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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The Cultural Consequences of the Federal Reserve – Jörg Guido Hülsmann
1 juni
It may seem unusual that an economist would talk about culture. Usually, we talk about prices and production, quantities produced, employment, the structure of production, scarce resources, and entrepreneurship.
But there are certain things that economists can say about the culture, and more precisely, that economists can say about the transformation of the culture. So what is culture? Well, to put it simply, it is the way we do things. This can include the way we eat — whether or not we dine with family members on a regular basis, for example — how we sleep, and how we use automobiles or other modes of transportation. And of course, the way we produce, consume, or accumulate capital are important aspects of the culture as well.
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Brexit and systemic risk – Jon Danielsson, Robert Macrae, Eva Micheler
31 mei
Brexit is likely to cause considerable disruption for financial markets. Some worry that it may also increase systemic risk. This column revisits the debate and argues that an increase in systemic risk is unlikely. While legal ‘plumbing’ and institutional and regulatory equivalence are of concern, systemic risk is more likely to fall due to increased financial fragmentation and caution by market participants in the face of uncertainty.
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Projecting the Price of Bitcoin – Charles Hugh Smith
2 juni
The wild card in cryptocurrencies is the role of Big Institutional Money.
I’ve taken the liberty of preparing a projection of bitcoin’s price action going forward:
You see the primary dynamic is continued skepticism from the mainstream, which owns essentially no cryptocurrency and conventionally views bitcoin and its peers as fads, scams and bubbles that will soon pop as price crashes back to near-zero.
Skepticism is always a wise default position to start one’s inquiry, but if no knowledge is being acquired, skepticism quickly morphs into stubborn ignorance.
itcoin et al. are not the equivalent of Beanie Babies. Cryptocurrencies have utility value. They facilitate international payments for goods and services.
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Tech skills are suddenly “abundant” in San Francisco & Silicon Valley – Wolf Richter
4 juni
Hiring dropped 4.1% in May year-over-year in the Bay Area, which includes Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and other cities, according to LinkedIn’s new Workforce Report. This contrasted with the US overall, where hiring rose 2.4%, “the strongest month for hiring since June 2015,” as the report put it.
On a seasonally-adjusted basis – this irons out large seasonal variations, such as the drop-off in December due to the holidays or the surge over the summer due to seasonal work and student internships – hiring plunged 11.1% in May from April.
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Bank resolution: The importance of a public backstop – Stephen Cecchetti, Kim Schoenholtz
29 mei
In April 2017, the US House of Representatives passed a bipartisan revision of the bankruptcy code, which would expedite the resolution of adequately structured intermediaries. This column considers the new Financial Institutions Bankruptcy Act of 2017 and how it fits in with the existing Dodd-Frank mechanism. By raising the odds of an effective resolution, the Act (as a complement to Dodd-Frank) boosts the credibility of the US regime. However, in the absence of an Orderly Liquidation Fund-like provision for temporary government funding, investors and foreign regulators will expect a future US government to re-introduce an ad hoc bailout mechanism when it is inevitably needed.
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How Long Can the Fed Keep the Boom Going? – Thorsten Polleit
30 mei
The US bond market trades at a quite high valuation. For instance, the 10-year US Treasury bond presents a price earnings (PE) ratio of 43. In other words: It takes 43 years for the investor to recoup the bond’s purchase price through coupon payments; the bond market’s PE ratio even went up to 68 in June 2012 and July 2016, respectively.
At the same time, the PE ratio of the stock market is at 23, significantly higher than its long-term average of close to 17 for the period from 1973 to 2017. That said, the 10-year Treasury bond has become more hazardous compared to stocks. This is exactly what the PE ratio tells us: The higher (lower) the PE ratio, the higher (lower) the investor’s risk.
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Oh My, Those Conflicted American Consumers…. – Wolf Richter
31 mei
The divide in economic confidence has become extreme.
The election had an instant impact on consumer sentiment in the US. From one day to the next, their confidence about the economy surged – though nothing changed in the economy.
The major sentiment surveys all show the same pattern: Confidence soared after the election, peaked in March, and has begun to taper off. The surveys also agree: Economic confidence has soared among Republicans but has plunged among Democrats, and the net effect has been an increase in the overall score.
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How Debt-Asset Bubbles Implode: The Supernova Model of Financial Collapse – Charles Hugh Smith
30 mei
When debt-asset bubbles expand at rates far above the expansion of earnings and real-world productive wealth, their collapse is inevitable. The Supernova model of financial collapse is one way to understand this.
