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The Baseline Scenario 1970-01-01 00:00:00

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The Weekend Quiz – September 14-15, 2019 – answers and discussion

Here are the answers with discussion for this Weekend’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....

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action A very cool job market paper and explanatory thread, from Ph.D. candidate Matthew Klein. He, Bradford L. Barham, and Yuexuan Wu, link women’s household bargaining power to malaria rates in Malawi. They find that a one standard deviation increase in a woman’s household bargaining power implies a 40% reduction in chances that anybody in the household contracts malaria. They caution...

Is This The Hardest Investing Environment Ever?

I was on the Stansberry Investor Hour last week  with Dan Ferris discussing the markets and the broader macro environment. My segment starts at 29:30. Topics discussed: The general macro environment and why growth could remain sluggish. I was very bullish about bonds 24 months ago at the Stansberry Investment Conference, but that view has changed…. Bond math and why 0% yielding bonds make investing so difficult. FUN! Why I wouldn’t be...

Frederic L. Pryor Dies

On September 2, 2019, Frederic L. Pryor died at age 86, which has now been reported in obits in both the  NY Times and the Washington Post.  These outlets have focused on his incidental role in 1861-62 as the unfortunate graduate student who was arrested in East Berlin on Aug. 25, 1961 while attempting to visit the sister of a friend, with the sister having already defected to the West.  Fred was also planning to give a copy of his PhD (Yale)...

Watch for a re-emergence of the convergence to zero play

Understanding curve flatteningLong-time readers know that I have talked for a number of years about a longer-term global convergence to zero play that I see shaping up. It first emerged during the mid-cycle slowdown in 2015 and 2016 as yield curves began to flatten. Looking through my archives, I n...

The high price of dollar safety

The world is saving like crazy. Corporations are building up cash mountains that they can’t or won’t invest in expanding their businesses. Individuals are building up pensions and precautionary savings. Governments, especially in developing countries, are building up FX reserves. The “savings glut,” as former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke dubbed it, shows no signs of dissipating. It is sloshing around the world looking for a productive home. But...

Economists Do It With Models 1970-01-01 00:00:00

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Bitcoin Is Failing As Money—But Bitcoin Cash Isn’t

Money has three principal functions: as a medium of exchange, as a store of value, and as a unit of account. Secondary attributes that have aided the adoption of various forms of money include interestingness (“Ooh! Look how shiny that gold is!”), uniform divisibility, portability, resistance to counterfeit, and imposeability. That last one is important, because it is what makes state-backed fiat currency the dominant form of money in the...

Gujarat breaking with coal

The announcement that the Indian state of Gujarat will allow no new thermal coal plants seems like a really big deal. First up, it’s striking that a state with electricity demand growing at 8-10 per cent a year has concluded that it can meet this demand entirely with renewables. That’s totally contrary to the line pushed by the government and coal lobby here in Australia, suggesting that rapid growth in electricity demand can only be met...

Facebook’s digital currency Libra — just for suckers or a global economic revolution?

Facebook’s digital currency Libra — just for suckers or a global economic revolution? Mit 20 Partnern hat Facebook die digitale Weltwährung “Libra” angekündigt … Mit einem Schlag kann das Konsortium alle nur denkbaren Netzwerkeffekte im digitalen Zahlungsbereich ausschöpfen. Damit ist Libra unmittelbar und überall präsent. Eine globale ökonomische Revolution. Die Digitalökonomie folgt der Regel “The winner takes it all”. Wer...

Break up the Dem Party

Your access to this site has been limited Your access to this site has been limited Your access to this service has been temporarily limited. Please try again in a few minutes. (HTTP response code 503) Reason: Exceeded the maximum global requests per minute for crawlers or humans. If you are a WordPress user with administrative privileges on this site please enter your email in the box below and click "Send". You will then...

Robert Frank – Billionaires hurt economic growth and should be taxed out of existence, says bestselling French economist

Thomas Piketty "Entrepreneurs will have millions or tens of millions," he said. "But beyond that, those who have hundreds of millions or billions will have to share with shareholders, who could be employees. So no, there won't be billionaires anymore. How can we justify that their existence is necessary for the common good? Contrary to what is often said, their enrichment was obtained thanks to these collective goods, which are...

