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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U.S. Weeks Away From A Recession According To Latest Loan Data – Tyler Durden
10 juni
While many “conventional” indicators of US economic vibrancy and strength have lost their informational and predictive value over the past decade (GDP fluctuates erratically especially in Q1, employment is the lowest this century yet real wage growth is non-existent, inflation remains under the Fed’s target despite its $4.5 trillion balance sheet and so on), one indicator has remained a stubbornly fail-safe marker of economic contraction: since the 1960, every time Commercial & Industrial loan balances have declined (or simply stopped growing), whether due to tighter loan supply or declining demand, a recession was already either in progress or would start soon.
This can be seen on both the linked chart, and the one zoomed in below, which shows the uncanny correlation between loan growth and economic recession.
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The False Promise of Infrastructure Spending – Charles Hugh Smith
6 juni
Building bridges to nowhere isn’t just a waste of money in the present; it saddles the economy with productivity-draining costs for decades to come.
If there is anything the political left, right and center can agree upon, it’s the lasting benefits of spending more (borrowed) money on infrastructure: roadways, rail lines, airports, seaports, pipelines, dams, electrical lines and so on: the physical networks of advanced civilization.
That Roman roadways constructed 2,000 years ago are still visible illustrates the longstanding value of reliable infrastructure: Roman political control and trade depended on roadways and sea transport to tie the sprawling empire together.
This is the basic assumption behind the notion that virtually any and all infrastructure spending will create value far into the future.
But is this really true? Does rebuilding and/or adding infrastructure create economic value?
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Infrastructure ‘Stimulus’ – Chinese Ghost Cities & The Big Money Drain – Alec Deluce
10 juni
As President Trump’s “Infrastructure Week” comes to an ignominious end, NIRP Umbrella’s Alex Deluce reminds us that spending money on bridges to nowhere and cities of the future is anything but the stimulating panacea it is talked up to be…
Is a Chinese credit bubble in the cards? Well, it will be interesting to see if China’s authorities can get through the unwind of US $3 trillion worth of excess credit and the distressed debt on banks’ balance sheets.
From 2009 to 2016, more than 10 trillion of Chinese investment was thrown at infrastructure, ghost cities, and corruption thanks to a helping hand from the Chinese banks and foreign lenders eager to participate in the Chinese growth story.
In fact, hundreds of new cities in China are essentially empty. The hope is that rural population someday move in.
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“Bail-In” Era for Europe’s Banking Crisis Begins – Don Quijones
7 juni
Many Banco Popular investors wiped out. Taxpayers off the hook. What it means for Italy.
Banco Popular, until today Spain’s sixth biggest bank, is no more. Its assets, including a massive portfolio of small-business clients, now belong to Banco Santander, Spain’s biggest bank. The global giant now has 17 million customers in Spain, a country of just 45 million people. The price was €1.
Spain’s Ministry of the Economy revealed that by 3 pm Tuesday, Popular was no longer able to contain the deposit outflow. “It had exhausted all its lines of liquidity, both ordinary and extraordinary.” It had run out of collateral to cover any further lines of emergency liquidity.
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Why ESBies won’t solve the euro area’s problems – Marcello Minenna (eenmalige – gratis – registratie vereist)
26 april
The following guest post on European Safe Bonds is from Marcello Minenna, the head of Quantitative Analysis and Financial Innovation at Consob, the Italian securities regulator. The views expressed here are his personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of Consob.

The euro was supposed to promise financial integration but instead has encouraged fragmentation. Since 2008, banks have retreated within national borders and governments are increasingly dependent on domestic savers for funding.
Weakness in a given country’s banking system can cause sell-offs in its sovereign bonds, wounding its home government’s finances and weakening the banks further. Scepticism about a government’s debt can hit the assets of local banks and encourage deposit flight. Either way you end up with a “doom loop” of tightening credit and market-imposed fiscal austerity.
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Predicting Fed forecasts – Neil Ericsson
8 juni
Decisions by the Fed’s Federal Open Market Committee are based in part on the Greenbook forecasts. These forecasts are produced by the Federal Reserve Board’s staff and are presented to the FOMC prior to their policy meetings, but are not made public for another five years. This column shows that the minutes of those FOMC meetings can help infer the Fed staff’s Greenbook forecasts of the US real GDP growth rate, years before the Greenbook’s public release. The FOMC minutes are thus highly informative about a key input to monetary policymaking.
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Debt Has No Consequences? Color Me Skeptical – Charles Hugh Smith
8 juni
The entire status quo is based on the delusion that rapidly rising debt will never generate any negative consequences.
