Category Archives: Economic fundamentals

Ilargi: Deflation, A Stock Market Crash And Then Christmas

Yves here. I know I should write about Janet Yellen’s confirmation hearing, but I can’t stand to do it. Plus I am confident you’ll enjoy this piece more.

Michael Pettis: Forget the Plenum

ves here. Pettis highlights the difficulties of restructuring the Chinese economy to feature more small business lending and consumption and calls them “political.” I’m not sure I agree fully.

Wolf Richter: The Day The Bubble Became Official, And Everyone Was Happy (Except Twitter Casualties)

A new era has dawned: there is now a consensus that this is a stock market bubble. We’re back where we were during the last bubble, or the one before it, though the jury is still out if this is February 2000 or October 1999 or sometime in 2007.

Richard Alford: On Grading the Bernanke Fed

We are certain to hear more and more appraisals of Bernake’s tenure as Fed chairman as he approaches the end of his term. But will they use good benchmarks? We suggest measuring his performance against his claims for the Fed’s objectives and what he said the central bank could accomplish. Not surprisingly, we find that he came up short.

Yanis Varoufakis: Ponzi Austerity – A Definition and an Example

For a while now I have been arguing that Europe’s policies for reducing the public debts of fiscally stressed member-states can be described as a Ponzi austerity scheme. In this post I attempt precisely to define ‘Ponzi austerity’.

The BLS Jobs Report Covering October 2013: Effects of the Shutdown Mostly Hidden But Still Large

Yves here. As Hugh said via e-mail:

The report is actually two reports fundamentally at odds with each other.

It’s like taking a hammer to a tomato. One report says the tomato got smashed. The other report says the tomato got bigger. Which are you going to believe?

Student Debt is Crushing the Economic Future of the Young

If a bad job market wasn’t damaging enough, the cost of paying off student loans does much more harm to the long-term prospects of young people than is commonly realized.

Ilargi: Sometimes Humor Is The Best Way To Tell A Tragic Story

Yves here. This article is a portrait of official denial, which is then dutifully taken up and amplified by the media (well, not universally, but widely, as Ilargi’s post also demonstrates). It corroborates one of my pet theories: that we are at the end of an economic paradigm. The powers that be lack the will and imagination to do anything other than patch it up and put it back into operation. That simply assures more frequent breakdowns until the system is beyond repair.

Has QE Stimulated Credit?

Yves here. As much as the post below is a very useful recap of data in terms of the impact of QE, I need to hector “Unconventional Economist” for being pretty conventional. His headline question, whether intentionally or not, reinforces the notion that it was reasonable to think that QE, or super low rates generally (as in ZIRP) would lead to increase lending….

Yanis Varoufakis: The US Treasury is Right About Germany’s Eurozone Policies: Here is Why

By Yanis Varoufakis, professor of economics at the University of Athens. Cross posted from his blog

On 30^th October, in its Report to Congress on Economic and Exchange Rate Policies, the US Treasury took a swipe at Germany, accusing it of exporting economic depression to the rest of Eurozone and, indeed, to the global economy. The German Finance Ministry responded the next day with a statement that: “There are no imbalances in Germany that need correction. On the contrary, the innovative German economy contributes significantly to global growth through exports and the import of components for finished products.” There are few occasions in any argument where one side is completely right and the other comprehensively wrong. This is one of them!

Governments Need to Take the Reins Back From Central Banks and Deal with Economic Imbalances

Macrobusiness flagged a short interview with Ann Pettifor, a highly-regarded international finance expert who is the Director of Policy Research for Macroeconomics on the ABC program The Business. Pettifor argues that economists are responsible for the bias today to over-rely on monetary policy to solve problems that can only be addressed by government spending. Leaning too heavily on monetary policy to try to address weak growth simply generates asset bubbles.

Yanis Varoufakis: The Dirty War for Europe’s Integrity and Soul

As Lambert says, get a cup of coffee, or maybe two. This is a long piece, but that is in part because it includes many damning vignettes from the Eurocrisis, so this is the antithesis of a dry read.

Us Versus Them

By Gerald Minack, a former global equity strategist for Morgan Stanley. Cross posted from MacroBusiness

Rising political polarisation in the US has gone hand-in-hand with rising income inequality, falling top-end tax rates, lower taxes on business, rising leverage and higher asset prices. These trends may be coincidental, but they seem to reinforce each other.

The Fed’s Exit Problem: Symptom of Paradigm Breakdown?

Yves here. This Real News Network interview with Yilmaz Akyüz, chief economist at the South Centre and former director and chief economist at UNCTAD, focuses on the conundrum of the Fed’s need to exit from QE from an international perspective, and layers in the further complication that China is not going to keep up its investment spending at the same level. Akyüz argues that “….we have problems at the end of the crisis which are as big as the ones during the crisis, and these problems are largely due to mismanagement of the crisis, particularly in the U.S. and Europe.”

But I’m not sure it’s as simple as mismanagement.

The European Crisis: Lessons from the 1920s, the Gold Standard, and Historical Trilemmas

Yves here. This post by Michael Bordo and Howard James finds significant parallels between the 1920s and the economic and policy conflicts facing the Eurozone, which does not speak well for them being resolved tidily.