Economische aanraders: 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 worden.

Sinds 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.

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New CEPR Policy Insight | Post-Brexit trade and development policy – Richard Baldwin, Paul Collier, Anthony Venables
29 maart
Regardless of what one may think of the decision, the British people have voted to leave the EU – a result that throws up historic challenges as well as historic opportunities. This column introduces CEPR’s latest Policy Insight, which suggests that Brexit should be viewed as an important opportunity for fresh thinking.
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Brexit bill negotiators must answer these 12 questions – ZsoltDarvas, Konstantinos Efstathiou, Inês Goncalves, Raposo Date
31 maart
Is Brexit a divorce, or is the UK leaving a club? This is the first question to answer as negotatiors discuss the key aspects of the EU-UK financial settlement. The authors present various scenarios, and find that the UK could be expected to pay between €25.4 billion and €65.1 billion. But the final cost can only be calculated after extensive political negotiations.
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Unraveling QE “Later This Year” Gets Serious – Wolf Richter
31 maart
Today it was New York Fed President William Dudley’s job to hammer home the message. He’s one of the most influential members on the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee. His New York Fed deals with the securities that are on the Fed’s balance sheet as a result of QE. And he said the Fed might start reversing QE this year.
With this call to shrink the Fed’s balance sheet, he is following in the footsteps of other Fed heads, including Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester, San Francisco Fed President John Williams, and most notably Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren – a former “dove” who has been publicly fretting about bubbles in commercial real estate and housing and the risks they pose to “financial stability.”
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Moscow And Beijing Join Forces To Bypass US Dollar In Global Markets, Shift To Gold Trade – Tyler Durden
1 april
The Russian central bank opened its first overseas office in Beijing on March 14, marking a step forward in forging a Beijing-Moscow alliance to bypass the US dollar in the global monetary system, and to phase-in a gold-backed standard of trade.
According to the South China Morning Post the new office was part of agreements made between the two neighbours “to seek stronger economic ties” since the West brought in sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine crisis and the oil-price slump hit the Russian economy.
According to Dmitry Skobelkin, the deputy governor of the Central Bank of Russia, the opening of a Beijing representative office by the Central Bank of Russia was a “very timely” move to aid specific cooperation, including bond issuance, anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism measures between China and Russia.
The new central bank office was opened at a time when Russia is preparing to issue its first federal loan bonds denominated in Chinese yuan. Officials from China’s central bank and financial regulatory commissions attended the ceremony at the Russian embassy in Beijing, which was set up in October 1959 in the heyday of Sino-Soviet relations. Financial regulators from the two countries agreed last May to issue home currency-denominated bonds in each other’s markets, a move that was widely viewed as intended to eventually test the global reserve status of the US dollar.
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*** The Overlapping Crises Are Coming, Regardless of Who’s in Power – Charles Hugh Smith
28 maart
No leader can reverse the dynamics of mutually reinforcing crises.
Commentators seem split into three camps: those who see Trump as a manifestation of smouldering social/economic ills, those who see Trump and his supporters as the cause of those ills, and those who see Trump as both manifestation and cause of those ills.
I think this misses the point, which is the overlapping crises unfolding in this decade– diminishing returns on skyrocketing debts, the demographics of an aging populace, the erosion of the social contract and the profound disunity of political elites–will continue expanding and feeding on each other regardless of who is in power.
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Shock, Horror: ECB Not as “Independent” as it Claims – Report – Don Quijones
29 maart
The European Central Bank has found itself in the rare position of having to defend itself in the public arena following the release of a scathing report on its perceived lack of political independence. The report, published by anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International, argues that the institution has accrued new power and influence in the wake of the financial crisis but its code of conduct has not kept up with that newfound clout.
It even suggests that the ECB should withdraw from the Eurozone’s Troika of creditors, precisely at a time that calls are rising for the creation of a European Monetary Fund.
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*** Why Angela Merkel Hates Tax Competition – Ryan McMaken
27 maart
European political leaders gathered in Malta last month to discuss the future of the European Union. During the meeting, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made sure to denounce any post-Brexit move on the part of the United Kingdom to lower corporate taxes. (Merkel condemned efforts by the US to cut corporate taxes as well.) Merkel called any such move a “race to the bottom.”
With these comments, Merkel; was echoing earlier comments by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble who in January employed the same “race to the bottom” phrase and harangued the UK on the matter, claiming that any attempt to lower taxes would be in violation of international agreements. Besides, lowering taxes is retrograde and non-progressive thinking, Schäuble noted, stating that “A truly global economy must think of global governance.”
This controversy helps to reveal how the European Union has been a useful tool in preventing tax competition between member states.
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Our Economies Run On Housing Bubbles – Raúl Ilargi Meijer
30 maart
We are witnessing the demise of the world’s two largest economic power blocks, the US and EU. Given deteriorating economic conditions on both sides of the Atlantic, which have been playing out for many years but were so far largely kept hidden from view by unprecedented issuance of debt, the demise should come as no surprise.
The debt levels are not just unprecedented, they would until recently have been unimaginable. When the conditions for today’s debt orgasm were first created in the second half of the 20th century, people had yet to wrap their minds around the opportunities and possibilities that were coming on offer. Once they did, they ran with it like so many lemmings.
The reason why economies are now faltering invites an interesting discussion. Energy availability certainly plays a role, or rather the energy cost of energy, but we might want to reserve a relatively larger role for the idea, and the subsequent practice, of trying to run entire societies on debt (instead of labor and resources).
