Recently (July 2010), the Bank of International Settlements released their latest working paper – Countercyclical capital buffers: exploring options – which discusses the concept of counter-cyclical capital buffers. This is in line with a growing awareness that prudential regulation has to be counter-cyclical given the destabilising pro-cyclical behaviour of the financial markets. Several readers have asked me to explain/comment on this proposal. Overall it is sensible to regulate private banks via the asset side of the balance sheet rather than the liabilities side. The countercyclical capital buffers proposal is consistent with this strategy and would overcome the destabilising impact of a reliance on minimum capital requirements that plagued the first two Basel regulatory frameworks. However, I would prefer a fully public banking system which can deliver financial stability and durable returns (social) with much less risk overall.

I am reserving Friday’s for no blog, short blog or normal blog depending on whether I can do other things and keep my weekend’s free of blog activity. In general I will use Friday’s to put a Quiz up for Saturday and prepare the Answers and Discussion for Sunday. If I have some “blog” time left and there is something interesting to write about then I will post it – like today. There was an interesting article in the UK Guardian (July 21, 2010) by Robert Skidelsky who was the biographer of John Maynard Keynes. The article – What do deficit slashers wear under their hair shirts? – probes the “assumptions made by the economists who demand rapid ‘fiscal consolidation'”. I thought that was interesting given that most of the published justifications for austerity rather vaguely invoke failed economic theories like Ricardian Equivalence and Rational Expectations. Skidelsky’s point is that these defunct macroeconomic doctrines which got us into this mess are now resurfacing as the dominant narrative. That spells disaster.

The increasingly alarmist commentator Niall Ferguson was at it again the Financial Times (July 20, 2010) in his article – Have Keynesians learnt nothing?. The article has a simple presumption – we are getting scared of deficits and as a result inflation is inevitable. What? We are scared because we expect there will be inflation and so we will act accordingly and start pushing up wages and prices to defend ourselves in real terms. The result will be inflation. This is a playback of the so-called rational expectations literature which Ferguson proudly cites as his authority. The problem is that the theory is defunct – it never was valid and only a butt of depressed cultists still hang on to it as their religion because they learned it when they were young and in doing so lost their capacity to experience the joys of wider education. We really must feel sorry for them.

Today I read a study – A Bit Rich – published in December 2009 by the New Economics Foundation, which is a UK-based think tank aiming to provide an alternative narrative to mainstream economics. That agenda obviously interests me. The study investigates the relationship between pay and value by taking a case study approach and extending our concept of value to include both social and environmental benefits and costs. What they find is that the financial sector is a negative contributor (by some) to society whereas low paid occupations (cleaning etc) are vastly underpaid. What this tells me is that we need a fundamental re-alignment of pay scales in addition to bringing real wage growth into line with productivity growth. We need to reduce the real take of some of the higher paid occupations (especially in the financial sector) and increase the rewards of those currently trapped in low-paid jobs but who serve valuable functions in the overall scheme of our societies’ well-being.