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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The euro crisis in the mirror of the European Monetary System – Giancarlo Corsetti, Barry Eichengreen, Galina Hale, Eric Tallman
15 februari
Why was recovery from the euro area crisis delayed for a decade? The explanation lies in the absence of credible and timely policies to backstop financial intermediaries and sovereign debt and to thereby prevent problems in banks and bond markets from feeding on one another. This column adds light and colour to this analysis, contrasting recent experience with the 1992-3 crisis in the European Monetary System, when national central banks and treasuries more successfully provided this backstop.
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China Accounts For More Than 60% Of All New Credit Created Globally In The Past Ten Years – Tyler Durden
16 februari
Over five years ago, in November 2013, when the world’s attention was still largely focused on what the “Big 4” central banks would do with QE and/or interest rates, we wrote an article showing in one simple chart “How In Five Short Years, China Humiliated The World’s Central Banks”, and noted that in just the brief period since the financial crisis “Chinese bank assets (and by implication liabilities) have grown by an astounding $15 trillion, bringing the total to over $24 trillion. In other words, China has expanded its financial balance sheet by 50% more than the assets of all global central banks combined.”
Fast forward to today, when not only is China’s debt the biggest wildcard for the stability of the global financial system – something China is well aware of and is why in January, Beijing injected a gargantuan $685 billion in new credit into its financial system, greater than the GDP of the 21st largest country, Taiwan…
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Bond Funds Are “Potential Source of Financial Instability,” after Years of Global QE and Low Interest Rates: Fitch – Wolf Richter
11 februari
“Liquidity issues at bond mutual funds could result in wider contagion and affect other parts of the financial system and the macro economy.”
Bond investors go for different risks and returns. There is buy-low-sell-high, unless things don’t work out and it’s buy-high-sell-low. Buy-and-holders buy bonds when issued and hold till maturity, collecting coupon payments and then getting their money back – unless things don’t work out.
Other investors buy a bond when a company or an entire sector gets in trouble, such as the shale-oil space in 2015 and 2016. They might buy a distressed junk bond for 40 cents on the dollar, at a yield of 20%, that then does not blow up, allowing them to collect coupon payment representing a 20% yield from cost, year-after-year until maturity, when the bond is redeemed at face value for a capital gain of 150% (cost 40 cents on the dollar, redeemed at 100 cents). Sweet deals, if it works out.
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***What Happens When More QE Fails to Reverse the Recession? – Charles Hugh Smith
15 februari
The smart money is liquidating assets, paying off debt and moving capital into collateral that isn’t impaired by debt or speculative valuations.
The Federal Reserve’s sudden return to “accommodative” dovishness in response to the stock market’s swoon telegraphs its intent to fire up QE once the recession kicks into gear. QE (quantitative easing) are monetary policies designed to ease borrowing and the issuance of credit, and to prop up assets such as stocks and real estate.
The basic idea is that the Fed creates currency out of thin air and uses the new money to buy Treasury bonds and other assets. This injects fresh money into the financial system and lowers the yield on Treasury bonds, as the Fed will buy bonds at near-zero yield or even less than zero in pursuit of its policy goals of goosing assets higher and increasing borrowing/spending.
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Wellbeing measurements, Easterlin’s paradox and new growth models: A perspective through gross national happiness – Sriram Balasubramanian
17 februari
There has been considerable criticism of the general reliance on GDP as an indicator of growth and development. One strand of criticism focuses on the inability of GDP to capture the subjective well-being or happiness of a populace. This column examines new growth models, paying particular attention to Bhutan, which has pursued gross national happiness, rather than GDP, since the 1970s. It finds evidence of the Easterlin paradox in Bhutan, and draws out lessons for macroeconomic growth models.
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Europe Tried It’s Own “Green New Deal” — It Was a Disaster – Daniel Lacalle
12 februari
What happens when politicians see that their monster stimuli have not delivered? They bring the next rabbit out of a hat. They need a new name and a new magic solution to make citizens believe in the magic of demand-side policies despite the constant failure of those same plans.
