Tag Archives: Finance

A PLOG is a ´Persistent Large Output Gap´. Read: a long period of high unemployment. Literature about PLOGs tries to mitigate one of the ideas of economic orthodoxy, especially the unsubstantiated idea that lowering high post-economic crisis unemployment will fuel inflation. According to this literature, which is quite empirical, it doesn´t. However, this somewhat older literature does not yet consider the post-2009 Euro Area experience. Here, I will propose an updated definition of...

from Dean Baker New York Times columnist Christopher Caldwell devoted his Thanksgiving piece to describing the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck’s views on capitalism and democracy.  I have not read much of Streeck’s work, but as recounted by Caldwell, he gets many of the basic facts about the U.S. economy badly wrong. According to Caldwell’s account, capitalists were willing to sacrifice profits in the decades after World War II for stability. This meant less dynamism but allowed...

The ´natural rate of unemployment´, also called ´Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment´ (NAIRU) or ´Non-Accelerating Wage Rate of Unemployment´ (NAWRU), is as, on this blog, Lars Syll states (here and here), a dangerous tool. According to NAIRU/NAWRU theory, a) When unemployment falls below a certain threshold, an inexorable increase in inflation will start. This is simply not true, considering the facts. b) As NAIRU/NAWRU theory is untrue, it can´t be measured by...

from Lars Syll Sixty years ago Milton Friedman wrote an (in)famous article arguing that (1) the natural rate of unemployment was independent of monetary policy and that (2) trying to keep the unemployment rate below the natural rate would only give rise to higher and higher inflation. The hypothesis has always been controversial, and much theoretical and empirical work has questioned the real-world relevance of the idea that unemployment really is independent of monetary policy and that...

from Lars Syll The NAIRU story has always had a very clear policy implication — attempts to promote full employment are doomed to fail since governments and central banks can’t push unemployment below the critical NAIRU threshold without causing harmful runaway inflation. Although a lot of mainstream economists and politicians have a touching faith in the NAIRU fairy tale, it doesn’t hold water when scrutinized. One of the main problems with NAIRU is that it is essentially a timeless...

Like John Stuart Mill, I´m more interested in credit than in money. Developments in the amount of credit provided are much more instructive to the economist than data on money. Look at the graph below (no. 2 in the ECB press release) , a highly Post-Keynesian graph that originated from the pre-Euro Bundesbank and is now published by the European Central Bank. It shows that money growth in the EU is relatively moderate and, more interesting, caused by a combination of 1) lather large...

Eurostat published new data on employment in Europe. Average employment growth is +0,9%. The average hides stark differences. A Germany-centered core consisting of Germany, Austria, Sweden, Estonia, Finland, and Hungary shows declines. Surprisingly, it excludes Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. The South does better. Countries like Portugal, France, Greece, and, especially, Spain post above-average increases. But unemployment in these countries is still high (over 5%), even when EU...

Executive summary: if investments are needed, do not reform. Invest. Investments are the reform. Angus Maddison (historical patterns of growth) and Jan Kregel (leading post-Keynesian economist) were the intellectually dominant forces during my economics study in Groningen around 1982. Let´s apply their frameworks to Greece. Growth, as we measure it, has many sources: increasing the productivity of existing activities (the mechanization of the potato harvest), shifting labour from...

11th of November 2024 My Lords, there are many things to welcome in this Budget, particularly on the spending side. I am less keen on some of the tax proposals, which seem to be mean-minded and counterproductive, such as the tax on knowledge. The spending commitments are important because they reverse the disastrous policy of austerity, which has brought our public services and infrastructure close to collapse. Even the IMF, originally a champion of austerity, admitted that it had...

from Lars Syll We have already shown that deficit spending increases our collective savings. But what happens if Uncle Sam borrows when he runs a deficit? Is that wht eats up savings and forces interest rates higher? The answer is no. The financial crowding-out story asks us to imagine that there’s a fixed supply of savings from which anyone can attempt to borrow … MMT rejects the loanable funds story, which is rooted in the idea that borrowing is limited by access to scarce financial...