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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***So You Want to Get Rich: Focus on Human Capital – Charles Hugh Smith
29 januari
Wealth is flowing to those who earn money from their human capital and enterprise.
So you want to get rich: OK, what’s the plan? If you ask youngsters how to get rich, many will respond by listing the professions the media focuses on: entertainment, actors/actresses, pro athletes, and maybe a few lionized inventors or CEOs.
The media’s glorification of the few at the top of these sectors masks the statistical reality that those who attain wealth in these pursuits number in the hundreds or perhaps thousands, not in the millions. As in a lottery, the odds of joining such a limited group are extremely low.
There are 330 million Americans and 150 million people reporting income, so statistically, the odds of getting rich improve significantly if we focus on joining the ranks of the 11 million people who are getting rich from their human capital rather than on the few thousand people earning big bucks in music, film, sports, etc.
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Artificial intelligence, algorithmic pricing, and collusion – Emilio Calvano, Giacomo Calzolari, Vincenzo Denicolò, Sergio Pastorello
3 februari
Antitrust agencies are concerned that the autonomous pricing algorithms increasingly used by online vendors may learn to collude. This column uses experiments with pricing algorithms powered by AI in a controlled environment to demonstrate that even relatively simple algorithms systematically learn to play sophisticated collusive strategies. Most worrying is that they learn to collude by trial and error, with no prior knowledge of the environment in which they operate, without communicating with one another, and without being specifically designed or instructed to collude.
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The Difference between Money Supply & Liquidity – Frank Shostak
2 februari
The US debt ceiling suspension, signed on February 2018, expires in March this year. According to some experts, the US Treasury will have to carry out special measures because of possible delays in raising this ceiling. Treasury would need to draw down its deposits with the Fed and deposit the money in various banks for future use to pay government expenses. As a result, this would boost monetary liquidity and therefore would have beneficial effects on financial markets.
It is sometimes argued that changes in government deposits with the Federal Reserve (Fed) set in motion changes in liquidity and that this has effects on financial markets. On this logic an increase in government deposits with the Fed would lead to a decline in the supply of money and hence to a decline in monetary liquidity.
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The Next Big Threat For Oil Comes From China – Philip Verleger
31 januari
There is a widespread concern in the world regarding China’s decelerating economic growth. The slowdown, if it continues, threatens economic activity almost everywhere. Growth in Germany, for example, has already cooled due to its exports of high-quality machinery to China dropping precipitously.
Those in the oil market also worry about China. The country’s economic growth has been a key driver of global crude oil consumption. Indeed, China accounts for one-third of the International Energy Agency’s projected 2019 increase in world oil use.
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Banks And Buyers Favor Short-Dated CLOs As Fears Of Credit Crunch Intensify – Tyler Durden
2 februari
After a disastrous Q4 where “the wheels came off the leveraged loan market”, leaving banks unable to sell their loans as retail investors and institutional buyers yanked money out and moved it to more secure areas in the credit market (sending the yield on the 10-year Treasury back toward 2.5% during the opening days of 2019), the market has made a sudden and surprising comeback, with the average bid price in the leveraged loan market retracing 40% of its decline from the prior quarter, according to the credit team at Goldman Sachs.
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After the ESM programme: Options for Greek bank restructuring – Alexander Lehmann
29 januari
With the end of the Greece support programme, authorities now have scope to focus on the legacy of NPLs and excess private-sector debt. Two wide-ranging schemes are under discussion. They should be assessed in terms of required state support, likely investor appetite for problematic bank assets, and institutional capacity to manage a complex new organisation tasked with debt restructuring.
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Who Bought the Gigantic $1.5 Trillion of New US Government Debt Issued over the Past 12 Months? – Wolf Richter
31 januari
China, Japan, other foreign entities dumped US Treasuries. But someone had to buy. Here’s who.
Under the impact of a stupendous spending binge peppered with juicy tax cuts, the Treasury Department has had to issue a flood of Treasury securities to fund the cash outflow. So, over the past 12 months, the US gross national debt has ballooned by $1.5 trillion to $22 trillion as of January 30, according to Treasury Department data. And these are the good times when the economy is hopping. At the next recession, this is going to get cute.
But who the heck is buying all this debt? That question will grow increasingly important and worrisome as we move forward with this gigantic ballooning debt, fueled by deficits that Fed chairman Jerome Powell calls “unsustainable” at every chance he gets:
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The Economic Argument for a Carbon Tax Is a Work of Fiction – Robert P. Murphy
1 februari
We live in strange times indeed when an environmental reporter for The New York Times writes that we should stop pushing for a carbon tax, just a few weeks before dozens of distinguished economists sign a letter to the Wall Street Journal calling for a carbon tax. Yet despite the prestige behind the impressive list of signers, the economists mislead the American public on several key points.
Specifically, there is quite open hostility on the progressive Left to merely a carbon tax—for example as is spelled out in the “Green New Deal” that has attracted so much attention. It is thus very dangerous for these economists to tell the public that a carbon tax would promote economic growth by eliminating unnecessary regulation. Furthermore, there is no discussion of just how severely economic growth would be limited, even if the carbon tax receipts were refunded dollar-for-dollar (which of course they won’t be). The talk about average families receiving more back in dividends than they pay out in higher energy prices is extremely misleading, and could only be true if the scheme fails in its ostensible goal of drastically cutting emissions. Finally, the attempt to maintain American competitiveness with a “border adjustment” would simply ensure that the program was symbolic and did little to slow global carbon dioxide emissions.
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The death of the healthcare market – Jihn H. Cochrane
30 januari
People really do not need health insurance for regular small expenses, as they do not need car insurance to “pay for” oil changes. And any insurance system relies on an underlying cash market to find what the right prices are. Collision insurance works reasonably well because there is a supply and demand market for auto repair in which people pay their own money and there are competitive suppliers and free entry, offering services along a wide quality-price spectrum.