Retail sales, Consumer Sentiment, Rails, Sea containers, Wholesale sales, Employment, Hours worked

Up a bit but still looking a lot lower than a few months ago: “Deep in contraction” Analyst Opinion of Container Movements Simply looking at this month versus last month – there were only marginal changes to weak numbers. The year-over-year rate of growth improved for imports and marginally worsened for exports. Still, year-to-date growth for both imports and exports remain deep in contraction. The three-month rolling averages for exports...

Bloomberg Interview: Wray on Modern Monetary Theory

Michael Stephens | July 31, 2019 Bloomberg Businessweek‘s Cristina Lindblad and Peter Coy sat down with L. Randall Wray for an in-depth interview on Modern Monetary Theory: $title = the_title('','',false); ?> if ($title == 'Contributors') { //get_levy_contributors(); } ?> Comments

New Book on Roy Harrod

Esteban Pérez Caldentey has just published a new book on Roy Harrod for the collection edited by Anthony Thirlwall. From the description: This landmark book describes and analyzes the original contributions Sir Roy Harrod made to fields including microeconomics, macroeconomics, international trade and finance, growth theory, trade cycle analysis and economic methodology. Harrod’s prolific writings reflect an astounding and unique intellectual...

Awakening the Investor-in-Whole-Society

By J.D. ALT There’s a lot of handwringing now about how central banks have no ammunition to fight a recession. The fact that this is apparently true—and, perhaps, uniquely true in modern history—is all the more reason to explore MMT’s premise that central banks are not just instruments of private commerce, but are, as well, instruments of collective, democratic will. The bankers are in a box of their own making, but that box, in fact, is...

New Economics Foundation 1970-01-01 00:00:00

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Macro Dynamics with a Job Guarantee – Part 2: Keynesian Cross Diagram

As a preliminary exercise, it may be instructive to modify the familiar Keynesian cross diagram to include the effects of a job guarantee within a simple short-run framework. The diagram includes two key schedules. The first is a 45-degree line showing all points for which actual expenditure equals actual income. The second is a line with lesser slope depicting the level of planned expenditure (total demand) at each level of income. Under...

How Far Can We Push This Thing? Some Optimistic Reflections on the Potential For Economic Experimentation

Readers are probably aware that there is quite a lot of discussion of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and the potential for fiscal experimentation batting around at the moment. Others have weighed in on this already, and I have little to add. It is striking, however, that most of the push-back — where there is push-back — is not focused on trying to discredit the idea that we should engage in fiscal experimentation. Indeed, the notion that we...

A Pattern Over The Wage Axis In A Case Of Joint Production

Figure 1: Wage Curves with Corn as Numeraire1.0 Introduction This post presents an example of a fluke switch point in which the choice of technique cannot be analyzed by the construction of the wage frontier. Under joint production, the technique that is cost-minimizing, for a given rate of profits, does not necessarily maximize the wage. Nevertheless, one can still see what I call a pattern over the wage axis in this case. The example is a...

The Rogue Prorogation and the English-Scottish judicial divide

As the pressures and contradictions of no-deal Brexit threaten the unity of the United Kingdom, further fissures are to be seen through the prisms of judical reasoning, in which English and Scottish judges view and interpet the world in utterly divergent ways.The English High Court (which included the Lord Chief Justice and the Master of the Rolls) has curtly dismissed the claim that the Prime Minister’s decision to seek prorogation of...

My review of Eric Weissman’s book on intentional homeless communities

I’ve just reviewed Eric Weissman’s book on intentional homeless communities. Points made in the review include the following: -Intentional communities in general are communities built around specific goals. But in the case of this book, I mean small communities of housing sometimes made from discarded, donated and recycled material, and sometimes purpose-built, to address homelessness. -Intentional communities are not the same thing as...

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How to Achieve Shorter Working Hours

I have great pleasure in presenting this report on shorter working hours, which John McDonnell asked me to prepare, and which I have written with the valuable assistance of Rachel Kay. I accepted John’s invitation because shorter working hours is something I believe in. In fact, I wrote a book with my son, How Much is Enough?, which made the case for reducing the burden of work as part of the good life. The philosophy of this Report is quite...

A Pattern Over The Wage Axis In A Case Of Joint Production

Figure 1: Wage Curves with Corn as Numeraire1.0 Introduction This post presents an example of a fluke switch point in which the choice of technique cannot be analyzed by the construction of the wage frontier. Under joint production, the technique that is cost-minimizing, for a given rate of profits, does not necessarily maximize the wage. Nevertheless, one can still see what I call a pattern over the wage axis in this case. The example is a...