The Eurozone Example
A huge stimulus in 2008 in a “growth and employment plan”. A stimulus of 1.5% of GDP to create “millions of jobs in infrastructure, civil works, interconnections, and strategic sectors”. 4.5 million jobs were destroyed and the deficit nearly doubled. That was after the crisis because between 2001 and 2008, money supply in the Eurozone doubled. The Eurozone has been a chain of stimuli since day one.
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Official lending in the euro area: Lessons for debt sustainability – Giancarlo Corsetti, Aitor Erce, Timothy Uy
13 februari
During the euro area crisis, management of official loan maturities emerged as a critical item in the discussion on which instruments and strategies are most effective at ensuring debt sustainability. Using a theoretical model calibrated to Portugal and cross-country data, this column shows that lengthening loan maturities and managing debt repayment flows has substantial effects on sustainability. It also unveils a key policy trade-off in official lending between increasing the amount of safe debt (immune from rollover risk) and strengthening the incentive to default in response to negative shocks to fundamentals.
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The Problem with Cutting Taxes without Reducing Spending – Frank Shostak
15 februari
According to many economic experts and commentators, an effective way to generate economic growth is through the lowering of taxes. The lowering of taxes, it is held, is going to place more money in consumer’s pockets thereby setting in motion an economic growth. This way of thinking is based on the popular view that a given dollar increase in consumer spending will lift the economy’s gross domestic product (GDP) by a multiple of the increase in consumer expenditure. An example will illustrate the magic of this multiplier.
Let us assume that on average individuals spend 90 cents and save 10 cents of each additional dollar they receive. If consumers raise their spending by $100 million this will boost retailers’ revenues by this amount. Retailers in turn will spend 90% of their new income, i.e. $90 million on various goods and services. The recipients of the $90 million will in turn spend 90% of $90 million i.e. $81 million and so on. At each stage in the spending chain, people spend 90% of the additional income they receive. This process eventually ends with the GDP rising by $ 1 billion i.e. (10*100 million).
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Voting with their money: Brexit and outward investment by UK firms – Holger Breinlich, Elsa Leromain, Dennis Novy, Thomas Sampson
12 februari
Media reports suggest that some UK firms have started to move production abroad in anticipation of Brexit. Using data on announcements of new foreign investment transactions, this column reports evidence that the Brexit vote has led to a 12% increase in the number of new investments made by UK firms in EU27 countries. At the same time, new investments in the UK from the EU27 have declined by 11%. The results are consistent with the idea that UK firms are offshoring production to the EU27 because they expect Brexit to increase barriers to trade and migration, making the UK a less attractive place to invest and create jobs.
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Howard Marks: The Most Dangerous Thing The Fed Ever Did Was Convince Investors That “It’s Different This Time” – Tyler Durden
16 februari
As the infamous quote from the movie “the Usual Suspects” goes: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Similarly, as the billionaire investor and Oaktree Capital Management founder Howard Marks explained during a recent interview with RealVision’s Grant Williams, the most dangerous trick the Federal Reserve ever pulled was to convince investors that “it’s different this time”.
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***I Was Asked About J.P. Morgan’s Blockchain-Based “JPM Coin.” I Ruthlessly Expand it to Other Payment Systems – Wolf Richter
16 februari
Are banks trying to send credit-card-processing fee-gougers Visa, MasterCard et al. the way of Friendster?
The crypto world went into a tizzy when J.P. Morgan announced “JPM Coin.” They thought that the bank had switched sides finally, after CEO Jamie Dimon had blasted cryptocurrencies as “fraud.” Given my own blistering rants about cryptocurrencies – such as Bitcoin Plunges to $3,738; Whole Crypto Scam Melts Down, Hedge Funds Stuck – I was asked what I thought about JPM Coin. And so I expanded my answer to others in the payment-processing industry, and what they may be trying to do to fee-gougers, such as Visa and MasterCard.
Here’s what JPM Coin actually is not – and is.
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The Folly of Minimum Wage Laws – Mark Hendrickson
14 februari
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf has proposed raising the legal minimum wage to $12 per hour on July 1, 2019, and then an additional 50 cents per year until the minimum wage reaches $15 per hour in 2025.
Laws mandating a minimum wage have existed without interruption since the federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. So habituated have we become to this form of government intervention that when a politician like Gov. Wolf proposes to mandate a higher minimum wage, few people bother to question whether government is competent to rule on what a proper wage is.
