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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Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis – Hans-Hermann Hoppe
1 september
I will do the following in this chapter: First, I will present a series of theses that constitute the hard-core of the Marxist theory of history. I claim that all of them are essentially correct. Then I will show how these true theses are derived in Marxism from a false starting point. Finally, I want to demonstrate how Austrianism in the Mises-Rothbard tradition can give a correct but categorically different explanation of their validity.
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***De-Dollarization Accelerates: China Readies Yuan-Priced Crude Oil Benchmark Backed By Gold – Tsvetana Paraskova
1 september
The world’s top oil importer, China, is preparing to launch a crude oil futures contract denominated in Chinese yuan and convertible into gold, potentially creating the most important Asian oil benchmark and allowing oil exporters to bypass U.S.-dollar denominated benchmarks by trading in yuan, Nikkei Asian Review reports.
The crude oil futures will be the first commodity contract in China open to foreign investment funds, trading houses, and oil firms. The circumvention of U.S. dollar trade could allow oil exporters such as Russia and Iran, for example, to bypass U.S. sanctions by trading in yuan, according to Nikkei Asian Review. To make the yuan-denominated contract more attractive, China plans the yuan to be fully convertible in gold on the Shanghai and Hong Kong exchanges.
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The financial crisis, ten years on – Stephen Cecchetti, Kim Schoenholtz
29 augustus
There is still a notable lack of consensus over when exactly the 2007-09 financial crisis started. This column argues that the crisis began on 9 August 2007, when BNP Paribas announced they were suspending redemptions. In 2007, the US and European financial systems lacked two key shock absorbers: adequate capital to meet falls in asset values, and adequate holdings of high-quality liquid assets to meet temporary liquidity shortfalls. Lacking these, the financial system was vulnerable to even relatively small disturbances, like the BNP Paribas announcement.
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Fearing Contagion, Russia Bails Out Bondholders in its Biggest Bank Collapse Yet – Wolf Richter
30 augustus
“The panicky mood has been dampened down,” as other banks are rumored to be teetering.
True to the playbook of bank bailouts, the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) decided to bail out Bank Otkritie Financial Corporation, the largest privately owned bank in the country, and the seventh largest bank behind six state-owned banks.
The Central Bank put in an undisclosed amount of money in return for at least a 75% stake. This is likely to be Russia’s biggest bank bailout ever, well ahead of the current record holder, the $6.7 billion bailout of the Bank of Moscow in 2011.
Otkritie and its businesses would operate as usual, the Central Bank said. The banks obligations to creditors and bondholders, which include other Russian banks, would be honored to avoid contagion.
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Want to Grow the Economy? Stop Listening to Clueless Economists – John Tamny
31 augustus
The great investor and writer Andy Kessler frequently points out that the failure rate among Silicon Valley start-ups is 90 percent. Every member of the economics profession would be wise to memorize the previous figure, and repeat it daily. If so, economists might come closer to understanding why they’re mystified by what they deem slow economic growth. And mystified they are. So much so that they’ve apparently given up.
According to New York Times reporter Binyamin Appelbaum, the theme that emerged from the Kansas City Fed’s Jackson Hole confab is that economists have ceased offering growth proposals. Appelbaum indicates that they’re playing defense now; floating ideas to allegedly ensure things don’t get worse. Having tried everything since 2008 (more on this in a bit), they’ve given up arguing about what they plainly don’t understand, or recognize. It almost renders the credentialed sympathetic in some weird, pathetic way.
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Correlation networks to measure the systemic implications of bank resolution – Giudici Paolo, Laura Parisi
28 augustus
In the European single resolution framework, there are three potential paths for failing banks: bail-in, private intervention, or liquidation. This column proposes combining a new market-based early warning measure of credit risk based on CDS spreads to investigate potential losses and systemic contagion for each path. Applying this to Italy’s banking system suggests that private intervention and a bail-in minimise losses compared to liquidation, and, bail-in slightly reduces contagion effects compared to private intervention.
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***How Welfare States Encourage Bad Economic Thinking – Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski
1 september
The greatest intellectual accomplishment of the laissez-faire liberal theorists was the recognition of the “hard” and “soft” institutions that are crucial prerequisites of productive accomplishment and material prosperity. The hard institutions include private property rights, market prices, and sound money. The soft institutions include those that reinforce values such as prudence, thrift, resourcefulness, innovative courage, and respect for success.
However, this accomplishment was accompanied by a proportionately great intellectual error — the belief that these institutions can be safeguarded exclusively by monopolistic apparatus of aggressive violence, commonly known as states. Since states necessarily parasitize on the productive output of market society, the belief that they are necessary for its emergence, let alone that they can remain “minimal” after its emergence, is fatally misguided. On the contrary, it appears perfectly predictable that they will grow in step with the increase in market output.
