under the Marshall Plan. It has since grown (and diversified) into one of the largest banks in Germany (taken its main business units into account) and pumps millions of Euros in the domestic economy and the export sector (via IPEX, its 100 per cent owned subsidiary). It is a major reason why the public debt ratio in Germany is 80 per cent rather than close to 100 per cent. It is a major reason why the federal deficit has been reduced without scorching the German economy. It is a story about smoke-and-mirrors accounting, German-style.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of modern monetary theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
When the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) of European Parliament considered the 2012 Report from the European Central Bank, the Rapporteur of the Committee and Deputy President of the EP, Gianni Pittela tendered the – Draft Report – on June 11, 2013. The ECB presented its – Annual Report 2012 to the Committee on April 24, 2013. The ECB is accountable to the EP and this Committee was exercising its political functions under that relationship. Under the heading Monetary Policy, the draft report contained two interesting items (9 and 10). By the time the amendments were finalised you learned a lot about politics in Europe and why the current system is unworkable.
There are seven graphs in the paper. An Excel spreadsheet was involved. Shonky stuff alert! R&R are back with another attention-seeking effort after they were disgraced when their Excel manipulation that just happened to generate ideologically-convenient results was discovered to be shonky (in the extreme). This time is not different though. As in all their so-called historical insights the pair conflate monetary regimes across time and at points of time, which means most of their conclusions are erroneous. While their insolvency threshold has zero credibility now they also still hang on it, if only by implication. And they claim that repression is when residents of free nations enjoy parking their savings in risk-free, interest-bearing government bonds, instead of taking risks with commercial paper. Sounds like free choice to me. Is suggest R&R take some R&R and let governments get on with expanding their deficits and reducing unemployment. The public debt ratios will take care of themselves.
The Euro crisis is over! The Euro crisis is over! I suppose if one says it loudly enough and often enough it might drown out what the data tells us. The most recent data – inflation slowing, real GDP growth slowing, no movement on unemployment – tells us that while the politicians have an incentive to talk up the situation and proclaim the crisis is over, the reality is different. The fact that the bureaucrats are now realising that Eurozone budgets in many nations are not going to come close to meeting the harsh (revised) Stability and Growth Pact requirements tells us that the policy structures in place are not delivering on their promise. When a 0.1 per cent growth rate is celebrated you know something is amiss – that is how far standards have dropped in a region that cannot deliver sustained prosperity to its citizens as long as it ties a massive anchor round its feet! The industrialists and elites talk continually of structural reform – which is code for cutting workers pay and rights and retrenching welfare systems for the disadvantaged, the major structural weakness stares them in the face – unnoticed. That structural weakness is the flawed design of the monetary union. Until that is addressed the situation will limp along, perhaps get a surge of growth here and there, until the next major negative demand shock hits from somewhere (like the US, or China) and then the whole drama begins again.
A regular occurrence is the prediction of doom for Japan. Some minor upturn in Japanese government bond yields or a movement in some other irrelevant financial statistic relating to the Japanese public sector sends the financial press into apoplexy. The latest signal of impending bankruptcy being bandied about relates to the rising trend in foreign holdings of short- and longer-term Japanese government debt. This trend is explained by financial markets moving into less risky assets (in this case, Japanese government bonds) as uncertainty in other markets, for example the Eurozone, remains. However, the narrative then goes that eventually these purchasers will refrain from buying Japanese government debt and with the funding from the savings of the ageing domestic population drying up, the Japanese government will run out of money. Policy response? Cut fiscal deficits immediately through a combination of tax rises and spending cuts. All of which is nonsense and if the Japanese government follows the advice – there will be a 1997-style recession and public debt ratios will just rise faster than they are at present. It is better that we now all turn to the sport’s section of whatever news you read and relax.