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Sacrificing consumption to mitigate catastrophic risks – Tim Besley, Avinash Dixit
31 maart
Many scientists agree that the probability of a rare environmental disaster increases as the stock of greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere. This column asks how much consumption current generations should be willing to sacrifice to reduce the risk of such a future catastrophe. If there were a way of immediately eliminating the risk of all future catastrophes, society should be willing to sacrifice 16% of its consumption in perpetuity to achieve this. A sacrifice of 5.8% of annual consumption could bring about a 30% reduction in emissions, in line with the reductions contemplated in agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol.
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Klaas Knot on ECB Tapering: “We’ll See.” – C.Jay Engel
30 maart
With the Fed continuing to portray a “hawkish” message, focused on three or four 2017 rate hikes, the ECB is too having to decide whether their easing policy should be cut back. The Fed began its tapering of (official) QE years ago and is therefore now onto rate hikes and balance sheet efforts. The ECB, however, is still heavily in asset-purchasing mode.
In a recent interview with the the Wall Street Journal, Dutch central bank governor Klaas Knot, made it clear: Euro area interest rate hikes are not going to take place until the asset purchase program has been brought to a close.
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Stockman Warns “‘Stimulus-Blinded’ Mules Don’t See What’s Coming At All” – David Stockman
1 april
Reagan’s top economic adviser David Stockman explains why Trump’s tax cuts… and his stimulus plan… are dead on arrival.
The mules of Wall Street were back at it again, buying the dips after the overnight whoosh downward in the futures market. Apparently, it will take an actual two-by-four between the eyes to break a habit that has been working for 96 months now since the March 2009 post-crisis bottom.
We think it is plain as day, however, that we are in a new ball game that the “stimulus-blinded” mules don’t see coming at all. To wit, they have been juiced for eight years running by the Keynesian apparatchiks at the Fed who needed permission from exactly no one to run the printing presses full tilt or to rescue the market with a new round of QE or an extension of ZIRP whenever the indices began to wobble.
But now, even the money printers have made it clear in no uncertain terms that they are done for this cycle, anyway, and that they will be belatedly but consistently raising interest rates for what ought to be a truly scary reason.
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More covered interest parity – John H. Cochrane
30 maart
Several correspondents were kind enough to send me additional work on covered interest parity.
There are two big questions (and a third at the end): 1) what force pushes prices out of line? 2) what force stops arbitrageurs from taking advantage of it, and thereby pushing prices back in line?
Covered Interest Parity Lost: Understanding the Cross-Currency Basis by Claudio Borio, Robert McCauley, Patrick McGuire, and Vladyslav Sushko (also “The Failure of Covered Interest Parity”)
point out that the price whose variation drives arbitrage is the forward rate.
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The Fed’s price stability achievement: A case for Federal Reserve independence – Stephen Cecchetti, Kim Schoenholtz
28 maart
US monetary policy has been the target of substantial criticism over the years. This column outlines one key area where the Federal Reserve has done remarkably well – managing price stability. Its ability to control inflation is a key reason that, for the sake of the US and global economies, the Fed’s independence should be preserved.
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Is the Global Taxman Coming? – Don Quijones
1 april
Credit Suisse is once again under international investigation for allegedly helping its clients evade the prying eyes of national tax authorities. This comes after the bank was fined $2.6 billion by the U.S. government in 2014 for helping Americans evade taxes.
Helping high net worth private clients and corporations evade taxes, and then getting caught is not unique to Credit Suisse. Fellow Swiss megabank UBS and UK giant HSBC were fined hundreds of millions of dollars for their troubles.
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The Problem with Paid Parental Leave – Xiong Yue
28 maart
A Chinese fable called “Three in the Morning and Four in the Evening,” relates this story: An old man in ancient China wanted to reduce his pet monkeys’ food as he can’t afford the previous amount any longer. He first told them that he would reduce the monkey’s ration to three acorns in the morning and four acorns in the evening. Thereupon, his monkeys protested angrily. Then the old man said, “How about four in the morning and three in the evening?” Knowing that he would get four acorns the next morning, the monkeys became ecstatic.
We may laugh at the monkey in this story, but when actress Anne Hathaway gave a speech at the United Nations this month arguing for paid parental leave for all parents — both mothers and fathers — she is no wiser than the monkey.
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Happiness and wellbeing as objectives of macroeconomic policy: Views of economists – Wouter den Haan, Martin Ellison, Ethan Ilzetzki, Michael McMahon, Ricardo Reis
30 maart
Are quantitative measures of subjective wellbeing reliable enough to provide insights into empirical macroeconomic analysis, and should they influence the objectives of macroeconomic policy? The latest Centre for Macroeconomics and CEPR expert survey finds a reasonable amount of openness to wellbeing measures among European macroeconomists. On balance, though, there remains a strong sense that while these measures merit further research, we are a long way off reaching a point where they are widely accepted and sufficiently reliable for macroeconomic analysis and policymaking.
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The War on Cash: Old and New – Louis Rouanet
30 maart
Before the United States ran aground on the dangerous reefs of State interventionism and centralism, the dollar was not only a sign of stability, but also a symbol of human freedom. A dollar was a means to express your wants and commands to the business class. The consumer, for the most part, was sovereign. Any American could save, consume, and invest his money whose value was not debauched by a government in lack of resources. To this day, and despite the evils of inflationism and central banking, the dollar remains an instrument of freedom and independence for many Americans. There are those, however, who would like to change that. They are the Wall Street financiers, politicians, annointed intellectuals, and central bankers for whom a centralized control of the money supply is not enough. To them, not only the supply of money but also the free and innocent use of money should be strictly limited and regulated by the State. Their new enemy is the banknote and their new war is the war on cash.

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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.