Bloomberg Interview: Wray on Modern Monetary Theory

Michael Stephens | July 31, 2019 Bloomberg Businessweek‘s Cristina Lindblad and Peter Coy sat down with L. Randall Wray for an in-depth interview on Modern Monetary Theory: $title = the_title('','',false); ?> if ($title == 'Contributors') { //get_levy_contributors(); } ?> Comments

L’Europa a una svolta? Se fosse una cosa seria, se non ora quando?

Pubblichiamo intervista su il sussidiario.net VINCOLI DI BILANCIO UE/ La Germania è in crisi, l’Italia ne approfitti 27.08.2019 - int. Sergio Cesaratto Le economie dei Paesi Ocse sono in frenata e per FT a Bruxelles si studia un nuovo Patto di stabilità più soft. E’ il momento giusto per dare una svolta keynesiana Nel giorno in cui l’Ocse segnala il rallentamento del Pil dell’area nel secondo trimestre (+0,5% rispetto...

Keynes’ Life: 1931

I give an account below of Keynes life in 1931.January–May 1931 On 27 January 1931, Friedrich Hayek arrived in London at the London School of Economics (LSE). Hayek gave four evening lectures at 5 p.m. from 27 to 30 January 1931 on “Prices and Production” (Howson 2011: 196), and these lectures were later published in England as the book Prices and Production (September 1931), an exposition of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT). Hayek...

LA TESI-TRUFFA DELLA FINAZIARIZZAZIONE di Stavros Mavroudeas – SOLLEVAZIONE

LA TESI-TRUFFA DELLA FINAZIARIZZAZIONE di Stavros Mavroudeas sollevazione.blogspot.com/2019/08/la-tesi-truffa-della-finaziarizzazione.html [ venerdì 30 agosto 2019 ] Un articolo duramente polemico questo di Stavros Mavroudeas, professore di Politica Economica presso l’università Panteion di Atene. Conoscemmo Stavros in Grecia come intellettuale e militante attivo della sinistra no-euro ellenica. Duramente polemico con tutti quegli...

LA TESI-TRUFFA DELLA FINAZIARIZZAZIONE di Stavros Mavroudeas – SOLLEVAZIONE

LA TESI-TRUFFA DELLA FINAZIARIZZAZIONE di Stavros Mavroudeas sollevazione.blogspot.com/2019/08/la-tesi-truffa-della-finaziarizzazione.html [ venerdì 30 agosto 2019 ] Un articolo duramente polemico questo di Stavros Mavroudeas, professore di Politica Economica presso l’università Panteion di Atene. Conoscemmo Stavros in Grecia come intellettuale e militante attivo della sinistra no-euro ellenica. Duramente polemico con tutti quegli...

Joe Biden: “How Are We to Pay for Single Payer Healthcare Alias Medicare for All?”

Joe knows the answer to this question and he is baiting the other candidates. Joe has a history of supporting big business interests as witnessed by his aggressive support of the banking industry with bankruptcy laws favoring banking against the needs of citizens and with a special intended harshness when it comes to student loans. Joe has sponsored or cosponsored every bankruptcy bill since 1997. With his question and his healthcare bill, I...

Central Bank Independence: A Rigged Debate Based on False Politics and Economics

The case for central bank independence is built on an intellectual two-step. Step one argues there is a problem of inflation prone government. Step two argues independence is the solution to that problem. This paper challenges that case and shows it is based on false politics and economics. The paper argues central bank independence is ...

Will money creation save us?

Before the 2007-2008 crisis the balance sheet of the European Central Bank (that is, the totality of securities owned and loans granted by the ECB) was approximately 1000 billion Euros, or barely 10% of the GDP of the Euro zone. In 2019 it had risen to 4700 billion Euros, or 40% of the GDP of the zone. Thus between 2008 and 2018, the ECB has implemented a monetary creation equivalent to over one and a half years of the French GDP, one year of...

The Case For Concerted Action 1970-01-01 00:00:00

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Must we replace the dollar with a shared international currency unit? On the BBC World Service’s REAL STORY

[embedded content] Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, recently said that we need a new international currency unit to replace the US dollar. In this BBC World Service program, I was asked what I thought of the idea. For more of a background to my answer click here. (For the whole BBC program, click here.)