Economische aanraders: Veren of Lood biedt u op zondag wekelijks een inkijkje in (minstens) 15 belangrijke of informatieve artikelen en interviews die vooral de voorafgaande 7 dagen op economisch terrein verschenen op onafhankelijke sites.

De kop is de link naar het oorspronkelijke artikel, waarvan de samenvatting of de eerste (twee) alinea’s hier gegeven worden. Er zijn in deze rubriek altijd verschillende economische scholen vertegenwoordigd, en we streven er naar die diversiteit te handhaven.

We nemen wekelijks ook een paar extra links op naar artikelen die minder specialistische kennis vereisen. Deze met *** gemerkte artikelen zijn ons inziens ook interessant voor lezers met weinig basiskennis van economie.

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***Progressives and the Origins of the Economic “Consensus” – Edward Britton
3 juni
There was a time when free market economists were some of the most highly praised intellectuals in the modern world. In the early twentieth century, Austrian economics was understood for what it truly is: a social science based on praxeology and human action. But from the mid-1900s through the 2000s, society replaced their appreciation for the Viennese method with a false claim that Austrian economics was an ideological, archaic pseudoscience used to justify libertarian and conservative ideas. And although the mainstream throws Chicagoan and even Austrian economists a bone from time to time, most academics have drifted toward the modern monetary theory (MMT) or some form of Keynesianism. But in order to understand why the mainstream is the way it is, we must first understand how the economic consensus came to be.
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Why The European Recovery Plan Will Likely Fail – Daniel Lacalle
31 mei
The 750 billion euro stimulus plan announced by the European Commission has been greeted by many macroeconomic analysts and investment banks with euphoria. However, we must be cautious. Why? Many would argue that a swift and decisive response to the crisis with an injection of liquidity that avoids a financial collapse and a strong fiscal impulse that cements the recovery are overwhelmingly positive measures. History and experience tell us that, indeed, the risk of disappointment regarding the positive impact on the real economy is not small.
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Why GDP Metrics Won’t Tell Us Much about the Post-COVID Recovery – Alasdair Macleod
6 juni
In seeking to measure everything, econometricians gave us the dubious gift of gross national product and gross domestic product, the latter being in fashion today and the former in times past. Although there are different ways of measuring it, GDP is commonly taken as a measure of spending, comprised of household spending, government spending, investment spending, and net exports. The Bank of England’s guide says that it is a measure of the size and health of the economy. And the US’s Bureau of Economic Analysis similarly says, “the growth rate of GDP is the most popular indicator of the nation’s overall economic health”.
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***The “Post-Plague” Office: There Could be Quite a Run on the Suburbs – John McNellis
3 Juni
I asked top executives from three tech companies—with a hundred employees, with a thousand, and with many thousands—where they would put their next offices.
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg said he believes that half of Facebook’s employees will be working from home over the next 10 years. To that point, Facebook released the results of an internal employee poll: 50% plus want to get back to the office, while 40% would like to work from home permanently, 75% of those at some great distance from headquarters.
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Heterogeneous relationships between automation technologies and skilled labour – Masayuki Morikawa
1 Juni
The impact of new automation technologies on the labour market has attracted the attention of researchers and policymakers. This column presents new survey-based evidence on the complementarity between automation technologies and human skills. The proportion of high-skilled workers is higher in firms using AI and big data technologies, but lower in those using robots. The Covid-19 shock may have long-lasting impacts on the structure of the labour market through the diffusion of new automation technologies.
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There’s No End in Sight to the Zombie Economy – Andrew Moran
1 juni
The United States was waiting for the zombie apocalypse. The country was given a coronapocalypse instead. But could the two events merge and provide the nation with a dangerous economic trend? Corporate America’s worst-kept secret had been the swelling number of zombies kept on life support and hidden away during the boom phase of the business cycle. Now that the coronavirus pandemic has exposed the fault lines underneath the economy, the zombification may accelerate due to a toxic concoction of Federal Reserve stimulus and congressional relief. Will zombies leave their graves, searching for freshly created US dollars and feasting on the carcass of the ailing marketplace?
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Tractable epidemiological models for economic analysis – Dirk Niepelt, Martín Gonzalez-Eiras
5 Juni
The COVID-19 shock has changed the discipline of economics in that it has brought an interest in epidemiology into the foreground of economic analysis. This column explores how traditional models of infectious diseases can be combined with an additional economic layer on top. This hybrid approach can help draw accurate predictions for the long run impact of the crisis, without substantive loss in terms of ‘realism’ or flexibility.
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Crude Steel Production: China Blows the Doors off Rest of the World During Pandemic After Already Huge Surge in 2019 – Wolf Richter
6 juni
Never let a good crisis go to waste. US production, 4th in the world, plunged 32% in April. India’s production, normally in 2nd place, collapsed 64%.
Global production of crude steel – ingots, semi-finished products (billets, blooms, slabs), and liquid steel for castings – dropped 13% in April compared to April last year, to 137 million metric tonnes (Mt), according to the World Steel Association. While China’s production, at 85 Mt, was flat with a year ago, production by the rest of the world (without China) plunged 27% to 52.1 Mt.
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When Institutions Fail, Fragmentation and Decentralization Become Solutions – Charle Hugh Smith
4 juni
That which has failed is unsustainable, no matter how many trillions the Federal Reserve tosses against the tides of history.
The chapter titles of Michael Grant’s excellent account of The Fall of the Roman Empire identify the core dynamics of decline:
The Gulfs Between the Classes
The Credibility Gap
The Partnerships That Failed
The Groups That Opted Out
The Undermining of Effort
