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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Completing EMU – Marco Buti, Servaas Deroose, José Leandro, Gabriele Giudice
13 juli
Despite much being done to strengthen the Economic and Monetary Union, it remains incomplete and this is one of the main reasons for the Eurozone’s lacklustre economic performance in the recent years. While there are still diverging views on how to “cross the river”, there is also a political and economic window of opportunity to complete the EMU architecture. This column discusses the ideas presented in a new European Commission Reflection Paper aimed at relaunching the debate on how to move forward, with a focus on bridging the differences between the member states that stress responsibility and risk reduction and those calling for solidarity and risk sharing.
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Deutsche: The Fed Has Created “Universal Basic Income For The Rich” And Now It Can’t Get Out – Tyler Durden
15 juli
Two weeks after Aleksandar Kocic highlighted the moment in 2012 when the market stopped caring about newsflow and reality, and, in a word “broke” with pervasive complacency setting in regardless of macro uncertainty…
… Deutsche Bank’s post modernist master of stream-of-consciousness narrative is back with a new essay dissecting his favorite topic, the interplay between the Fed and markets, the so-called “umbilical limbo” that connects the two in the form of ultraeasy monetary policy and QE in general, and more importantly, the narrative that the Fed has spun over the past ten years, which while supportive of risk assets, has concurrently resulted in what Kocic calls a “permanent state of exception” from normalcy as a result of the Fed decision to defer the financial crisis indefinitely.
It is the unwind of this exceptional state, created symbiotically between the Federal Reserve and the markets, that is the source of consternation for markets, and manifests itself in the upcoming “tricky” renormalization of both the global rate structure, and the unwind of central banks’ balance sheets and trillions in monetary stimulus. And, quick to revert to his favorite philosophical abstraction, Kocic notes that more than anything the Fed is hardly eager to “disown” the power it has been exercising for years in its attempt to avoid, or at least delay the next crisis:
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***Unwinding QE will be “More Disruptive than People Think” – Wolf Richter
15 juli
“We’ve never had QE like this before, and we’ve never had unwinding like this before,” said JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon at the Europlace finance conference in Paris. “Obviously that should say something to you about the risk that might mean, because we’ve never lived with it before.”
He was referring to the Fed’s plan to unwind QE, shedding Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities on its balance sheet. The Fed will likely announce the kick-off this year, possibly at its September meeting.
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Endogenous growth and lack of recovery from the Global Crisis – Maarten de Ridder, Coen Teulings
13 juli
Around the world, growth has yet to recover to its pre-Global Crisis trend. This column uses the crisis as a quasi-natural experiment to test the endogenous growth hypothesis, which suggests that output has not recovered because the crisis affected the rate of technological progress. Firms that preferred a bank that was more severely affected by the crisis experienced a large fall in R&D investment and a persistent fall in output in subsequent years. This suggests a direct link between R&D and future productivity, as predicted by endogenous growth models.
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The Inevitability Of DeGrowth – Charles Hugh Smith
10 juli
Debt-dependent consumption in a world in which wages stagnate for the bottom 90% and energy costs increase as demand outstrips supply is a system with only one possible end-point: collapse.
Even though we don’t know precisely how the future will unfold, we know a few things:
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Jobs and Inflation: Gradually and Then Suddenly – Ben Hunt
13 juli
The Fed and the ECB believe they can tighten and taper without killing the market so long as they jawbone this constantly.
If you’ve been reading my notes immediately before and after the June Fed meeting (“Tell My Horse” and “Post-Fed Follow-up”), you know that I think we now have a sea change in what the Fed is focused on and what their default course of action is going to be. Rather than looking for reasons to ease up on monetary policy and be more accommodative, the Fed and the ECB (and even the BOJ in their own weird way) are now looking for reasons to tighten up on monetary policy and be more restrictive. As Jamie Dimon said the other day, the tide that’s been coming in for eight years is now starting to go out. Caveat emptor.
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On borrowed time – Tim Price
11 juli
There are a number of things you don’t want to hear a central banker say. One of those things just popped out of Janet Yellen’s mouth – “I don’t believe we will see another financial crisis in our lifetime.” That has to be up there with Irving Fisher’s deathless observation from 17 October 1929 that “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau” or John Maynard Keynes’ comparably adept forecast from 1927 that “We will not have any more crashes in our time.”
So far, so anecdotal. How about some data to back up the thesis that, as Thorstein Polleit puts it, the super bubble is in trouble ?
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Our Financial Buffers Are Thinning – Charles Hugh Smith
13 juli
The fragility of our financial buffers will only be revealed when they fail in the next crisis.
While buffer has a specific meaning in chemistry, I am using the word in the broad sense of a reserve resource that absorbs the initial destructive impacts of crises or system overloads. Marshland along a sea coast is a buffer against destructive storm waves, for example.
A savings account acts as a buffer against financial drawdowns or losses of income that would otherwise quickly cascade into a full-blown crisis.
Redundancy of resources can act as a buffer. If an airline maintains an aircraft in reserve, this reserve plane acts as a buffer against the disruption to the airline’s scheduled flights should one of its aircraft be unexpectedly removed from service by a mechanical failure. The reserve aircraft can replace the plane that was withdrawn from service with minimal disruption.
