Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns The most important debate of our lifetimes is now ongoing. For many, the answer will be existential. First, the question: Should the ECB “write the check’ for the euro area national governments? In thinking about the answer to this all-important question, I prefer to shift the focus by changing the verb […]
Read more...Dean Baker is co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He previously was a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and an assistant professor of economics at Bucknell University. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. His latest book, The End of Loser Liberalism, has recently been released to download free of charge on the CEPR website.
Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer based in Dublin, Ireland.
Philip Pilkington: The problems we currently face are without doubt, as you say, purely demand-based. Certainly all the evidence I’ve seen – from both sides of the pond – leads to this conclusion too. I know that in the book you say that this too is part of evading the real problems underlying the crisis. As you’ve said in the previous part of the interview, these are largely to do with seriously unbalanced income distribution and a lack of purchasing power among workers. You’ve said in the book that these problems have been generated by the ‘trickle-up’ or ‘supply-side’ economics theories that became popular in the 1970s and were implemented thereafter.
Do you think that your profession – and, for that matter, those commentators and policymakers that they have trained – are ignorant of the problems you highlight in the book because they are so beholden to supply-side theories or do you think that they use their supply-side theories as an ideological mask to make political arguments? If the former is the case, then how on earth has economics become such an irrelevant and dogmatic discipline? And if the latter is the case the how has the profession become so corrupted?
Read more...Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns. Follow me on Twitter at edwardnh for more credit crisis coverage. Disclaimer: This piece on the impact of Italy’s potential insolvency on the sovereign debt crisis is not an advocacy piece. It is supposed to be an actionable prediction of what I see as likely to occur. That said, see link […]
Read more...Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns. Follow me on Twitter at edwardnh for more credit crisis coverage. Disclaimer: This piece on the impact of Italy’s potential insolvency on the sovereign debt crisis is not an advocacy piece. It is supposed to be an actionable prediction of what I see as likely to occur. Last week we witnessed […]
Read more...Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns. Follow me on Twitter at edwardnh for more credit crisis coverage. Here’s an interpretation of the euro zone I have been meaning to discuss. I touched on it in the update to my post on how austerity in Europe works. In a fixed exchange rate environment like the euro area, you […]
Read more...By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland In waking a tiger, use a long stick. – Mao Tse-tung Well, it looks like it could finally be happening. The Chinese housing bubble could well be bursting right before our eyes. The bubble has long been present for all to see, with news […]
Read more...I am going to fill in a few posts for Yves while she is away on conference. Here’s one that is a thought piece I wrote last week at Credit Writedowns. It is a mental model of the economy I am toying with based on some comments the modern monetary theory folks have made to […]
Read more...It is interesting to see how the popular desire for Occupy Wall Street to issue demands is leading various pundits and experts to boil down and update their views on what really needs to be done to fix the financial and political systems. (Note we are of the minority view that OWS is being shrewd in not acceding to pressure to reduce its desire for broad-based change to soundbites and an easily-to-digest program.
Bill Black give his usual forthright views on this segment on Real News Network. Enjoy!
Read more...Reader Sufferin’ Succotash asked whether Papandreou would turn out to be Pericles or Petain. We now have our answer. His finance minister, Evengelos Venizelos, went to the G20 in Cannes (going directly after being discharged from the hospital, meaning he almost certainly did not inform and therefore intended to betray Papandreou) and issued a statement arguing that the need to get the next cash dole from the bailout program and maintain “international credibility” trumped all other considerations. Papandreou backed down and canceled the referendum.
Even though everyone who is not part of the problem recognizes that an eventual Greek default (or much deeper debt restructuring) is inevitable, it seems the Greek population must be ground into the dust first to discourage any rebellion against the new order of rule by creditors. The wild card is whether the level of civil disobedience rises to the point where the government has to change course. We’ve already read of serious signs of breakdown: widespread failures to collect trash, frequent power interruption, such reduced schedules for public transportation that it becomes difficult for those who still have jobs to get to work.
Although this segment was taped before the Papandreou volte face, this discussion on Democracy Now with Michael Hudson illuminates some of the underlying dynamics behind this showdown.
