Sunday , November 24 2024
Home / Mike Norman Economics / Kenneth Rogoff: Modern Monetary Theory is nonsense, just more voodoo economics

Kenneth Rogoff: Modern Monetary Theory is nonsense, just more voodoo economics

Summary:
Sounds like Rogoff hasn't changed from his glory days: The original feud was most famously between Stiglitz and Rogoff. Stiglitz, who led the movement at the World Bank to throw off its support for austerity, memorably claimed that IMF was staffed with “third rate” economists. https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/10/ken-rogoff-loses-it-calls-criticism-of-errors-in-debt-paper-a-witch-hunt.html Also: Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published a 2010 paper, Growth in the Time of Debt, which based on data from 44 countries that growth levels went negative once government debt to GDP ratios rose over 90%. This article was taken up eagerly by the pro-austerity crowd as definitive proof of the dangers of too much borrowing.  Yet a number of economists tried replicating the Reinhart-Rogoff

Topics:
Mike Norman considers the following as important:

This could be interesting, too:

Matias Vernengo writes Elon Musk (& Vivek Ramaswamy) on hardship, because he knows so much about it

Lars Pålsson Syll writes Klas Eklunds ‘Vår ekonomi’ — lärobok med stora brister

New Economics Foundation writes We need more than a tax on the super rich to deliver climate and economic justice

Robert Vienneau writes Profits Not Explained By Merit, Increased Risk, Increased Ability To Compete, Etc.

Sounds like Rogoff hasn't changed from his glory days:
The original feud was most famously between Stiglitz and Rogoff. Stiglitz, who led the movement at the World Bank to throw off its support for austerity, memorably claimed that IMF was staffed with “third rate” economists. https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/10/ken-rogoff-loses-it-calls-criticism-of-errors-in-debt-paper-a-witch-hunt.html
Also:
Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published a 2010 paper, Growth in the Time of Debt, which based on data from 44 countries that growth levels went negative once government debt to GDP ratios rose over 90%. This article was taken up eagerly by the pro-austerity crowd as definitive proof of the dangers of too much borrowing. 
Yet a number of economists tried replicating the Reinhart-Rogoff results for years, with no success. Reinhart and Rogoff refused to share their underlying computations. Five years later, now that the Reinhart/Rogoff work is widely accepted as true, they finally sent their “working spreadsheet” to a graduate student at the UMass Amherst, Thomas Herndon. He found data omissions, Excel errors, and questionable data weightings.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/10/ken-rogoff-loses-it-calls-criticism-of-errors-in-debt-paper-a-witch-hunt.html
Even without the Excel errors and data fudging, the book was absurd as documented first by MMT economists and later by most others. Even Paul Krugman, who had been striving hard to give Reinhart and Rogoff the benefit of the doubt, called it “really, really bad“.

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.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *