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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No. More Debt Is Not The Answer – Daniel Lacalle
11 oktober
In an article published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Isabel Schnabel, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB states that governments taking more debt now should not be a concern, and would strengthen the central bank independence in the future. She claims that “the decisive fiscal policy intervention in the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis strengthens the effectiveness of monetary policy and mitigates the long-term costs of the pandemic. With targeted, forward-looking investment, not least under the umbrella of the EU Recovery Fund, governments can foster sustainable growth, increase long-term competitiveness and facilitate the necessary reduction of the debt ratio once the crisis has been overcome”.
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Japan Embraced Debt as a Way out of Its Budget Crisis. It’s Not Working. – Taiki Murai, Gunther Schnabl
10 oktober
The sudden resignation of Japans Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has led to evaluations of his so-called Abenomics. Many have praised Abe’s aggressive monetary policy because the long shopping list of the Bank of Japan (government bonds, corporate bonds, ETFs and real estate investment trusts) has inflated stock and real estate prices (Shirai 2020; Financial Times 2020). Concerns remain on the fiscal side since Abe’s consumption tax hikes from 5 percent to 8 percent in 2014 and to 10 percent in 2019 are widely seen as a failure (The Economist 2020). Indeed, Abe resolved Japan’s deep-seated fiscal problems only superficially.
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Fifty shades of QE: Central bankers versus academics – Elisabeth Kempf, Lubos Pastor
5 Oktober
The effectiveness of central banks’ asset purchase programmes (‘quantitative easing’) has been a subject of intense debate in both academic and policy circles. Much of the analysis is conducted by the staff of central banks themselves, which is not unlike pharmaceutical firms evaluating their own drugs. Indeed, as this column shows, papers by central bank researchers in the US, the UK, and the euro area report systematically larger effects of unconventional monetary policy on output and inflation than papers by independent academics. This is not to argue that central bank research should be discounted or to question its credibility – but it does highlight a previously unexplored conflict of interest.
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Problems with Theories on the Black-White Wealth Gap – Lipton Matthews
5 oktober
The wealth gap between white and black Americans is frequently discussed. Today it’s becoming popular to attribute disparities to black culture. Clearly all cultures are not equal, but can the subculture of some black American communities explain variations within the wealth gap?
For instance, fifty people in an inner-city neighborhood may engage in maladaptive activities; however, their actions are atypical of the broader black community. Discussing this issue is quite complicated since black culture is not monolithic. The culture of upper-class black Americans is different from that of their working-class peers. There are even subtle differences among various people from the working classes. Notwithstanding such nuances, the culture thesis is gaining widespread acceptance.
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Status of the Social Security Trust Fund, Fiscal 2020: Beware of Vicious Dog – Wolf Richter
10 oktober
Will Social Security Be There for You? Yes, but…
The Social Security Trust Fund – officially the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund – closed the fiscal year 2020 at the end of September with a balance of $2.81 trillion, the second highest fiscal-year close, behind 2017, up by $6.8 billion from a year ago, and up by $10 billion from two years ago, according to figures released by the Social Security Administration. The Trust Fund has vacillated in the same range since 2016, after growing substantially over the past decade.
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The Economics of Government Regulation – Ludwig von Mises
9 oktober
Restrictive measures are those measures undertaken by the authority which directly and primarily are intended to divert production, in the widest meaning of the word, including commerce and transportation, from the ways which it would take in the unhampered economy. Each interference diverts production from the channels prescribed by the market. The peculiar characteristic of restrictive measures lies in the fact that the diversion of production is a necessary and not unintended result of the intervention, and that the diversion of production is precisely what the authority seeks to accomplish by its action. Each intervention has also the necessary effect of diverting consumption from the ways which it would choose in the unhampered market economy. The restrictive measure is no exception in this respect. But the diversion of consumption is not the aim which its originators pursue; they want to influence production. The fact that these measures influence consumption as well seems to them a side effect which they either do not want at all or which they accept as unavoidable.
A selection from chapter I of Interventionism: An Economic Analysis.
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DoubleLine: The Pandora’s Box Of Fed’s Digital Currency Will Ignite An “Inflationary Conflagration” – Tyler Durden
8 oktober
We most recently described the Fed’s stealthy plan to deposit digital dollars to “each American” during the next crisis as a unprecedented monetary overhaul, but more importantly, a truly stealthy one: to be sure, there has barely been any media coverage of what may soon be a money transfer by the Fed – a direct stimulus to any and all Americans – in an attempt to spark inflation after years of losing the war with deflation.
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Tapping into talent: Coupling education and innovation policies for economic growth – Ufuk Akcigit, Jeremy Pearce, Marta Prato
10 Oktober
For economies to innovate and grow past the COVID-19 crisis, policymakers have to understand the implications of various policies for innovation and economic growth, and take into account how people sort into professions and how potential scientists and innovators respond to policy. This column presents a comprehensive framework to study theoretically and empirically the role of education and R&D policies for boosting innovation and economic growth. It finds that policy tools in both education and R&D are complementary in developing talent, which is the key ingredient to innovation. The best mix of policies depends on how unequal society is and how urgently innovation is needed.
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Stop Blaming Clasical Liberalism for the Problems of Human Nature – Zachary Yost
9 oktober
In a recent essay at the new online conservative magazine IM-1776, writer Alex Kaschuta argues that the contemporary world is under “The Heavy Chains of Liberalism” that have, in her mind, destroyed humane life, abolished tradition, and left atomized individuals increasingly “free” from all social and personal restraint. These complaints are nothing new, and some of the problems she points to are all too real, however, her broadside attack against liberalism misses the mark on nearly every front.