Read more...Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou has managed to put the European crisis game of financial fakery into turmoil. Pretty much no informed commentator expected the latest gimmick-larded rescue package to work; there were simply too many points of failure. And even if this program had miraculously come to fruition, a later train wreck was still inevitable, since Germany was persisting in wanting two contradictory outcomes: running trade surpluses in Europe, and not lending more to its trade parters.
But no one anticipated that a long suffering debtor would revolt, which is what Papandreou’s announcement of a referendum on the punitive bailout amounts to.
Read more...Yves here. Note the comment at the end, that Sarkozy’s sales pitch to China on the levered up EFSF did not go so well. If the Chinese don’t relent, this greatly reduces of this scheme working, even in the short term. And further note that the flagging European growth is the result of the austerity hairshirt being imposed on highly indebted economies. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has a pointed article on the consequences of the beggar-thy-neighbor German stance.
By Delusional Economics, who is horrified at the state of economic commentary in Australia and is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness
Angela Merkel has been warning for quite some time that Europe’s economic woes will take up to a decade to fix and that it is time for Europe to rethink its economic strategy after years of living “beyond its means”. It seems fairly obvious from those statements that the rest of the world is going to have to get use to Europe moving into a slow growth phase while it attempts to adjust away from what it considers to be unsustainable debt.
In an attempt support the transition while keeping Europe together the European leaders have put together 3 part package to save Greece, re-capitalise the banks and provide a stability mechanism for countries that run into trouble. The problem is that once you understand the technicalities behind what they have come up with you come to realise that real economic growth is the only thing that actually matters. The latest news out of Europe for many of the 17 member nations is not good at all in that regard.
Read more...By Paul de Grauwe, Professor of international economics, University of Leuven, member of the Group of Economic Policy Analysis, advising the EU Commission President Manuel Barroso, and former member of the Belgian parliament. Cross-posted from VoxEU.
The Eurozone crisis plays on to a familiar tune. Finance ministers meet on the weekend only for markets to dismiss their efforts the following Monday. This column argues that Europe’s leaders have lost touch, that the ECB has the firepower but is not prepared to use it, and that the outcome of all this is depressingly clear: Defeat by the financial markets.
Read more...Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns Today is the big European summit. Expectations are low because European politics have become messy. At the beginning of September I wrote about European political dysfunction: Clearly, [Former ECB Chief Economist Juergen] Stark sees the monetisation path the ECB is on as not at all compatible with the ECB’s mandate. Separately, […]
Read more...By Rumplestatskin, a professional economist with a broad range of interests and a diverse background in property development, environmental economics research and economic regulation. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.
What few seem to appreciate, either inside or outside of Japan, is just how strong the resulting Japanese recovery from 2002-2008 was. It was the longest unbroken recovery of Japan’s postwar history, and, while not as strong as pre-bubble Japanese performance, was in fact stronger than the growth in comparable economies even when fuelled by their own bubbles.
How on Earth did Japan manage that with their ageing population and zero population growth?
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager, and Rob Parenteau, CFA, sole proprietor of MacroStrategy Edge and a research associate of The Levy Economics Institute
Historically, Greeks have been very good at constructing myths. The rest of the world? Not so great, if the current burst of commentary on the country is anything to go by. Reading the press, one gets the impression of a bunch of lazy Mediterranean scroungers, enjoying one of the highest standards of living in Europe while making the frugal Germans pick up the tab. This is a nonsensical propaganda. As if Greece is the only country ever to cook its books in the European Union! Rather, the heart of the problem is in the antiquated revenue system that supports that state, which results in a budget shortfall consistently about 10% of GDP. The top 20% of the income distribution in Greece pay virtually no taxes at all, the product of a corrupt bargain reached during the days of the junta between the military and Greece’s wealthiest plutocrats. No wonder there is a fiscal crisis!
So it’s not a problem of Greek profligates, or an overly generous welfare state, both of which suggest that the standard IMF style remedies being proposed here are bound to fail, as they are doing right now. In fact, given the non-stop austerity being imposed on Athens (which simply has the effect of deflating the economy further and thereby reducing the ability of the Greeks to hit the fiscal targets imposed on them), the Greeks really are getting close to the point where they may well default and shift the problem back to those imposing the austerity.
Read more...