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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Increasing Demand Won’t Make the Economy Grow – Frank Shostak
11 januari
Whenever the so-called economy shows signs of weakness most experts are of the view that what is required to prevent the economy sliding into recession is to boost the overall demand for goods and services.
If the private sector fails to increase its demand then it is the role of the government to fill this void.
Following the ideas of Keynes and Friedman, most experts associate economic growth with increases in the demand for goods and services.
Both Keynes and Friedman felt that the great depression of the 1930s was due to an insufficiency in aggregate demand and thus the way to fix the problem was to boost aggregate demand.
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Germany Heads for a Technical Recession – Wolf Richter
8 januari
This economic slowdown is not unique to Germany but has been spreading across the EU.
OK, this is embarrassing in the land of super-stimulus via the ECB’s negative-interest-rate policy and years of QE that were supposed to perform miracles: Production in Germany’s industry, which includes construction, dropped 1.9% in November from the prior month (seasonally adjusted), the German statistical agency Destatis reported this morning. This drop is also embarrassing because economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected a 0.3% gain.
The agency also downwardly revised October, to a monthly decline of 0.8%. This makes three months in a row of declines.
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The powers and pitfalls of quantitative easing – Wei Cui, Vincent Sterk
9 januari
The effects of quantitative easing are poorly understood, in part because standard models of monetary policy predict that it doesn’t work. This column uses a model in which households can be unequal and hold assets with different degrees of liquidity to show that quantitative easing can provide a powerful stimulus to the macroeconomy, and that it avoided a large decline in output and inflation during 2009. Nevertheless, side-effects on inequality mean that social welfare tends to be lower under quantitative easing than under conventional policy.
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Property tax present value – John H. Cochrane
11 januari
How much is the property tax? In Calfornia, we pay 1% per year.
That doesn’t seem bad, except that property values are very high. You can’t get a tear-down in Palo Alto for under $2 million. If you buy a house that costs 5 times your income — say someone earning $200,000 per year buying a $1 million house — then that is equivalent to 5 percentage points additional income tax. On top of 42% federal, 13.2% state, 9% sales, and other taxes, it’s part of my view that we’re past 70% top marginal rate now.
The other way to look at taxes is in present value. At 1% interest rate, the value of a 1% payment is $1.00. What that means: Suppose you bought a $1,000,000 house. It’s going to cost you $10,000 in property taxes per year. Let’s set up an account that will pay your property taxes. If you get 1% interest on that account, you need to put $1,000,000 in the account!
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The economics of cryptocurrency pump and dump schemes – JT Hamrick, Farhang Rouhi, Arghya Mukherjee, Amir Feder, Neil Gandal, Tyler Moore, Marie Vasek
9 januari
The surge of interest in cryptocurrencies has been accompanied by a proliferation of fraud, largely in the form of pump and dump schemes. This column provides the first measure of the scope of such schemes across cryptocurrencies. The results suggest that the phenomenon is widespread and often quite profitable, and highlight the need for concerted efforts from industry and regulators to fight cryptocurrency price manipulation.
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***Automakers Prepare for “No-Deal” Brexit – Don Quijones
12 januari
They’re already under pressure from the deteriorating market.
Honda, the fourth largest car producer in the UK, has unveiled plans to halt its UK production for the first six days of April in order to stockpile parts in the immediate aftermath of Britain’s exit from the EU. The announcement came on Thursday, the same day that UK Premier Theresa May met her Japanese counterpart Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to discuss Brexit-related issues.
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The Recession Will Be Unevenly Distributed – Charles Hugh Smith
10 januari
Those households, enterprises and organizations that have no debt, a very low cost basis and a highly flexible, adaptable structure will survive and even prosper.
The coming recession will be unevenly distributed, meaning that it will devastate many while leaving others relatively untouched. A few will actually do better in the recession than they did in the so-called “recovery.”