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Adventures In ‘Quantitative Tightening’-Lane – MN Gordon, Pater tenerarum
15 juli
Flowing Toward the Great Depression
All remaining doubts concerning the place the U.S. economy and its tangled web of international credits and debts is headed were clarified this week. On Monday, Mark Yusko, CIO of Morgan Creek Capital Management, told CNBC that:
“…we’re flowing toward the path of 1928-29 when Hoover was president. Now Trump is president. Both were presidents with no experience who come in with a Congress that is all Republican, lots of big promises, lots of things that don’t happen and the fall is when people realize, ‘Wait, it hasn’t played out the way we thought.’ [By the fall], we’ll have a lot more evidence of declining growth. Growth has been slipping.”——————————————————————————————————
Impacts of outward foreign direct investment: New firm-level evidence from Japan – Kazunobu Hayakawa, Toshiyuki Matsuura
9 juli
Foreign direct investment has generally been found to have positive effects for firms in their home country. There are, however, concerns about potential negative effects for other domestic firms in the investing firm’s supply chain. This column uses Japanese firm-level data to explore the supply chain effects of foreign direct investment. Foreign direct investment does not appear to have adverse effects on domestic transaction networks. Rather, the positive effects of firms’ foreign investing are found to spread to the whole economy through their supply chains.
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“Stocks Are About To Make Dudley, Fischer, And Yellen Extremely Nervous” – Kevin Muir
14 juli
It was only a month ago Fed President Dudley was lecturing us about the dangers of overly easy financial conditions and how inflation’s sanguine performance was “transitory.” And it wasn’t like he was alone. The Fed’s generally accepted second in command, Stanley Fischer, echoed similar comments.
Well, this morning about the most awkward economic news possible was released. CPI undershot, coming in at 1.6% instead of the expected 1.7%. Retail sales were abysmal, registering -0.2% instead of the forecasted 0.1% gain. And the University of Michigan sentiment numbers reflected a public who is becoming increasingly skeptical of the Fed’s rosy outlook. The actual index was 93.1 instead of the surveyed 95.0, but more importantly, expectations plumetted to 80.2 instead of 84.4.
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Janet Yellen: False Prophet of Prosperity – Ron Paul
11 juli
Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen recently predicted that, thanks to the regulations implemented after the 2008 market meltdown, America would not experience another economic crisis “in our lifetimes.” Yellen’s statement should send shivers down our spines, as there are few more reliable signals of an impending recession, or worse, than when so-called “experts” proclaim that we are in an era of unending prosperity.
For instance, in the years leading up to the 2008 market meltdown, then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke repeatedly denied the existence of a housing bubble. In February 2007, Bernanke not only denied that “sluggishness” in the housing market would affect the general economy, but predicted that the economy would expand in 2007 and 2008. Of course, instead of years of economic growth, 2007 and 2008 were marked by a market meltdown whose effects are still being felt.
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***Stock Market Tsunami Siren Goes Off – Wolf Richter
0 juli
It will be ignored until it’s too late.
Everyone who’s watching the stock market has their own reasons for their endless optimism, their doom-and-gloom visions, their bouts of anxiety that come with trying to sit on the fence until the very last moment, or their blasé attitude that nothing can go wrong because the Fed has their back. But there are some factors that are like a tsunami siren that should send inhabitants scrambling to higher ground.
Since July 2012 – so over the past five years – the trailing 12-month earnings per share of all the companies in the S&P 500 index rose just 12% in total. Or just over 2% per year on average. Or barely at the rate of inflation – nothing more.
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Monetary Sovereigns, Monetary Subjects: Modern Money & The Criminal Legal System – Raul carillo
12 juli
I delivered the talk published below as part of a panel at Yale’s annual Rebellious Lawyering Conference, on February 17th, 2017. The panel, entitled “Financing Criminal Justice”, co-hosted by The Modern Money Network, focused on the connections between fiscal austerity and the horrors of the U.S. criminal legal system. I was joined on the panel by Thomas Harvey, Co-Founder and Executive Director of ArchCityDefenders, Judge Jaribu Hill, Director of the Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights, and Mitali Nagrecha, Director of Harvard Law School’s National Criminal Justice Debt Initiative.
Together, we discussed how financially-strapped local government entities, charged with public safety, perpetuate social violence, especially upon low-income communities of color. My presentation focused on macroeconomic context. More specifically, I attempted to build a bridge between the insights of MMT and arguments asserted by opponents of mass incarceration, police brutality, and criminal justice debt.
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Europe’s Unsustainable Welfare State – Daniel Lacalle
15 juli
Angela Merkel used to say that “the European Union is about 5% of the world’s population, about 25% of its GDP, and about 50% of global welfare spending”:
The real data is more concerning.
The European Union is:
7.2% of the World Population.
23.8% of the World’s GDP.
58% of the World’s Welfare Spending.
Something has to give.
The EU average tax burden on workers is 44.9%. The average worker in the EU spends half a year working for the tax man.
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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.