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A decade after Lehman, puzzles and challenges in the international monetary system – Ozge Akinci, Roland Beck, Paola Donati, Linda Goldberg, Livio Stracca
15 februari
While some improvements have occurred in the wake of the Global Crisis, the international monetary system still is rife with puzzles and challenges. This column summarises the latest Global Research Forum, which took stock of global financial stability a full decade on from Lehman. The starting points for many discussions were that international financial linkages remain strong, but have evolved in their composition; the US dollar continues to be the key currency for international trade and financial transactions; and banking systems have increased their resiliency and broadened their toolkits for dealing with stresses. Meanwhile, corporate debt issuance has soared and average US dollar-denominated liabilities have increased in most major emerging market economies.
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We’re Overdue for a Sell-Everything/No-Fed-Rescue Recession – Chales Hugh Smith
12 februari
We’re way overdue for a sell-everything recession, one that the Fed will only make worse by pursuing its usual policies of lowering interest rates and goosing easy money.
As I noted last week, central banks, like generals, always fight the last war–until the war is lost. The global economy is careening into recession (call it a “slowdown” if you are employed by the Corporate-State Media), and while we don’t yet know just how deep and wide this recession will be, we can make an educated guess that it won’t be a repeat of any of the previous five recessions: 1973-74, 1981-82, 1990-91, 2001-02 or 2008-09.
Recessions triggered by energy or financial crises tend to be short and shallow as the crisis soon eases; recessions caused by structural imbalances tend to be enduringly brutal. Many recessions are structural, but the triggering event is a short-term crisis.
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Money-Supply Growth Slows in January – Ryan McMaken
15 februari
Money supply growth slowed in January, falling to the second-lowest rate recorded since February of last year. Overall, money-supply growth remains well below the growth rates experienced from 2009 to 2016, and has fluctuated little since March of last year.
In January, year-over-year growth in the money supply was at 3.3 percent. That was down from December’s growth rate of 3.8 percent, but was up from January 2018’s rate of 2.8 percent.
The money-supply metric used here — the “true” or Rothbard-Salerno money supply measure (TMS) — is the metric developed by Murray Rothbard and Joseph Salerno, and is designed to provide a better measure of money supply fluctuations than M2. The Mises Institute now offers regular updates on this metric and its growth.
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Here Comes The Shanghai Accord 2.0: China Unleashes Gargantuan Credit Injection To Start 2019 – Tyler Durden
15 februari
One month ago, we pointed out a curious shift in the official language out of China’s central bank: in late December, when traders were generally away on vacation, the PBOC indicated a critical shift in the official monetary policy description at the December Central Economic Work Conference, from “prudent and neutral” to “prudent with appropriate looseness and tightness”.
What caught our attention is that the new description was surprisingly similar to what was adopted in 2015, just as monetary policy eased significantly and ahead of the famous “Shanghai Accord” of January 2016 when, as the world was careening to a bear market, a coordinated response from G-7 leaders and China sparked a massive rally in stocks as China unleashed another massive credit injection burst which impacted the global economy for the next year. As Goldman said at the time, “such official policy language, while subtle, can carry important information about the monetary policy stance.”
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On the built-in instability of cryptocurrencies – Joshua Aizenman
12 februari
The fall in valuation of Bitcoin has led to a debate over whether decentralised currencies can be reliably stable. This column argues that in contrast to the success of inflation-targeting regimes, there is no feasible path towards stability of a decentralised currency. The instability of cryptocurrencies is the outcome of a systemic ‘tragedy of the commons’ coordination failure. This is inherent in their design.
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Chart Of The Day: European Earnings Are Unchanged Over The Past Ten Years – Tyler Durden
16 februari
Last week, Morgan Stanley’s resident bear, Mike Wilson, slashed his EPS outlook for the S&P, declaring that an earnings recession has arrived, not just for Q1 earnings, where EPS are now forecast to decline 2.2% Y/Y, the first drop in three years, and how now expects full year EPS to grow just 1%, down from 4.3%, as the kind of hockeystick rebound expected by consensus in the second half is unlikely to materialize.
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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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