Veren of Lood biedt u op zondag wekelijks een inkijkje in (minstens) 10 belangrijke of informatieve artikelen en interviews die 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 zijn.

Sinds begin december 2015 nemen we 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.

——————————————————————————————————
Why We Need a Recession: To Kill the Central-Bank Casino – C. Jay Engel
27 april
Signs of a looming recession are everywhere. Durable goods orders plunged and the Atlanta Fed’s GDP estimate was lowered to 1.4% from 1.9%. Meanwhile, existing home sales “tumbled” in February and the difference between pro forma and GAAP corporate earnings numbers are at the highest since the previous financial crisis.
——————————————————————————————————
Do rich people pay their “fair share”? – Ryan McMaken
25 april
Earlier this month, information from a Panamanian law firm was leaked which showed that many wealthy people had set up Panamanian shell companies to hide income and avoid taxes.
Out of 11.5 million leaked documents, only 211 people (.00006% of the US population) with US addresses (not all of them citizens) were implicated by the documents. Nevertheless, American politicians and members of the media seized on the leak as an illustration of how high-income Americans aren’t paying “their fair share.”
——————————————————————————————————
Fighting deflation with unconventional fiscal policy – Francesco D’Acunto, Daniel Hoang, Michael Weber
27 april
The Eurozone faces zero inflation paired with low economic growth. With monetary policy hobbled by the zero lower bound, it is time to think more broadly. This column discusses the theoretical and empirical evidence on ‘unconventional fiscal policy’. Such policies aim to increase growth and inflation in a budget-neutral fashion, while keeping the tax burden on households constant.
——————————————————————————————————
With fiat money, everything is relative – Frank Shostak
27 april
At the end of March the price of the euro in terms of US dollars closed at 1.1378. This was an increase of 4.7 percent from February when it increased by 0.3 percent. The yearly growth rate of the price of the euro in US dollar terms jumped to 6 percent in March from minus 2.9 percent in February.
——————————————————————————————————
Why Real Reform Is Now Impossible – Charles Hugh Smith
28 april
The endless bleating of well-paid pundits in the corporate media about “reform” is just more circus.
It’s difficult for well-meaning pundits to abandon the fantasy that meaningful reform is possible. Indeed, a critical function of the punditry and corporate media is to foster the fantasy that the status quo could be reformed if only we all got together and blah blah blah.
As I explain in my new book Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform, real structural reform would trigger the collapse of the status quo. (As a reminder, the status quo benefits the few at the expense of the many.)
——————————————————————————————————
The new ECB Macroprudential Bulletin – Vítor Constâncio
25 april
Since the Crisis, macroprudential policy has become a necessary complement to monetary policy. The ECB is striving to be a major contributor to the growing body of thought about the role and instruments of this new policy area. In this column, Vice-President Vítor Constâncio introduces the new bi-annual ECB Macroprudential Bulletin aimed at widening awareness about the Bank’s macroprudential policy mandate, enhancing transparency, and informing about current ECB discussions and approaches in the field.
——————————————————————————————————
***Lessons from Japan: Decades of Decay, Unavoidable Collapse – Charles Hugh Smith
26 april
Japan has proven that decay can be stretched into decades, but it has yet to prove that gravity can be revoked by central bank monetary games.
Japan’s fiscal and monetary extremes are in the news again: this time it’s the Bank of Japan’s extraordinarily large ownership of Japanese stocks, a policy intended to boost “investor sentiment” and prop up sagging equity valuations:
The Tokyo Whale Is Quietly Buying Up Huge Stakes in Japan Inc.
The core failure of Japan’s central bank and state is they have attempted to substitute monetary games for desperately needed social, political and economic reforms. This is the Keynesian ideology and project in a single sentence:
——————————————————————————————————
*** What the Heck is Going on With the Dollar and “Fear?” – Wolf Richter
1 mei
Gold jumped 2.2% on Friday to $1,294.90 an ounce. It’s up nearly 5% for the week and hit the highest price since January 2015.
Silver rose 1.7% on Friday to $17.80 an ounce. During the day, it kissed the highest price since January 2015. It has jumped 15% in April.
The yen, which the Bank of Japan successfully crushed for a while, has re-soared, from ¥126 to the dollar in June last year to ¥112 by last Wednesday morning in Tokyo. At that point, the BOJ announced that it would keep its scorched-earth campaign of negative interest rates and money printing unchanged, rather than adding to it. This disappointed the hedge fund community that had been cocksure that the BOJ would throw more fodder their way. So Japanese stocks plunged and the yen soared to hit ¥106.5 to the dollar on Friday, up 5% in three days, and the highest level since October 2014.
