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The Arthurian on a no-credit-growth system

Summary:
Read these two posts together. Art brings up an interesting issue. Why can capitalism not survive in a no-growth world? Because that's how we set it up. If we set it up differently, it would work differently. If we designed economic policy for a no-growth world, we could live in a no-growth world. You see it in economic models all the time. We're almost there now, actually. We live in an almost-no-growth world, right? And yes, things are not very good. And even I have been calling for (or predicting, actually) better growth. However, things are not very good in our no-growth world because all our policies are designed for a world of "full speed ahead" growth. Just for the record, then, the fact that economic conditions have satisfied almost no one for the past decade is not evidence

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Read these two posts together. Art brings up an interesting issue.
Why can capitalism not survive in a no-growth world? Because that's how we set it up. If we set it up differently, it would work differently. If we designed economic policy for a no-growth world, we could live in a no-growth world. You see it in economic models all the time.
We're almost there now, actually. We live in an almost-no-growth world, right? And yes, things are not very good. And even I have been calling for (or predicting, actually) better growth. However, things are not very good in our no-growth world because all our policies are designed for a world of "full speed ahead" growth. Just for the record, then, the fact that economic conditions have satisfied almost no one for the past decade is not evidence that we cannot live in a no-growth world.
I can't lay it out for you today. I'm not particularly a fan of the no-growth world. I don't see it as necessary. But that's just me.
But I can lay out a parallel situation. I can lay out a no-debt-growth world:
Economic growth under this [presently existing] system is supported by credit use. Say we grow three percent. We need credit enough for that three percent. We don't need credit enough for the whole economy. We don't need to use credit for everything. We do use credit for everything, and that's the problem; but we don't have to. 
Let the Fed issue that money. If the economy grows 3%, let the Fed issue 3% more money by expanding its holdings of government debt. The system is essentially unchanged under the plan I describe, except the normal growth of Federal Debt held by Federal Reserve Banks is faster than before, and anti-inflation policy gets some help from the tax code.
Remember, I'm talking about encouraging the private sector to pay down debt at an accelerated rate. This doesn't have to be a punitive plan. Shouldn't be, until we can average 4% RGDP growth for a decade. Oh, and this suppression of wages to fight inflation, that has to go.

A plan similar to this, more or less, could change policy enough to make a no-growth world a pretty decent place to live.
The New Arthurian
Excerpts from a book review

A bit more from Heilbroner and Silk
The Arthurian

Mike Norman
Mike Norman is an economist and veteran trader whose career has spanned over 30 years on Wall Street. He is a former member and trader on the CME, NYMEX, COMEX and NYFE and he managed money for one of the largest hedge funds and ran a prop trading desk for Credit Suisse.

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