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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***Has the Global Economy Finally Exhausted its Good Luck? – Charles Hugh Smith
30 januari
All of these guarantees and redundancies are as illusory as the “unsinkable” technologies of the Titanic.
The past three decades of global growth are rarely attributed to luck: it’s all the result of our brilliant fiscal, monetary and trade policies. Those in positions of wealth and power are delighted to take credit for this tremendous success, but as a general rule, the more knowledgeable you are and the higher up the food chain you are, the greater your awareness of the role of luck in any unbroken chain of success.
There are various moving parts in what we call luck. One is what we don’t know but think we know, or put another way, we know enough to be confident everything will work as intended and expected.
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Savings vs. Money: Which Is More Important? – Frank Shostak
29 januari
Conventional wisdom holds that savings is the amount of money left after monetary income was used for consumer outlays. Hence, for a given outlay, an increase in money income implies more savings and thus more funding for investment. This in turn sets the platform for higher economic growth.
Following this logic, one could also establish that increases in money supply are beneficial to the entire process of capital formation and economic growth. (Note: increases in money supply result in increases in monetary income and this, for a given consumer outlay, implies an increase in savings).
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Checking if the straitjacket fits: Theory versus statistical fit in macroeconomic modelling – Mike Wickens
28 januari
Where should the emphasis lie in macroeconometric modelling between the purity of the economic theory and empirical performance? The widespread use of DSGE models estimated by Bayesian methods has been accompanied by a downgrading of the role of statistical fit. This column reviews the issue and concludes that the challenge is to incorporate greater flexibility into the theory in such a way as to be compatible with both the theory and the data.
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The Era of Boom and Bust Isn’t Over – Thorsten Polleit
31 januari
At the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, Bob Prince, co-chief investment officer at Bridgewater Associates, attracted attention when he suggested in a news interview that the boom and bust cycle as we have come to know it in the last decades may have ended. This viewpoint may well have been encouraged by the fact that the latest economic upswing (“boom”) has been going for around a decade and that an end is not in sight as suggested by incoming macro- and microeconomic data.
But would that not reject the key insight of the Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT), which says that a boom, brought about by artificially lowered market interest rates and injections of new credit and money produced “out of thin air,” must eventually end in a bust? In what follows, I will remind us of the key message of the ABCT and outline the “special conditions” which must be taken into account if the ABCT is applied to real-world developments. Against this backdrop, we can then form a view about how the next crisis might look.
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***Housing speculation and its economic consequences – Zhenyu Gao, Michael Sockin, Wei Xiong
26 januari
Housing speculation became a national phenomenon in the low interest rate environment of the US during the mid-2000s. This column argues that speculation, which was largely independent of the credit expansion to subprime households, contributed significantly to US housing and economic cycles in the 2000s. It led not only to greater price appreciation, economic expansions, and housing construction during the boom in 2004–2006, but also to more severe economic downturns during the subsequent bust in 2007–2009.
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“In Aggregate,” Consumers Are Doing Pretty Good, But America’s Vast Income Disparity Skew the Data – Wolf Richter
31 januari
Consumers that added $1.3 trillion to their savings last year are not the ones who owe $1 trillion on their credit cards.
This phrase, “consumers in aggregate,” is starting to crop up even in Fed speak, including in Jerome Powell’s press conference this week, to express that they’re not totally blind to what is happening. Consumers “in aggregate” – all of them thrown together into one bucket and summarized with one number – are still doing their job, propping up the US economy.
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The Global Supply & Demand Shock Of The Coronavirus – Global Macro Monitor
1 februari
Our analysis of the impact of the Coronavirus is a work in progress and nobody knows the endgame. It is still the early days of the epidemic, and its dynamics will take time to understand. The scale of the impact will depend on how contagious and lethal it reveals itself.
There is a supply shock to global manufacturing as many factories in the world’s supply chain will be shuttered for longer, which shifts the global supply curve left, increasing-price and production pressures. Ergo component shortages, higher prices, and lower production.
The 2 percent decline in the U.S. stock market and collapse in bond yields are signaling a potential global aggregate demand shock that offsets the supply shock.
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Stress tests can limit international spillovers of accommodative monetary policy – Emily Liu, Friederike Niepmann, Tim Schmidt-Eisenlohr
2 februari
After the Global Crisis, accommodative monetary policy also eased financial conditions in emerging market economies. This column shows that US banks contributed to the transmission of US monetary policy and that regulation and supervision attenuated it. Only US banks that performed well in the Fed’s annual stress tests expanded their lending to emerging markets in response to monetary easing. Banks with that performance poorly left their lending unchanged.