Every one of these is a manifestation of institutional failure. The Gulfs Between the Classes (see chart of soaring inequality below) manifests a completely broken economic and social order, and the abject failure of core institutions (for example, the source of wealth inequality, the Federal Reserve).
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***Exposure to transit migration: Public attitudes and entrepreneurship – Nicolas Ajzenman, Cevat Giray Aksoy, Sergei Guriev
5 Juni
The impact of the 2015 refugee crisis on sending and receiving societies has received significant scholarly attention. But there is little research on how the crisis affected ‘transit countries’ through which migrants travelled. This column studies 800 localities in 18 European countries to discover how local populations responded to the temporary presence of forced migrants. Data show that entrepreneurial activity of residents living closer to refugee routes fell considerably, and while anti-migrant sentiment increased in these areas, attitudes towards other minorities remained unchanged.
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We’re Living the Founding Fathers’ Nightmare: America Is Corrupt to the Core – Charles Hugh Smith
1 Juni
Our ruling elites, devoid of leadership, are little more than the scum of self-interested, greedy grifters who rose to the top of America’s foul-smelling stew of corruption.
The Founding Fathers were wary of institutional threats to liberty and the citizenry’s sovereignty, which included centralized concentrations of power (monarchy, central banks, federal agencies, etc.) and the tyranny of corruption unleashed by small-minded, self-interested, greedy grifters who saw all elected offices and positions of government influence as nothing more than a means to increase their own private wealth.
The Founders feared the dominance of self-interested, greedy grifters because they had no concept of the public good: to the greedy grifters, the government existed solely to serve their petty private interests and the interests of their fellow grifters.
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Declining worker power versus rising monopoly power: Explaining recent macro trends – Anna Stansbury, Lawrence H. Summers
2 Juni
Since the early 1980s, the US has seen a falling labour share and slow wage growth for typical workers, while measures of corporate valuations and measured markups have increased. A number of papers have argued that increasing monopoly or monopsony power can explain these trends. This column argues instead that the decline in worker power in the US economy is a more compelling explanation for recent macro trends than a broad-based rise in monopoly power.
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Hopes Of ‘V-Shaped’ Recovery Sink As World Trade Refuses To Rebound – Tyler Durden
6 juni
The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns across the world have led to a recession, if not depression, unseen since the 1930s. It has resulted in unprecedented job loss and economic declines in both developed and emerging economies.
Central bankers have spent the last several months flooding global markets with liquidity, lowering rates to the zero lower bound, and unleashing massive bond-buying programs, a bid to arrest declines in asset prices. No matter what the Neel Kashkaris of the central banking world do — their attempts to flood markets with liquidity will likely fail to engineer a V-shaped recovery in world trade (though they have certainly engineered a V-shaped recovery in stocks).
Research firm Inchcape Shipping Services is reporting just that, as the path to recovery for world trade will not resemble a classic “V” and be much slower than previously thought.
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***International Tourist Arrivals & Spending in Tourism-Dependent Spain Collapsed to “Zero” in April. May Likely Similar – Nick Corbishley
2 juni
It’s not often that “zero” is used in official statistics that are normally counted in millions of people and billions of euros.
In April, for the first time since records began, no — meaning officially “zero” — foreign tourists arrived in Spain, and foreign tourists spent “zero” in Spain, the world’s second most visited country in 2019, as its borders were essentially closed to foreign visitors for the duration of the month, according to new figures published by the country’s Institute of National Statistics (INE). Here are the first three (slightly truncated) paragraphs of the accompanying press release
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***Why Socialists Love the Phrase “It’s Not Real Socialism” – Peyton Gouzien
1 juni
The main reason that the socialists have had the staying power that has, luckily, eluded the Nazis is the argument that these self-acclaimed socialist regimes were “not real socialism.” One influential intellectual responsible for popularizing this argument is philosopher Noam Chomsky, who postulates that socialist regimes, the USSR specifically, merely pretended to be socialist to give themselves “legitimate” reasons to wield their authoritarian “club” against their people. The argument has since spread like wildfire through college-age socialists and presidential candidates such as Bernie Sanders. Labeling past socialist regimes as “not real socialism” allows socialists to avoid the argument put forth by antisocialists throughout history, or so they think. The problem with characterizing these regimes as not socialist is not only an ignorance of their history but that it does not allow socialists to escape the problem of economic calculation and the eventual descent into despotic authoritarian regimes.
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Orphaned Silver Is Finding Its Parent – Alasdair MacLeod
6 juni
This article examines the prospects for silver, which has been overlooked in favour of gold. Due to the economic and monetary consequences of the coronavirus lockdowns and the earlier turning of the credit cycle, there is an increasing likelihood of a severe and sustained downturn that will require far more monetary expansion to deal with, favouring the prospects of both gold and silver returning to their former monetary roles.
To understand the consequences for silver, this article draws on history, principally of silver standards in America and Britain, in order to appreciate the issues involved and the prospects for silver to regain its former monetary role.
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Flattening the pandemic and recession curves – Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas
3 Juni
Public health policy, at least in all semi-decently run countries, has aimed to ‘flatten the Covid-19 curve’ by imposing drastic social distancing measures and promoting health practices to reduce the transmission rate. This column, taken from a VoxEU eBook, explains how, in the short run, flattening the infection curve inevitably steepens the macroeconomic recession curve. Fortunately, economic policy can act decisively to also flatten this curve.
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