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 zijn.

Sinds begin 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 Source of Failure: We Optimize What We Measure – Charles Hugh Smith
30 mei
Rather than measure consumption and metrics that incentivize debt, what if we measure well-being and opportunities offered in our communities?
The problems we face cannot be fixed with policy tweaks and minor reforms. Yet policy tweaks and minor reforms are all we can manage when the pie is shrinking and every vested interest is fighting to maintain their share of the pie.
Our failure stems from a much deeper problem: we optimize what we measure. If we measure the wrong things, and focus on measuring process rather than outcome, we end up with precisely what we have now: a set of perverse incentives that encourage self-destructive behaviors and policies.
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Rate Hike Cycle Likely Complete – Not Just Beginning – Chris Hamilton
4 juni
The Federal Reserve continues discussing the timing for a cycle of rate hikes and a return to “normal”…but I think there is more than ample evidence which points to exactly the opposite. Seems the adage “watch what they do…not what they say” is appropriate as ever. So where’s the evidence?
1) FFR and Manufacturing Employment Growth Cycles
The chart below shows a 3yr moving average of the growth/decline in manufacturing jobs in the US vs. the same 3yr moving average of the Federal Funds Rate. Manufacturing job growth representing a proxy for business and economic expansion. Noteworthy are the blue arrows representing cycle peaks in manufacturing job creation all (except this present cycle) taking place during a rising rate environment and followed a couple years later by cycle interest rate peaks (dashed black arrows). This next round of rate cuts incented the next round of investment and manufacturing job growth. This has been a highly reliable indicator.
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US Job Growth Rate Hits 28-Month Low – Ryan McmMaken
3 juni
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released new employment data today, and nonfarm payroll employment increased in May be the smallest amount seen in 28 months.
For May 2016, there were 144,592,000 payroll jobs in the US, which was up 1.6 percent, or 2.3 million jobs, from May 2015. (These are all not-seasonally-adjusted numbers)
That’s the smallest year-over-year increase reported since February 2014, when payroll jobs increased by 1.57 percent. The largest year-over-year increase in recent years was reported during July 2015, when it was up 2.18 percent:
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How the Fed Stopped the “Corporate Profit Recession” (and the Media Fell for it) – Wolf Richter
1 juni
The end of the corporate “profit recession” has been declared last week. It was based on data by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, released on May 27. Corporate profits, after declining with some zigs and zags since their peak in the third quarter 2014, suddenly ticked up in the first quarter 2016. And everyone was ecstatic.
Corporate profits are in the eye of the beholder. For example, “adjusted earnings” – the ex-bad items earnings proffered by companies and analysts – of the S&P 500 companies have dropped four quarters in a row, since their peak in Q2 2015, on a year-over-year basis.
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Evidence of hidden protectionism in the US in the Great Recession – Robert Grundke, Christoph Moser
2 juni
When the Great Recession hit the world economy, fears of protectionism led to close monitoring of non-tariff barriers to trade. The increase in US import protection appeared rather modest for all those trade policy measures that do not need to be notified to the WTO. However, stricter enforcement of given product standards does not require any notification. This column argues that the US has increasingly relied on this less transparent and trade-reducing policy instrument during the recent economic crisis.
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*** The Big Mac Peso-Dollar Blues in Mexico – Don Quijones
31 mei
Although Mexico’s economy has grown at a steady rate during the lion’s share of this fledgling century, Mexican workers’ real salaries have barely shifted. In fact, over the last four decades, Mexicans’ purchasing power has not just stagnated, as has happened in many Western nations, in terms of minimum wage, it has shrunk by 78%. In 1976, a family on minimum wage could buy four times as much as today.
So bad have things become that when CNN’s Spanish edition did a study comparing the minimum statutory wage of over a dozen Latin American countries set against each country’s performance on the Big Mac index, with the US Dollar as the benchmark currency, Mexico came in 13th out of 13, behind a host of much smaller, weaker economies.
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The Five Stages of Central Bankers’ Failure – Charles Hugh Smith
31 mei
Central bankers must accept the complete and utter failure of their policies if we are to move forward.
Central bankers are now in the denial and anger stages of Kubler-Ross’s famed stages of loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Central bankers are in denial that all their trillions of dollars, euros, yen and yuan have completely and utterly failed to achieve the desired result: “organic” (i.e. unmanipulated by central states/banks) expansion of productivity, investment and household earnings.
