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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Persistent economic slowdown and emergence of debt-ridden borrowers – Keiichiro Kobayashi
2 mei
There is concern about the persistent slowdown of economic growth in the aftermath of financial crises. This column presents a framework which shows that excessive debt accumulated by firms and households during a crisis can cause persistent stagnation. Relief from excessive debt has a direct impact on economic growth, whereas unconventional monetary and fiscal policies cannot directly solve the fundamental debt problem.
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A Problem Emerges: Central Banks Injected A Record $1 Trillion In 2017… It’s Not Enough – Tyler Durden
6 mei
Two weeks ago Bank of America caused a stir when it calculated that central banks (mostly the ECB & BoJ) have bought $1 trillion of financial assets just in the first four months of 2017, which amounts to $3.6 trillion annualized, “the largest CB buying on record.”
BofA’s Michael Hartnett noted that supersized central bank intervention which he dubbed a “liquidity supernova” is “the best explanation why global stocks & bonds both annualizing double-digit gains YTD despite Trump, Le Pen, China, macro…”
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Douthat and Feldstein on Euro – John H. Cochrane
2 mei
In case you missed it, this Sunday featured a creditable effort by the NY Times to look out of the groundhog hole. You have likely followed the explosion resulting from Bret Stephens’ first column. Likewise, Ross Douthat tried to explain the attraction of Marine LePen. I’m not a LePen fan, but appreciated his honest effort to explain how the other side say things.
I was interested in Douthat’s views on the euro:
But on the other hand, our era’s “enlightened” governance has produced an out-of-touch eurozone elite lashed to a destructive common currency,..
There is no American equivalent to the epic disaster of the euro, a form of German imperialism with the struggling parts of Europe as its subjects…
And while many of her economic prescriptions are half-baked, her overarching critique of the euro is correct: Her country and her continent would be better off without it.
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*** Redefining the Middle Class: It Isn’t What You Earn and Owe, It’s What You Own That Generates Income – Charles Hugh Smith
3 mei
No wonder the “middle class” has lost political power–it has lost the economic power of the ownership of productive assets.
Longtime correspondent Mark G. observed that the key phrase in yesterday’s excellent commentary by correspondent Ron G. is property-owning middle class. Mark wrote: “It appears to me that the income bracket method used today isn’t very informative.”
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The fading American Dream: Trends in absolute income mobility since 1940 – Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, Jimmy Narang
5 mei
One of the defining features of the ‘American Dream’ is the ideal that children have a higher standard of living than their parents. This column examines rates of ‘absolute income mobility’ – the fraction of children who earn more than their parents – to assess whether the US is living up to this ideal. Rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. Most of this decline is driven by the more unequal distribution of economic growth rather than the slowdown in aggregate growth rates.
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Spain’s Government Presses Property-Bubble Rewind Button – Don Quijones
6 mei
After spending the last few years groggily getting back onto its feet following the collapse of one of the most spectacular — and destructive — real estate bubbles of this century, Spain’s economy is once again being primed for another property boom.
In the last quarter prices registered a year-on-year rise of 4.5%. Rents are also surging, though the country is still home to over half a million vacant properties. The cost of renting in Madrid and Barcelona, which between them account for 16% of those vacant properties, has reached historic highs, according to a new study by the online real estate market place Idealista. In Madrid, rents have risen on average by 27% since 2013; in Barcelona they’ve surged over 50%.
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Is the great China crash upon us? – David Llewellyn-Smith
5 mei
While we, as well as the few bearish peers we have, have warned of a pending “credit event” in China for some time now – admittedly incorrectly (China has proved much more resilient than expected) – the more recent red flags are among the most profound we’ve seen in years – in short, we agree with fresh observations made by some of the world’s most famous iron ore bears. Thus, while it is nearly impossible to pinpoint exactly when the credit bubble will definitively pop in China, a number of recent events, in our view, suggest the threat level is currently at red/severe.
