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 zijn.

Sinds begin 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.

——————————————————————————————————
German Wage Moderation and the Eurozone Crisis: A Critical Analysis – Servaas Storm
8 januari
It is high time to look more closely at the labor cost competitiveness myth.
Progress in economics “is slow partly from mere intellectual inertia,” wrote Joan Robinson (1962, p. 79) long ago, because “[i]n a subject where there is no agreed procedure for knocking out errors, doctrines have a long life.” As a recent illustration of such inertia, it took more than five years since Eurozone crisis started full-force (in May 2010) to come to a more or less reasonable “consensus diagnosis” as proposed by a group of economists associated with CEPR (in “Rebooting the Eurozone,” published in Vox on 20 November 2015).1
——————————————————————————————————
The Heavy Price of Economic Policy Failures – Jayati Ghosh
14 januari
A lot of the media discussion on the global economy nowadays is based on the notion of the “new normal” or “new mediocre” – the phenomenon of slowing, stagnating or negative economic growth across most of the world, with even worse news in terms of employment generation, with hardly any creation of good quality jobs and growing material insecurity for the bulk of the people. All sorts of explanations are being proffered for this state of affairs, from technological progress, to slower population growth, to insufficient investment because of shifts in relative prices of capital and labour, to “balance sheet recessions” created by the private debt overhang in many economies, to contractionary fiscal stances of governments that are also excessively indebted.
Yet these arguments that treat economic processes as the inevitable results of some forces outside the system that follow their own logic and are beyond social intervention, are hugely misplaced. Most of all, they let economic policies off the hook when attributing blame – and this is massively important because then the possibility of alternative strategies that would not result in the same outcomes are simply not considered.
——————————————————————————————————
Beyond competitive devaluations: The monetary dimensions of comparative advantage – Paul Bergin, Giancarlo Corsetti
11 januari
Competitive devaluation is a long-standing idea in international macroeconomic theory. This column takes a step back from the current debate and assesses a different perspective on monetary and exchange rate policies. Strategic behaviour is shown to be detrimental from a global welfare perspective. Due to negative spillovers elsewhere, devaluations invite retaliation – which in turn reduces manufacturing at the global level. Monetary policy can provide a non-negligible contribution to fostering comparative advantage in high-value branded manufacturing goods by pursuing efficient macroeconomic stabilisation.
——————————————————————————————————
Euro’s woes: Delays and Half Measures – Ashoka Mody
13 januari
The euro area member states gave up monetary policies for countering economic adversities, but the founding fathers lacked political will to compensate with pooled resources for helping each other. This incompleteness is surely made worse by wrong-headed policies, delays, and half measures. That said, the distinction is overstated: the incomplete monetary union and repeated policy errors likely come from the same source.
Recent research shows the ECB fell behind the curve at critical junctures of the crisis. As the U.S. Federal Reserve slashed interest rates to fight the Great Recession, the ECB at first raised the policy interest rate in July 2008. That hike came just as euro area industrial production began a prolonged economic contraction. In April and July 2011, the ECB raised interest rates when the American rate was near zero and the Fed was adding stimulus through quantitative easing.
——————————————————————————————————
What Will China Dump Next, After Treasuries, to Keep Control? – Wolf Richter
11 januari
“Practically boundless” future capital outflows.
“Beneath all of the financial turbulence there lurks, in my view, a credit crisis; I fear the worst now,” UBS economic adviser George Magnus told Bloomberg TV today. The reform agenda “has stalled,” he said, and “things are looking much bleaker for China going forward.”
And so on Monday, we got another flavor of it.
——————————————————————————————————
‘Made in China’: How does it affect our understanding of global market shares? Konstantins Benkovskis, Julia Woerz
14 januari
Global value chains have increased the complexity of good economic analysis no end. This column assess the extent to which global value chains change how we think about the world, and argues that the evolution of global market shares is no longer an adequate indicator of a country’s competitiveness in most cases. ‘Made in China’ has changed almost everything.
——————————————————————————————————
Kansloos door TTIP – Mitchell van de Klundert
11 januari
Vrijhandelsverdrag TTIP betekent de ondergang van delen van de Europese landbouw, terwijl Amerikaanse boeren en grote bedrijven gaan profiteren. Dat stelt een branchevereniging voor Duitse duurzame ondernemers.
‘Het mogen dan misschien nu al slechte tijden zijn voor Europese boeren – onder andere door de lage melkprijzen en sancties tegen Rusland – maar de echte genadeslag gaat komen door TTIP’. Dit schrijft nieuwswebsite Euractiv op maandag 11 januari na inzage in een nog te verschijnen rapport van UnternehmensGrün, een branchevereniging voor duurzame ondernemers in Duitsland. ‘Het zijn vooral de sectoren melk, vlees en granen waar Europese boeren de dupe worden’.
