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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Bank performance under negative interest rates – Jose A. Lopez, Andrew Rose, Mark Spiegel
2 oktober
Many countries have now adopted negative nominal interest rates. The column uses data on 5,000 banks affected by this policy to conclude that, while their net income has not fallen, strategies to increase non-interest income are unlikely to be sustainable. Therefore we cannot assume that bank performance and lending will carry on at current levels over extended periods of negative policy rates.
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The Dynamics of Decadence – Charles Hugh Smith
5 oktober
In the present era of decadence, Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the modern equivalent of Bread and Circuses.
The dynamics of decadence are easy to understand: as affluence becomes the norm that is widely assumed to be permanent, shared purpose and sacrifice for the common good is replaced by self-absorbed decadence and an ethos of maximizing personal gain.
In his seminal essay The Fate of Empires, Sir John Glubb listed these core dynamics of imperial decline:
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The “VaR Shock” Is Back: Global Bonds Lose $880 Billion In One Week – Tyler Durden
5 oktober
Markets were in turmoil, S&P futures were locked limit down as traders panicked, the establishment political system was in chaos and global bond portfolios were about to suffer a near record $1.2 trillion in losses in just a few days.
All this took place in the hours and days following Donald Trump’s November 8, 2016 election as a Value at Risk (or VaR) shockwave spread around the globe over fears Trump would ignite an inflationary conflagration that would undo years of unorthodox monetary policy, sending interest rates soaring and crashing stock markets.
In retrospect it didn’t happen, and as the initial shock from the political revolution in the US fizzled, bond buying resumed and the VaR shock of 2016 faded as an unpleasant memory.
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The transmission of policy and economic news in the announcements of the US Federal Reserve – Peter Karadi, Marek Jarociński
3 oktober
Central bank announcements simultaneously convey information about monetary policy and the economic outlook. This column uses changes in interest rate expectations and stock prices around the time of policy announcements of the Federal Reserve to disentangle the impact of news about monetary policy from that of news about the economic outlook. It finds that both pieces of information play a significant role in the dynamics of inflation and economic growth. Controlling for news about the economy provides a more accurate measure of the transmission of monetary policy.
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Think You’re Prepared For The Next Crisis? Think Again – Adam Taggart
5 oktober
Scottish poet Robert Burns aptly penned the famous phrase: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft a-gley.” (commonly adapted as “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”)
How right he was.
History has shown time and time again that the only 100% predictable outcome to any given strategy is that, when implemented, things will not go 100% according to plan.
The Titanic’s maiden voyage. Napolean’s invasion of Russia. The Soviet’s 1980 Olympic hockey dream team. The list of unexpected outcomes is legion.
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Hot Economic Warfare: Scrambling For Rare-Earth Minerals – Wayne Madsen
5 otober
Just like the gold rushes of California between 1848 and 1855, Canada’s Klonike of 1896 to 1899, and Western Australia’s of the 1890s, the world is experiencing a frenzy to obtain mining rights in pursuit of today’s “gold,” namely rare earth minerals. Used for components of electric vehicle batteries, mobile telephones, flat-screen televisions, flash drives, cameras, precision-guided missiles, industrial magnets, wind turbines, solar panels, and other high-tech items, rare earth minerals have become the type of sought-after commodity that uranium and plutonium were during the onset of the atomic age.
Rare earth minerals do not easily roll off one’s tongue in the same manner as gold, silver, and platinum. For example, yttrium oxide and europium, while sounding unimportant, are what provide the red hue in color televisions.

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Stabilising virtues of central banks haircuts: (Re)matching bank liquidity – Vincent Legroux, Imène Rahmouni-Rousseau, Urszula Szczerbowicz, Natacha Valla
5 oktober
Among the tools used by central banks to tame the financial crisis, some – such as haircuts applied by the central bank to the collateral posted at its provision of central liquidity to the banking system – have gone largely unnoticed. This column introduces a liquidity mismatch index to quantify the extent to which central banks effectively supported bank liquidity. The analysis suggests that in the case of French banks, the ECB alleviated banks’ liquidity mismatch significantly between 2011 and 2015.
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The Fed’s QE Unwind Reaches $285 Billion – Wolf Richter
4 oktober
The “up to” begins to matter for the first time.
The Fed released its weekly balance sheet Thursday afternoon. Over the four-week period from September 6 through October 3, total assets on the Fed’s balance sheet dropped by $34 billion. This brought the decline since October 2017, when the QE unwind began, to $285 billion. At $4,175 billion, total assets are now at the lowest level since March 5, 2014:
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Austrians vs. Market Monetarists on the Housing Bubble – Robert P. Murphy
5 oktober
We Austrian economists frequently cross swords with our Keynesian foes on all manner of economic analysis and government policy recommendations. Yet the standard Austrian analysis of the business cycle is also sharply at odds with that of the “Market Monetarists,” a new school of thought coming out of the Chicago school tradition and now gaining traction at places like the Mercatus Center. In particular, prominent Market Monetarists have challenged the Austrian narrative of the housing bubble, arguing that the claims of “malinvestment” and the need for reallocation of resources do not fit the data. Yet as we’ll see, it’s the Market Monetarists who are defying common sense with their alternate version of history.