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Global Slowdown, Internal Issues Hit Mexico: GDP Drops for First Time Since 2009 – Nick Corbishley
31 januari
President AMLO put it this way: “There may be no growth but there’s development and well-being, which are different.”
For Mexico’s economy, 2019 was not a good year. The country entered a mild technical recession in the first half and by the end of the year had registered its first annual decline in GDP since 2009. According to a preliminary estimate published by Mexico’s statistical institute INEGI, “real” GDP (adjusted for inflation) for the year 2019 declined -0.1%
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Exchange of information and bank deposits in international financial centres: An example of multilateral cooperation at work – Pierce O’Reilly, Kevin Parra Ramirez, Michael A. Stemmer
31 januari
Since the G20 declared in 2009 that “the era of bank secrecy is over”, jurisdictions have implemented an unprecedented range of measures designed to increase tax transparency by ensuring that information on foreign financial assets would be disclosed to tax authorities. This column presents the main results from a recent study on the impact of exchange of information on foreign-owned bank deposits in international financial centres. The findings highlight the effectiveness of the expansion of automatic exchange of information and provide evidence of the success of a comprehensive multilateral approach towards tax transparency.
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***Ferguson and the billionaires at Davos – John H. Cochrane
26 januari
In my last post, I commented on Joe Stiglitz view, heading to Davos, that billionaires and corporate leaders are anxious to pollute the air. In my wealth tax series I reported on the popular view on the Warren Sanders Saez Zucman view that corporate leaders and billionaires represent a regressive right wing political force, that must be stopped by any means including expropriation of their wealth, even if that means destroying the businesses that make them rich.
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Real Estate Developer: Why I Value my Properties Conservatively – John McNellis
1 Februari
As with the millions who subtract pounds and add inches to their dating site profiles, it’s very tempting to push values.
If you’re in real estate, if you’re developing or simply investing in property, you’re in the business of borrowing money. And if you’re a serial borrower, you have a chore to do every January: You must prepare your personal financial statement for your bankers.
Unlike the reporting requirements for public companies, financial statements for individuals are simple (at least in concept): a balance sheet that lists all liabilities and assets, deducts the one from the other, thereby producing a statement of net worth.
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Wokeademia & More Wokeademia – John H. Cochrane
30 en 31 januari
I’m working on an economic view of political polarization. One aspect of that project is the extent to which many institutions in our society have become politicized. Today’s post is one little data point in that larger story. It tells a little story of how to politicize an institution and silence dissenters.
Jerry Coyne reports on the “diversity equity and inclusion statement” required of anyone hired by the University of California, or desiring a raise or promotion. This is a required statement each candidate must write “Demonstrating Interest in and Ability to Advance Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” It’s not about whether you are “diverse,” meaning belonging to a racial, gender, or sexual-preference group the University wishes to hire. It is a statement, as it says, of your active participation in a political movement.
Tweede artikel werkt zaken verder uit (Red.)
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***The True Costs of Bad Economists, Explained – Per Bylund
28 januari
The eloquent nineteenth-century French economist and liberal Frédéric Bastiat famously noted that what separates a good economist from a bad one is the ability to consider both the seen and the unseen. A bad economist does not recognize the costs down the road, and may thus come to advocate all too costly solutions (as in the commonly used analogy, peeing in one’s pants in the dead of winter to escape the cold—warm at first, followed by freezing).
The distinction between the seen and the unseen is an important one, without which the true trade-off cannot be understood. And the trade-off is core to economics: every action is a choice, which means the alternatives must be known to figure out the better alternative.
Anyone can suggest solutions to problems without reference to the cost. But those are not actual solutions, since they may be what make us worse off later on.
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Learning about demand abroad from wholesalers – William Connell, Emmanuel Dhyne, Hylke Vandenbussche
30 januari
How do firms become exporters? Using transaction-level data from Belgium, this column examines the role of intermediary firms in the internationalisation process. It finds that a manufacturing firm that exports indirectly to a particular destination via a wholesaler is more likely to go on to become a direct exporter to that destination at a later point. This effect is driven by the spillover over of knowledge on foreign demand from the wholesaler to the manufacturer. The role of intermediaries is particularly important for destination markets that are further afield, where firms face greater uncertainty.
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