Here’s a chart of America’s national debt, extended a mere dozen years into the future: the current $20 trillion in debt will double to $40 trillion, and that assumes 1) trillions of dollars in private and local government pensions don’t implode and have to be bailed out by the federal government, a bail-out that will have to be paid by borrowing more money, 2) a recession doesn’t slash federal tax revenues, 3) Universal Basic Income (UBI) doesn’t become policy, adding $1+ trillion in additional borrowing annually–and so on.
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Next Asset Bubble Cracks: It’s so Big even the Fed is Fretting – Wolf Richter
7 juni
Commercial Real Estate’s boom-and-bust cycle heads south.
Commercial real estate’s eight-year boom reached such breath-taking levels that even the Fed has been pointing it out as one of the reasons for tightening monetary policy. The Fed is worried because of the size of the sector, its leverage, and what it did to the banks during the Financial Crisis. And now commercial real estate prices are heading south once again.
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***Withdrawing From Paris Agreement Helps the Most Vulnerable – Blaine Conzatti
8 juni
Are you concerned about the poor’s economic welfare? If so, you should celebrate President Trump’s announcement that the United States will withdraw itself from the Paris Agreement.
The Paris climate accord, which was ratified last year, attempts to “brings all nations into a common cause to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate change and adapt to its effects.” Supporters of the agreement claim it is necessary to avert the disastrous consequences of climate change.
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Globalisation and executive compensation – Wolfgang Keller, Will Olney
9 Juni
Growing income inequality has been a hallmark of developed economies over the past few decades. Despite a large empirical literature exploring the determinants of this trend, to date few studies have explored the role of globalisation. Using US data on executive compensation, this column argues that while firm size, technology, and poor governance have all contributed to the growth in top incomes, globalisation is just as important in explaining the trend.
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Why The Markets Are Overdue For A Gigantic Bust – Chris Martenson
9 juni
Let me begin with a caveat: confirmation bias is an ever-present risk for an analyst such as myself.
If you’re not familiar with the term, ‘confirmation bias’ suggests that once we’ve invested time and emotional energy into developing a worldview, we’ll then seek information to confirm that view.
After writing about the economy for so many years, I’m now so convinced that we can’t print our way to prosperity that I find myself seeing signs confirming this view everywhere, every single day. So that’s the danger to be aware of when listening to me. I’m going to keep repeating this mantra and Im going to keep finding data that supports this view.
Based on lots of historical inputs, I have concluded that Printing money out of thin air can engineer lots of things, including asset price bubbles and the redistribution of wealth from the masses to the elites. But it cannot print up real prosperity.
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A manifesto for economic research in Europe – Marc Ivaldi
8 juni
The COEURE project has evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of European research in economics. This column presents a manifesto for ensuring that economics in Europe continues to thrive in testing times. The authors argue that European economists must prioritise communication with policymakers and the public, and increase both the quantity and quality of their published work. They also suggest twelve of the most urgent fields of study on which European research funding should be focused.
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Great Debt Unwind: Bankruptcies by Consumers and Businesses Jump – Wolf Richter
6 juni
The Debt Slaves are beginning to buckle under their loads.
Consumer and business bankruptcies are rising again, after declining for years since the Financial Crisis. That’s not a propitious sign.
For bankruptcy filings by businesses from large corporations to tiny sole proprietorships, the dance started in November 2015. At first it was the energy bust. But bankruptcies of energy companies have tapered off with new money surging into the oil & gas sector once again. Now bankruptcies in the retail sector are steadily worsening, and other sectors too have picked up the slack.
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***Countering the mining curse – Nicolas Berman, Mathieu Couttenier, Dominic Rohner, Mathias Thoenig
9 juni
Countries that are rich in natural resources do not always prosper economically. This column uses data on conflict and mineral extraction in Africa to argue that recent rises in mineral prices explain up to a quarter of local conflicts between 1997 and 2010. Mining-induced violence is associated with foreign ownership, although corporate social responsibility policies were associated with less violence. This is relevant to the US debate on whether to scrap the legal requirement to disclose whether products contain conflict minerals.
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***When Will the European Super-Bubble Pop? – Nick Giambruno
8 juni
France’s new president can’t keep the European Union together.
In early May, France elected globalist darling Emmanuel Macron. His victory gave the EU a short-term boost. However, it did not change the fundamental problems with Europe’s artificial mega-state.
Doug Casey agrees:
The EU was built upon a foundation of sand, doomed to failure from the very start. The idea was ill-fated because the Swedes and the Sicilians are as different from each other as the Poles and the Irish. There are linguistic, religious, and cultural differences, and big differences in the standard of living.
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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.