The underlying cash market has disappeared in health care. If you try to just pay for service, you face the ridiculous sticker prices. Everyone needs to go through some sort of middleman. We have, collectively, fallen for the fallacy that “negotiation” can lower everyone’s price, rather than (try to) lower my price by raising yours. It is widely recognized that catastrophic insurance plus health savings plans are a much better structure than current pay for everything structures. But you can’t do that if people showing up on their own to buy things are faced with fictitious “list prices.”
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Freedom of Choice is What Sets Capitalism Apart — Not Competition – Antony Sammeroff
28 januari
Capitalism has often been described by as “a system of competition” by its adversaries, or a system “based on competition.” Naturally, this assertion is usually coupled with a spirited oration on how this “tooth n’ nail” competition psychologically corrupts us – pitting man against man in a “race to the bottom.”
Many of capitalism’s most vocal advocates have, themselves, imbibed this premise uncritically. They leap to a fervent defenses of competition, extolling its virtues — real or perceived. In my view, this is a mistake. To accept without evaluation the presupposition that capitalism is a system of competition — in contrast to other hypothetical systems of cooperation (namely socialism and communism) — is to frame the very debate itself in leftist terms and play the game on an unfairly tilted game-board.
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The interaction of household finances and unconventional fiscal policy – Scott Baker, Lorenz Kueng, Leslie McGranahan, Brian T. Melzer
30 januari
During and after the Global Crisis, economists and policymakers proposed a commitment to increase consumption taxes in the future as a way to shift consumption to the present. This column tests the impact of this unconventional fiscal policy using data on car sales. It finds that households respond dramatically to planned tax increases, but this depends on them having access to credit so they can bring forward their spending.
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***Is China’s Debt Crackdown Hitting California’s Commercial Real Estate Bubble? – Wolf Richter
29 januari
The moment the money runs out.
Oceanwide Plaza – a three-tower condominium, hotel, and retail complex expected to cost over $1 billion – is one of the largest real estate projects in downtown Los Angeles. It was scheduled to be completed in 2019. The owner and developer, Oceanwide Holdings, is a Chinese conglomerate that is also currently building one of the largest mixed-use projects in San Francisco, the $1.6 billion Oceanwide Center. But now it seems the funds have run out.
“In an effort to prioritize construction activity, and while we restructure capital for the project, interior construction at Oceanwide Plaza is temporarily on hold,” Oceanwide Holdings said in a statement, cited by the Los Angeles Times.
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The Tragedy of the Euro (and Who is Truly to Blame) – Alasdair Macleod
31 januari
After years of uncertainty following the country’s 2009 crisis, Greece’s corrupt government was replaced in January 2015 by a far-left government, elected because it promised the voters it would reject onerous bailout terms from Brussels. But it turned out that as far as the ECB and Brussels were concerned, Greece’s problems were to stay in Greece, and any hopes that its troubles would be shared with the Eurozone were dashed.
In effect, it appeared that the expense of rescuing a very small member of the Eurozone risked destabilizing the others. Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister, said the reason for the EU’s uncompromising approach was it was protecting the German banks from losses. As he saw it, a sensible compromise to help a member state struggling with debt had been dismissed out of hand.
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Chinese growth: A balancing act – Konstantinos Efstathiou
28 januari
China’s GDP growth in 2018 was 6.6%, its lowest annual growth rate in more than two decades, and the rate is expected to slow further this year. What is driving the slow-down in Chinese growth and what are the implications for Chinese policymakers and the global economy? This post reviews the blogosphere’s take.
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Beyond Okun’s law: Introducing labour market flows – Guay Lim, Robert Dixon, Jan van Ours
28 januari
One version of Okun’s law specifies a relationship between the change in the unemployment rate and output growth. This column uses US labour market flows data to investigate this relationship between 1990 and 2017. It finds that the net flows between employment and unemployment are sensitive to changes in growth but respond differently to positive and negative changes. This implies that the US Okun relationship is stable but asymmetric, the effect of a change being larger in contractionary periods than in expansionary ones.
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BofA: The Typical Professional Investor Is Focused On Momentum, Is Unused To Volatility And Sees Valuation As Irrelevant – Tyler Durden
2 februari
With the S&P having soared 350 points in just over a month, banks are once again finding themselves chasing their own penguin shadows, and having cut their 2019 year end S&P500 forecasts in the depth of the December near bear market, will soon be forced to start lifting them again. Or perhaps not: some like Bank of America, courtesy of a strategic typo, has all its bases covered, expecting the S&P to close at both 2900 (its old target) and at 2,688 – its fair value target.
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Big Trouble in Little China, the country’s economic problems are starting to escalate – Valentin Schmid
31 januari
The country’s economic problems are starting to escalate…
China is a country of extremes, especially regarding economic forecasts. There are those who think “China will take over the world” with its technocratic central planning. Then there are those who say its debt bubble is so gigantic, the economy will crash and burn.
The truth, probably, lies somewhere in the middle. And it looks like we are getting closer to know the truth.
Official GDP growth, is of course on track at 6.6 percent for the year 2018, stellar among industrial and even emerging economies. But nobody believes these figures, even though they are the worst since 1990.
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Home Sales to Get Even Uglier in Near Future – Wolf Richter
31 januari
“Dripping down, down, down. Frustrating that the housing market is not recovering”: National Association of Realtors
What will home sales look like in January and February? Very, very lousy, according to pending home sales, a measure that counts how many contracts were signed. Contract signings run roughly one or two months ahead of when the sales close and are reported as sales. The measure of pending home sales for December projects actual home sales in January and February.
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