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***Has Our Luck Finally Run Out? – Charles Hugh Smith
9 okober
We are woefully unprepared for a long run of bad luck.
Long-term cycles escape our notice because they play out over many years or even decades; few noticed the decreasing rainfall in the Mediterranean region in 150 A.D. but this gradual decline in rainfall slowly but surely reduced the grain harvests of the Roman Empire, which coupled with rising populations resulted in a reduced caloric intake for many people.
This weakened their immune systems in subtle ways, leaving them more vulnerable to the Antonine Plague of 165 AD.
The decline of temperatures in Northern Europe in the early 1300s led to “years without summer” and failed grain harvests which reduced the caloric intake of most people, leaving them weakened and more vulnerable to the Black Plague which swept Europe in 1347.
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Private-Equity Firm Blackstone, Spain’s Largest Landlord, Tries to Unload its Properties – Nick Corbishley
7 oktober
What does it mean when Wall Street mega-landlords that bought the impaired assets after the last crash are trying to unload during the worst economic crisis on record?
With Spain in the grip of its deepest recession on record, house prices have begun to fall for the first time since 2015 on a year-over-year basis. In a bid to buck this trend, Aliseda and Anticipa, two real-estate firms that private-equity giant Blackstone acquired in 2017 from Banco Santander, have pledged to reimburse investors up to one tenth of the sale price if the value of the properties they buy drops by more than a tenth in the three months after a deal is sealed.
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Explaining the Wall/Main Street disconnect – Ricardo Caballero, Alp Simsek
5 Oktober
While the Fed’s massive policy response to the Covid-19 shock was successful in reversing the financial meltdown, it did not prevent a dramatic collapse in the real economy. This column argues that the patterns observed are consistent with optimal monetary policy once the subtleties of the relationship between monetary policy, the stock market, and the economy are considered.
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The Genius of Mises’s Action Axiom – Per Bylund
6 oktober
The action axiom is the starting point of Mises’s economic method (praxeology). But it is far more than a place to start. It solves a seemingly intractable problem.
When Ludwig von Mises concretized economic thinking as praxeology, he himself held that it was merely a clarification of the pioneering theoretical work of Carl Menger. Menger in turn based his work on traditional logical economic reasoning. Mises himself did not anticipate the uproar that praxeology caused. It occurred chiefly among mainstream economists but also in the Austrian camp. As an example, Hayek was not fully on board.
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***Cinema Chains Near Collapse: The Problem Beyond the Pandemic – Wolf Richter
5 oktober
Out-of-money-date for Cineworld — owner of Regal, second largest movie theater chain in the US — is in November or December, but it’s hoping for a US taxpayer bailout.
The cinema business – like brick-and-mortar malls – has been in structural decline long before the Pandemic. The number of movie tickets sold had peaked in 2002 in the US, and has since been declining, beset by competition from technologies that deliver movies to the home, at first DVDs, then Blue ray disks, and with the spread of broadband, online services, such as Netflix, Amazon, Disney, and others. People are watching more movies than ever.
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Elephant who lost its trunk: Continued growth in Asia, but the slowdown in top 1% growth after the financial crisis – Branko Milanovic
6 Oktober
Recent analyses of developments in global inequality have largely been based on relatively old data. By widening the country coverage and using household-based data from each country, this column surveys developments in the global income distribution since the 2008 Global Crisis and brings the analysis up to 2013-14. Broadly speaking, the post-2008 period was good for the globally poor and for the global middle class; it was not good for the Western middle classes and the global top 1%. If developments from the past three decades continue for another 20 years, the gap between the West and Asia will shrink further and will eventually entirely disappear.
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The Paradox of Prosperity – Mark Hendrickson
7 oktober
In Friedrich Hayek’s 1954 book Capitalism and the Historians, the late French philosopher and political economist Bertrand de Jouvenel noted a baffling historical trend: “Strangely enough, the fall from favor of the money-maker coincides with an increase in his social usefulness.”
In surveying the history of capitalism from its inception in the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century when he was writing, De Jouvenel was struck by an ironic and counterintuitive phenomenon. By “money-maker,” he meant the capitalist entrepreneurs who became rich by supplying the masses with more consumer goods. Entrepreneurs generated the economic growth that uplifted standards of living; hence, their “social usefulness.”
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The shifting drivers of covered interest parity deviations – Eugenio Cerutti, Maurice Obstfeld, Haonan Zhou
8 Oktober
Covered interest rate parity has been a central principle in international finance, but important departures have persisted since the Global Crisis. This column argues that several macro-financial factors – reflecting risk appetite, monetary policies, and financial regulations – correlate over time with the evolution of covered interest parity deviations. The failure of covered interest rate parity has several policy implications, ranging from the domestic and international transmission of monetary policies to inefficient market allocations.
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If We Want to Increase Demand in the Market, We Must First Increase Production – Frank Shostak
5 oktober
Following the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, many commentators associate economic growth with increases in the demand for goods and services.
Both Keynes and Friedman held that the Great Depression of the 1930s was due to an insufficiency of aggregate demand and that thus the way to fix the problem was to boost aggregate demand.
For Keynes, this could be achieved by having the federal government borrow more money and spend it when the private sector would not. Friedman advocated that the Federal Reserve pump more money to revive demand.
But there is never such a thing as insufficient demand. An individual’s demand is constrained by his ability to produce goods. The more goods that an individual can produce, the more goods he can demand, i.e., acquire.
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