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Why Wages Have Lost Ground in the 21st Century – Charles Hugh Smith
31 augustus
The problem with stagnant wages is our socio-economic system requires ever-higher incomes to function.
One of the enduring mysteries for conventional economists is why wages aren’t rising for the bottom 95% even as unemployment is low and hiring remains robust. According to classical economics, the limited supply of available workers combined with strong demand for workers should push wages higher.
Why have wages for the bottom 95% lost ground in an expanding economy? We can start our search for answers by looking at a chart of wages going back 44 years to the early 1970s. Note that the top 5% began pulling away in the 1980s, when financialization and globalization took off, and accelerated in the 1990s tech boom and the early 2000s housing bubble. The bottom 95% benefited from these booms, but at a much more modest level: wages for the bottom 95% almost returned to 0% gain as opposed to actual declines.
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Risk intolerance and the global economy: A new macroeconomic framework – Ricardo Caballero, Alp Simsek
30 augustus
Interest rates continue to decline across the globe, while returns to capital remain constant or increasing. The reasons for this widening risky-safe gap are wide-ranging. This column illustrates the secular rise of risk intolerance in the global economy, and summarises a new macroeconomic framework suitable for this environment. It uses this framework to discuss the current global macroeconomic context, its underlying fragility, and the coexistence of low equilibrium interest rates and high speculation.
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Yellen at Jackson Hole – John H. Cochrane
30 augustus
Fed Chair Janet Yellen gave a thoughtful speech at the Jackson Hole conference.
The choice of topic, financial stability and the Fed’s role in financial regulation and supervision, says a lot. Financial regulation, supervision, and other tinkering, is much more centrally a part of what the Fed is and does these days than standard monetary policy. Whether overnight interest rates go up or down a quarter of a percentage point may be the subject with the greatest ratio of talk to action, and of commentary to actual effect, in all of economics. Interest rates are likely to stay around 1% for the foreseeable future. Get used to it. But the Fed is deeply involved in running the financial system, and all the talk points to more.
Rather unsurprisingly, she did not give the speech I might have given, or that some of the others campaigning for her job have given, bemoaning the current state of affairs. She’s been in charge, after all. If she viewed the Dodd-Frank act as a grossly complex Rube Goldberg contraption, and the Fed only following silly rule-making dictates to comply with the law, she would have said so loudly long before this. Whether with an eye to reappointment, to write the first draft of history, or — my sense of Ms. Yellen — out of forthright Jon Snow-like irrepressible honesty, one should not have expected a stunning critique. Moreover, her speech is dead-center of the world in which she lives, that of international policy and regulatory organizations. It would be a lot to expect a Fed chair to lead intellectually and to strike out far from the consensus of the bubble.
Still, I am disappointed. Even accepting her view of the crisis, and the current slow growth era, there are far more “Remaining Challenges” than her three paragraphs. There are far more questions to be asked, paths to choose, and fundamental choices to be made.
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***The US Cities with the Biggest Housing Bubbles – Wolf Richter
29 augustus
This is how monetary policies have crushed the value of labor.
For the good folks who hope fervently that the Fed doesn’t have reasons to raise rates or unwind QE because there isn’t enough inflation, here is an update on one aspect of inflation – asset price inflation, and particularly house price inflation – where the value of your hard-earned dollars has collapsed over a given number of years to where it takes a whole lot more dollars to pay for the same house.
So here are some visuals of amazing house price bubbles, city by city. Bubbles really aren’t hard to recognize, if you want to recognize them. What’s hard to predict accurately is when they will burst. Normally the Fed doesn’t want to acknowledge them. But now it has its eyes focused on them.
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International spillovers and local credit cycles: Evidence from Turkey – Yusuf Soner Baskaya, Julian di Giovanni, Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan, Mehmet Fatih Ulu
1 september
Most models assume capital flows are endogenous to the business cycle, and that inflows increase during an economy’s ‘boom’ periods. This column shows that the international no-arbitrage condition in fact does not hold, and that capital flows are pushed into an economy due to high global risk appetite. Controlling for domestic monetary policy responses to capital flows and changes in the exchange rate, exogenous capital inflows lower real borrowing costs and fuel credit expansion.
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***Not Even Junk Will Fetch High Interest Rates Anymore – Doug French
28 augustus
The Federal Reserve tries and tries and just can’t muster up some price-tag ripping price inflation. Blowing up its balance sheet from $900 billion to $4.5 trillion would have seemed to send us to Zimbabwe, but no, prices just won’t cooperate with the monetary masterminds toiling away in the Eccles Building.
MarketWatch’s Caroline Baum says Fed Chairs used to call these things conundrums. However, “Conundrums are a thing of the past. Nowadays, Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen has an explanation — an excuse, really — for almost anything, from the atypical behavior of asset prices to inconsistencies in economic relationships,” writes Baum.
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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.

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