Central bankers not only continue to insist their free money for financiers will eventually “trickle down” to the masses–they’re angry that the masses aren’t buying it. Central bankers are now blaming the masses for maintaining a perverse psychological state of disbelief in the omnipotence of central banks and their policies.
Central bankers are raging at the psychology of hesitant households, which they finger as the cause of global weakness: if only people believed everything was great, they’d borrow and blow tons of money, and the ship would leave port with a full head of steam.
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Today’s trade policy and trade research – Chad P. Bown, Meredith Crowley
5 juni
Free trade is under fire in nations across the world. This column surveys evidence on the importance of trade barriers. There is substantial variation in applied trade policy across countries, industries, and their trading partners, both cross-sectionally and over time. The variation found in these newly available and increasingly detailed databases offer researchers the opportunity to analyse and better understand firm-level trade, aggregate trade, and the shock to the world economy precipitated by China’s phenomenal export growth.
How important are policy barriers to trade? Historically, this question has been difficult to answer because, as noted by Anderson and van Wincoop (2004), “[t]he grossly incomplete and inaccurate information on policy barriers available to researchers [was] a scandal and a puzzle.”
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The abandonment of counter-cyclical fiscal policy – Jérémie Cohen-Setton
30 mei
What’s at stake: The reluctance to use fiscal policy as a stabilizing tool in the current deflationary environment has been puzzling to many and a number of authors are now putting forward possible explanations.
In its 2015 Fiscal Monitor, the IMF writes that to be stabilizing, the fiscal balance needs to increase when output rises and to decrease when it falls. That way, fiscal policy generates additional demand when output is weak and subtracts from demand when the economy is booming.
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The expansion of liability insurance availability and its effectiveness in limiting systemic risk – Charles W Calomiris, Matthew Jaremski
1 juni
Liability insurance is a fundamental part of banking regulation of today, but despite being accepted as best practice now, it did not expand out of the US until the second half of the 20th century. This column discusses economic and political explanations for the spread of liability insurance availability, and finds that a political explanation reflects the empirical evidence well. Liability insurance was preferable to other policies despite being inefficient, due to its use as political leverage.
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***Summers on roadblocks to infrastructure – John H. Cochrane
31 mei
The bureaucrats of Massachusetts have done the nation a wonderful service, by parking an abject lesson in America’s infrastructure sclerosis right in front of Larry Summers’ office.
Summers and Rachel Lipson have written a remarkable Op-Ed in the Boston Globe, and Larry a deeper follow-on piece on the Washington Post Wonkblog, detailing the 5 year struggle to repair a bridge that took 11 months to build in 1911.
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The transatlantic economy: Convergence or divergence? – Moreno Bertoldi, Paolo Pesenti, Hélène Rey, Valérie Rouxel-Laxton
3 juni
The issue of whether the US and Eurozone economies are on a convergent or a divergent path remains an open question, and was the topic of a recent conference hosted by the New York Fed. This column summarises the principal themes and findings of the conference discussion. Much will depend on the policy actions that will be taken in the coming years, as well as the modalities and timing of the completion of the Economic and Monetary Union.
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What Makes this Jobs Report so Truly Ugly? – Wolf Richter
3 juni
It would have been nice if we’d been correct to the minute, but we were two months early, and therefore wrong, when we wrote on March 30, If This Plays Out, Friday Will Get Ugly.
But it did play out today.
At the time, we suspected that the March jobs report, released in early April, would be a debacle. We based this on an analysis of the divergence over time between the reports issued by payroll processing company ADP and the jobs reports issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That divergence had been going on for months. Eventually it reverts to the mean. We postulated that March would be that month.
Instead, it happened two months behind schedule, so to speak, as today’s jobs report was precisely that sort of debacle.
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The Structure of Collapse: 2016-2019 – Charles Hugh Smith
3 juni
Leaders face a no-win dilemma: any change of course will crash the system, but maintaining the current course will also crash the system.
The end-state of unsustainable systems is collapse. Though collapse may appear to be sudden and chaotic, we can discern key structures that guide the processes of collapse.
Though the subject is complex enough to justify an entire shelf of books, these six dynamics are sufficient to illuminate the inevitable collapse of the status quo.
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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.