As I noted yesterday in Will the Crazy Global Debt Bubble Ever End?, I’ve used the Supernova analogy for years, but didn’t properly explain why it illuminates the dynamics of financial bubbles imploding.
According to Wikipedia, “A supernova is an astronomical event that occurs during the last stellar evolutionary stages of a massive star’s life, whose dramatic and catastrophic destruction is marked by one final titanic explosion.”
A key feature of a pre-supernova super-massive star is its rapid expansion. As the star consumes its available fuel via nuclear fusion, the star’s outer layer expands. Once there is no longer enough fuel/fusion to resist the force of gravity, the star implodes as gravity takes over.
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GDP and capturing the benefits of the Internet economy – Charles R. Hulten, Leonard Nakamura
2 juni
Conventional growth theory characterises innovation as ‘resource-saving’, in the sense that it allows the same output to be produced with fewer resources. This column introduces a sources-of-welfare growth model that also includes a measure of ‘output-saving’ innovation, which arises from the expanded scope and efficiency in consumer choice recently brought about by the Internet economy and smartphones. The findings highlight how various new kinds of intangible capital complicate the measurement of GDP.
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Central Banks Now Own A Third Of The Entire $54 Trillion Global Bond Market – Tyler Durden
4 juni
Two weeks ago we asked a question: maybe behind all the rhetoric and constant (ab)use of sophisticated terms like “gamma”, “vega”, CTAs, risk-parity, vol-neutral, central bank vol-suppression, (inverse) VIX ETFs and so forth to explain why despite the surging political uncertainty in recent years, and especially since the US election…… global equity volatility, both implied and realized, has tumbled to record lows, sliding below levels not even seen before the 2008 financial crisis, there was a far simpler reason for the plunge in vol: trading was slowly grinding to a halt.
That’s what Goldman Sachs found when looking at 13F filings in Q1, when it emerged that the gross portfolio turnover of hedge funds had retreated to a record low of just 28%. In other words, few if any of the “smart money” was actually trading in size.
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Haunting Photos of #Carmageddon: Hyundai Gets Crushed, as GM, Ford, Others Struggle – Wolf Richter
2 juni
Industry experts had lowered their forecasts for May auto sales, having been overoptimistic every month this year, always figuring that there would be a year-over-year sales increase, when in fact sales fell every month. So for May, they became practically gloomy, but not gloomy enough.
J.D. Power and LMC Automotive forecast that new vehicle sales in May would inch up 0.5% year-over-year to 1.54 million cars and light trucks. Edmunds predicted that sales would edge up 0.3% to 1.53 million units. And Kelley Blue Book forecast that sales would be essentially flat year-over-year at 1.525 million:
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Flexible labour markets, real wages, and economic recoveries: Views of economists – Wouter den Haan, Martin Ellison, Ethan Ilzetzki, Michael McMahon, Ricardo Reis
30 mei
Real hourly wage growth has behaved quite differently across countries over the past ten years. This column describes how the majority view of the latest Centre for Macroeconomics and CEPR expert survey is that low growth of real wages has had a positive impact on European employment rates during the recovery phase of the Great Recession. A strong majority of respondents also agrees that the dire performance of UK real wage growth relative to the big Eurozone economies is in large part due to the UK’s labour market policies, which provide workers with comparatively weak protection.
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Why International Financial Crises? – Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Yves Smith
2 juni
The first is that, as Keynes stressed, the problem with past international monetary systems like the gold standard was that there was no punishment for countries that engaged in mercantilist strategies and ran trade surpluses. Countries have strong incentives to do so because they effectively steal demand, and thus jobs, from their trade partners. The US has been willing to accommodate this desire because it saw ways to get geopolitical advantage from this situation. Second is that the US has been explicit about trying to make the world safer for US banks and later investment banks. Among other things, it was seen as a way to promote US multinationals. Believe it or not, globalization was supposed to be a force for peace. See this tweetstorm.
Note also that Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff had a simpler explanation: they looked at 800 years of financial crises and concluded that higher levels of international capital flows lead to more frequent and severe financial crises. And before you blame that on trade deals, keep in mind that the Bank of International Settlements found that the ratio of money movements related to securities transactions has exploded. In the runup to the crisis, international capital flows were over 60 times the level of trade.
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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.