The euro, which the ECB is trying to crush with all its might, has re-soared 9% since early December to $1.145 by Friday.
——————————————————————————————————
Is the World Getting Crazier, But We No Longer Notice? – Charles Hugh Smith
29 april
The banquet of consequences is about to be served.
If we step back and look at what’s happened since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09, it’s easy to see that the global leadership has chosen to do more of what’s failed spectacularly.
Since the Global Financial Meltdown, central bankers and planners have pursued policies designed to boost global stock markets to create a wealth effect in which people will be psychologically inclined to borrow and spend more because their stock market/IRA portfolios are rising. This supposedly encourages them to spend this “paper wealth.”
——————————————————————————————————
Why Saudi Arabia Will Not Win The Oil Price War – Frik Els
27 april
Crude oil prices continued to surprise on Tuesday, with the U.S. benchmark adding another 4 percent to $44.60 a barrel. West Texas Intermediate is now up 65 percent since hitting 13-year lows below $27 a barrel February 11. It’s a performance only bettered by the globe’s second most traded bulk commodity – iron ore.
But like analysts of the steelmaking raw material, many in the industry have been surprised by the extent of the rally, consistently calling the oil price lower. The blame for the cloudy outlook for crude is mostly being laid at the door of Saudi-Arabia.
After the collapse of the Doha talks to freeze production and amid a spat with the U.S. over terrorism, the world’s top producer has threatened a scorched earth policy when it comes to maintaining and growing its market share.
But there is an alternative view out there that argues that the U.S., more than the Saudis, will control the direction of the market and in the event of an all-out price war holds the commanding position.
——————————————————————————————————
A Blow to Transatlantic Corpocracy – Support for TTIP Begins to Unravel – Don Quijones
28 april
A new survey conducted by YouGov for the Bertelsmann Foundation showed that only 17% of Germans believe the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a good thing, down from 55% two years ago.
In the United States, only 18% support the deal compared to 53% in 2014.
Such low popularity ratings are an incredible feat for a trade agreement that until last year the public had barely even heard of, purposefully, even as it had been on the negotiation table for years, while the governments associated with it had expected to pass it with flying colors.
During his visit to Germany at the weekend, President Barack Obama tried to breathe life back into the deal, insisting that “the majority of people still favor trade” and “still recognize, on balance, that it’s a good idea.” While that may be so, TTIP, like the other alphabet-soup trade agreements, is not really about promoting trade; it’s about reconfiguring the legal apparatus and superstructures that govern national, regional, and global commerce, business and society, for the benefit of the world’s largest multinational corporations
——————————————————————————————————
*** The ABCs of a Market Economy – Henry Hazlitt
There are basically only two ways in which economic life can be organized. The first is by the voluntary choice of families and individuals and by voluntary cooperation. This arrangement has come to be known as the free market. The other is by the orders of a dictator. This is a command economy. In its more extreme form, when an organized state expropriates the means of production, it is called socialism or communism. Economic life must be primarily organized by one system or the other.
It can, of course, be a mixture, as it unfortunately is in most nations today. But the mixture tends to be unstable. If it is a mixture of a free and a coerced economy the coerced section tends constantly to increase.
——————————————————————————————————
Economics of the Trans-Pacific Partnership: Distributional impact – Peter A. Petri, Michael Plummer
30 april
The Trans-Pacific Partnership faces serious a political challenge in the US, with some viewing it as primarily benefitting the wealthy. This column argues that it will slightly favour middle- and low-income US households, while also generating substantial benefits for poorer developing countries. As with any trade agreement, the gains and losses will be asymmetrically distributed, but the gains should permit ample support for individuals adversely affected.
——————————————————————————————————

Disclaimer: De VoL-redactie selecteert deze artikelen op interessante inzichten, of naar wij denken nuttige informatie. Wij kunnen echter geen enkele aansprakelijkheid aanvaarden voor de gevolgen van beslissingen die op grond hiervan door lezers zijn genomen, zakelijk zomin als privé.