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The Connection Between Money-Supply Growth and Inflation – Frank Shostak
5 mei
In the article “Rapid money supply growth does not cause inflation” written by Richard Vague at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, December 2, 2016, the author argues that empirical evidence shows that increases in money supply has nothing to do with inflation. According to Vague,
Monetarist theory, which came to dominate economic thinking in the 1980s and the decades that followed, holds that rapid money supply growth is the cause of inflation. The theory, however, fails an actual test of the available evidence. In our review of 47 countries, generally from 1960 forward, we found that more often than not high inflation does not follow rapid money supply growth, and in contrast to this, high inflation has occurred frequently when it has not been preceded by rapid money supply growth.
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Twenty years on: Is there still a case for Bank of England independence? – Ed Balls, Anna Stansbury
1 mei
Until recently, the independence granted to the Bank of England 20 years ago had gone unchallenged. But the financial crisis has raised questions over whether central bank independence is necessary, feasible, and democratic. This column revisits the relationship between inflation and the operational and political independence of the central bank in advanced economies. The findings support the Bank of England model of monetary policy independence: fully operationally independent, but somewhat politically dependent. To make operational independence work, however, further reforms are needed to the model in both monetary–fiscal coordination and macroprudential policy.
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China’s Plan to Subvert the Global Dollar Standard – Alasdair Macleod
30 april
If nothing else, the Chinese have a sense of history and destiny. They have had a glorious past, stretching back millennia, and once controlled most of the Asian heartland in the days of Genghis and Kublai Khan. But even then, China was essentially inward-looking, protecting her own cultural values. Trade with Europeans in the centuries following Marco Polo’s visit was mostly at the behest of European travelers, not the Chinese. She exported her art and culture to visitors, and did not import European values.
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***Manufacturing Might Come Back to the US, but Robots will Get the Jobs: Apple CEO – Wolf Richter
4 mei
Robots are the Great Equalizer.
Apple will invest in and promote “advanced manufacturing” in the US, CEO Tim Cook told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Wednesday after the somewhat uninspiring earnings report. It was one of the ways Apple would create jobs in America, he said. To do that, Apple would put $1 billion in a fund that would invest in “advanced manufacturing” companies.
Apple has already “created two million jobs in America,” he said in the interview. This includes 80,000 jobs at Apple in the US; plus jobs at US suppliers, such as Corning, which makes the glass for the iPhone and iPad, and 3M, which makes adhesives that Apple uses in its devices; plus the “developer community” of almost 1.5 million people who write apps that, as he said, “change the world.”
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Milton Friedman and data adjustment – Neil Ericsson, David Hendry, Stedman Hood
4 mei
When empirically modelling the US demand for money, Milton Friedman more than doubled the observed initial stock of money to account for a “changing degree of financial sophistication” in the US relative to the UK. This column discusses effects of this adjustment on Friedman’s empirical models. His data adjustment dramatically reduced apparent movements in the velocity of circulation of money, and it adversely affected the constancy and fit of his estimated money demand models.
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The Fed Will Likely Chicken Out on Planned Rate Hikes – Thorsten Polleit
2 mei
The Austrian business cycle theory tells us that the injection of new money created through bank lending out of thin air causes an artificial boom; and that the slowdown of credit and money creation, let alone a decline in available loanable funds, turns the boom into bust. Recent bank lending data in the US show a noticeable slowdown in bank lending rates, setting in around autumn 2016. Does it signal trouble down the road?
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Understanding household financial distress: The role of noncognitive abilities – Gianpaolo Parise, Kim Peijnenburg
3 mei
Cognitive skills are often considered the key to financial wellbeing. Less weight is put on noncognitive skills. This column shows how a lack of conscientiousness, stress resistance, non-impulsiveness, or grit can explain economic fragility in households. When members possess these noncognitive skills, the household is more likely to save, less likely to have excessive unsecured debt, and less likely to be in financial distress.
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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.