I realize many of the concepts floated here are cryptic and need a fuller explanation: the impact of owning differing kinds of capital, fragmentation, asymmetry, opacity, etc
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The effect of machine learning on credit markets – Andreas Fuster, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Tarun Ramadorai, Ansgar Walther
11 januari
The use of machine learning in credit allocation should allow lenders to better extend credit, but the shift from traditional to machine learning lending models may have important distributional effects for consumers. This column studies the effect of machine learning on mortgage lending in the US. It finds that machine learning would offer lower rates to racial groups who already were at an advantage under the traditional model, but it would also benefit disadvantaged groups by enabling them to obtain a mortgage in the first place.
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Krugman on optimal taxes – John H. Cochrane
6 januari
As you may have noticed, I try very hard not to get in to the business of rebutting Paul Krugman’s various outrages. The article “The economics of soaking the rich” merits an exception. I will ignore the snark, the… distoritions, the … untruths, the attack by inventing evil motive, the demonization of anything starting with the letter R, and focus on the central economic points.
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Fed’s Powell: Balance Sheet to be “Substantially Smaller.” How Small? He Gave Big Clues. My Dive into the Dynamics & Charts – Wolf Richter
11 januari
In fact, QE started reversing at the end of 2014.
The Fed’s balance sheet would be “substantially smaller” after the Fed gets done with its QE unwind, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said on Thursday. How far the Fed might go in shedding assets is a red-hot topic right now that causes a lot of fretting and howling on Wall Street and in the White House. Here is what Powell said at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C – and then we get into the dynamics and charts of what he described and what “substantially smaller” might mean:
“Yes, we wanted to have the balance sheet return to a more normal level, which is a level no larger than it needs to be for us to conduct monetary policy,” he said. When asked what level that would be, he said:
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***Could Stocks Rally Even as Parts of the Economy Are Recessionary? – Charles Hugh Smith
7 januari
It’s not yet clear that the stock market swoon is predictive or merely a panic attack triggered by a loss of meds.
We contrarians can’t help it: when the herd is bullish, we start looking for a reversal. When the herd turns bearish, we also start looking for a reversal.
So now that the herd is skittishly bearish, anticipating a recession, contrarians start wondering if a most hated rally is in the offing, one that would leave most punters off the bus.
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Banking integration in the EMU: Let’s get real! – Mathias Hoffmann, Egor Maslov, Bent Sørensen, Iryna Stewen
10 januari
Bank-to-bank lending in the euro area has increased, direct cross-border lending has not. The column shows that dependence on domestic banks reduces risk-sharing in a crisis, reducing GDP growth in affected country-sectors. Benefits from banking integration are only robust to global shocks if banking integration takes the form of cross-border lending to firms and households.
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2019: World Economy Is Reaching Growth Limits; Expect Low Oil Prices, Financial Turbulence – Gail Tverberg
9 januari
Financial markets have been behaving in a very turbulent manner in the last couple of months. The issue, as I see it, is that the world economy is gradually shifting from a growth mode to a mode of shrinkage. This is something like a ship changing course, from going in one direction to going in reverse. The system acts as if the brakes are being very forcefully applied, and reaction of the economy is to almost shake.
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Bailing out the people: The public cost of excess private debt – Samba Mbaye, Marialuz Moreno Badia, Kyungla Chae
12 januari
Since the financial crisis researchers have extensively explored the dangers of excessive public debt, but excessive private debt has received less attention. This column documents a common form of indirect private sector bailout that goes largely unnoticed. Whenever households and firms are caught in a debt overhang and need to deleverage, governments come to the rescue through a countercyclical rise in public debt. This indirect substitution takes place even in the absence of a crisis.
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***Economic Breakdown Starts In East Asia Due To Collapsed Births & Childbearing Populations – Chris Hamilton
12 januari
The floor under the East Asia neighborhood (consisting of China, Japan, South / North Korea, Taiwan, & Mongolia) is about to fall away. These nations (combined) equal slightly more than 20% of the global population and consume 27% of total global energy. From 2000 through 2016, this region (spearheaded by China) represented 48% of the global growth in total energy consumption. So, when I tell you these countries are economically entering long-term domestic declines (or perhaps outright collapses), the impacts will reverberate everywhere.
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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.

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