——————————————————————————————————
*** This is Where Industrial Production Normally Meets a Recession – Wolf Richter
15 januari
The only exceptions were in the early 1950s
Painful – that’s how you can describe the slew of recent US economic data. And today’s data dump was even worse.
On a regional level, there was the Empire State Manufacturing Survey. The Current Activity Index plunged to the lowest level since March 2009. The last time it had squeaked into positive territory was in July 2015. The Expectations Index plummeted by an unprecedented 29 points, also to the worst level since March 2009.
——————————————————————————————————
Cost-benefit analysis of ‘leaning against the wind’: Are costs larger also with less effective macroprudential policy? – Lars E.O. Svensson
12 januari
The monetary policy of ‘leaning against the wind’ involves a higher policy interest rate. It is usually justified as reducing the probability and severity of a future crisis. This column argues that the costs of the policy exceed the benefits by a substantial margin, especially when taking into account that the cost of a crisis is higher if the economy is initially weaker due to the leaning itself. Furthermore, contrary to the common argument that the policy may be justified when macroprudential policy is less effective or even non-existent, less effective macroprudential policy actually makes the case against leaning against the wind policy stronger, not weaker.
——————————————————————————————————
*** Is the Auto loan bubble ready to pop? – Tommy Behnke
11 januari
On Tuesday, it was announced that over seventeen million new vehicles were sold in 2015, the highest it’s ever been in United States history.
While the media claims that this record has been reached because of drastic improvements to the US economy, they are once again failing to account for the central factor: credit expansion.
When interest rates are kept artificially low, individuals are misled into spending more than they otherwise would. In hindsight, they discover that their judgment errors wreaked havoc on their financial well-being.
This is a lesson that the country should have learned from the Subprime Crisis of 2008. Excessive credit creation led too many individuals to buy homes, build homes, and invest in the housing industry. This surge in artificial demand temporarily spiked prices, resulting in over four million foreclosed homes and the killing of over nine million US jobs.
——————————————————————————————————
The China Syndrome: The Coming Global Financial Meltdown – Charles Hugh Smith
11 januari
All the phantom wealth piled up in China’s boost phase is now melting down, and the China Syndrome will trigger a meltdown in global phantom assets.
The 1979 film The China Syndrome took its name from the darkly humorous notion that a nuclear reactor meltdown in the U.S. would burn straight through the Earth to China. (wikipedia: The China Syndrome)
In today’s world, the financial meltdown in China has burned straight through the global financial system to the U.S. financial markets. The mainstream financial media is delighted to promote the many links between the U.S. and Chinese economies when the two economies are feeding each other’s expansion in a tightly coupled virtuous cycle.
——————————————————————————————————
Capitalism Versus The Social Commons – Ed Walker
15 januari
One reason capitalists wind up with profits that they do not adequately reinvest is that they set their return targets too high. This has been documented periodically. A recent example comes from Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England on short-termism and how it leads to underinvestment.
Second is that many projects are best undertaken by government, such as infrastructure that will serve as the foundation for growth, basic research, or other projects where the time frames are too long, the payoffs too ambiguous, or the resource mobilization too great to make sense for the private sector. In keeping with the Ed Walker’s use of writings from long ago to shed light on our supposedly modern problems, Michal Kalecki explained in Political Aspects of Full Employment why businessmen prefer to have lower employment and as a result, growth:
The reasons for the opposition of the ‘industrial leaders’ to full employment achieved by government spending may be subdivided into three categories: (i) dislike of government interference in the problem of employment as such; (ii) dislike of the direction of government spending (public investment and subsidizing consumption); (iii) dislike of the social and political changes resulting from the maintenance of full employment.
When you have finished Walker’s fine piece, please go immediately and read Kalecki’s short, penetrating essay.
——————————————————————————————————
Can We See a Bubble If We’re Inside the Bubble? – Charles Hugh Smith
13 januari
We want this time to be different so badly, we can almost taste it.
If you visit San Francisco, you will find it difficult to walk more than a few blocks in central S.F. without encountering a major construction project. It seems that every decrepit low-rise building in the city has been razed and is being replaced with a gleaming new residential tower.
Parking lots have been ripped up and are now sprouting condos and luxury rental flats.
——————————————————————————————————

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.