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***Pensions Now Depend on Bubbles Never Popping (But All Bubbles Pop) – Charles Hugh Smith
3 oktober
We’re living in a fantasy, folks. Bubbles pop, period.
The nice thing about the “wealth” generated by bubbles is it’s so easy: no need to earn wealth the hard way, by scrimping and saving capital and investing it wisely. Just sit back and let central bank stimulus push assets higher.
The problem with bubble “wealth” is it’s like an addictive narcotic: now our entire pension system, public and private, is dependent on the current bubbles in stocks, real estate, junk bonds and other risk assets never popping.
But a funny thing eventually happens to financial bubbles: they all pop. And when the current bubbles pop, they will gut pension reserves, projections and promises.
Take a look at the chart below of taxpayer contributions to Calpers, the California public pension fund. Note that in the heady days of Bubble #1, the dot-com era, enormous gains in Calpers’ stock holdings meant taxpayers’ contributions were a modest $159 million annually.
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Euro area reform: An anatomy of the debate – Jean Pisani-Ferry
2 oktober
A year ago, a group of 14 French and German economists joined forces with the aim of forging common proposals for euro area reforms. Their report gave rise to a lively discussion among officials and academics. This column summarises the group’s proposals and also addresses some of the points raised in a subsequent Vox debate on the topic.
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Can Seasonal Adjustments Help Us Understand the Economy? – Frank Shostak
6 oktober
According to mainstream thinking, economic slumps are caused by various shocks. This means that these slumps are caused by unexpected events, which by implication are not known beforehand.
Obviously if reasons behind various shocks cannot be established beforehand it makes sense to look at various symptoms of the emerging economic slump. Based on these symptoms the economic doctors could decide on the medicine required either to fix the economy or to prevent it from collapsing into an economic slump.
To be able to ascertain the health of an economy, what is required is to have the necessary information i.e. the data. It is held that by analyzing the data, experts could identify the state of an economy. However, they argue that as it is not always easy to identify the health of the economy just by looking at the data — what is required is to break the data into its key components. This, it is held will enable the economist to identify the key sources of the disease.
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The Return of “Beyond Petroleum”: All Talk and No Strategy? – Leonard Hyman and Willian Tilles
2 oktober
“Oil and gas companies are becoming energy companies,” according to Bob Dudley. He heads the giant British oil company, BP, and stated this in a National Public Radio interview. Interestingly, his company under legendary CEO Lord Browne changed its name from British Petroleum to the far more ambiguous BP.
Browne informed the public that BP (now) stood for “beyond petroleum.” He changed the corporate logo to a green and yellow sunburst design and built up a renewable energy portfolio well ahead of other major energy companies.
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Are dividends telling us something? – Lance Robberts
5 oktober
Earlier this week, Eddy Elfenbein has an interesting post discussing the “Bull Market In Dividends.”
“For the third quarter, dividends from the S&P 500 grew by 10.96%. That’s the strongest growth rate in more than three years. It’s the 34th quarter in a row of dividend growth.
Over the last eight years, dividends are up 234%, which is pretty close to what the S&P 500 price index has done.
Considering how simple it is, the S&P 500 has tracked a 2% dividend yield fairly closely for the last several years.”
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Economics Everywhere, Politics Nowhere: The Benefits of Swiss Decentralization – Hunter Hastings
3 oktober
Is there any hope in the Western World that individual citizens can win some release from the relentless and imprisoning growth of government? In the US, government spending, a reasonable proxy for their power over us, increases every year, except for a few minor blips. The citizens’ situation becomes more and more dire. We have precious little say and little influence over our taxes, our health care, our energy and water supplies and costs, not to mention the social rules with which the government constrains us. The number of rules and regulations, using the proxy of pages in the Federal Register, also increases every year, and very few rules are removed. The government closes in on us more and more every day.
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***Hard Brexit, hard decisions, and ‘Irexit’ – Ronald Davies, Joseph Francois
1 oktober
With increasing frustration over the situation as ‘Brexit Day’ approaches, some political pundits are suggesting that an Irish exit from the EU would benefit Ireland. This column assesses the macroeconomic impact of a range of scenarios and argues that while any version of Brexit, with or without Irexit, worsens the Irish economic situation relative to the status quo, economically speaking the best option for Ireland is to stay within the fold of the EU while hoping for and working towards the best in terms of post-Brexit UK economic integration with Europe.
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Transparency or Deception: What the Fed Was Saying in 2007 – Mark Thornton – (pdf van lang artikel)
1 oktober
Central banks have embarked on a transition from relative secrecy to relative transparency over the last two decades. This has led researchers to investigate the ramifications of transparency on important economic outcomes. By and large, the results reported have been favorable, favorable with qualifications, or ambiguous. This paper examines the communications of officials from the Federal Reserve during 2007, the year between the end of the housing bubble and the beginning of the financial crisis. In contrast to previous findings, these communications are indicative of either deception, incompetence, or a combination of both.
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