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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12 Reasons Why Negative Rates Will Devastate The World – Tyler Durden
17 augustus
It has been a thesis over 20 years in the making, but with every passing day, SocGen’s Albert Edwards – who first coined the term “Ice Age” to describe the state of the world in which every debt issue ends up with a negative yield as capital markets and economies collapse into a deflationary singularity – is that much closer to having the victory lap of a lifetime. Although, we doubt he is happy about it.
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The CPI Understates Inflation Skewing Our Expectations – Bruce Wilds
17 augustus
The purpose of the consumer price index (CPI) is to reflect just how much inflation is eating into both our incomes and our savings. Consumer inflation has been estimated since the 1700s, by measuring price changes in a fixed-weight basket of goods. This method was seen as a way of measuring the cost of maintaining a constant standard of living. In the last 30 years, a growing gap has become obvious between government reporting of inflation, as measured by the CPI, and the perception of actual inflation held by the general public.
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Financial crises, regulation, and the structure of interbank networks: Evidence from 20th century America – Matthew Jaremski, David Wheelock
15 Augustus
In response to the Global Crisis a decade ago, banks have tried to make themselves more resilient to shocks transmitted through interbank connections. But the opacity of interbank networks makes it difficult to measure the effectiveness of such policies. This column uses evidence from 20th century America to show how the founding of the Federal Reserve and the Great Depression affected interbank networks and lending practices. The creation of the Fed reduced network concentration and therefore contagion risk, but the system remained vulnerable to local panics.
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Is the Fed Doing Anything Right? – Steve Williamson
5 augustus
I’m not sure the Fed has many friends these days. Donald Trump is unhappy with it, and the financial media seems puzzled by what the Fed is doing. Can we make sense of the Fed’s behavior, particularly its change in policy last week, or is the Fed simply incoherent?
It might help to start with first principles. What would good central bank policy look like, were we ever to have the good fortune to observe such a thing? A central bank should have clearly-stated goals. Those goals could be stated in the legal structure that constrains the central bank, or they could be in the central bank’s interpretation of the law.
Becommentarierend artikel van John H. Cochrane dd. 12 augustus vindt u hier.
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Lost Within The Rate Cut: The Fed’s Drive To Establish A New Payment System – Steve Guinness
14 augustus
Part way through delivering a press conference following the Federal Reserve’s first rate cut since December 2008, chairman Jerome Powell let it be known that the central bank was ‘looking carefully‘ at developing a new faster payments system. Unsurprisingly, his words on the subject proved the equivalent of screaming into the face of a force ten gale. Besides a handful of financial outlets, nobody heard him. All that analysts and observers were really interested in was the Fed’s stance on interest rates.
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What the Looming US-China Currency War Means for the Economy – Daniel Lacalle
13 augustus
A few months ago many of us read about the theory of “the nuclear option,” according to which China could generate a huge debt crisis in the United States and destroy the US economy if it sold its treasury holdings.
As I mentioned at the time, China can become a greater economic leader, but the Chinese yuan cannot be a global reserve currency while maintaining capital controls and exchange rate fixing.
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International business cycle co-movement in the global production network – Zhen Huo, Andrei Levchenko, Nitya Pandalai-Nayar
17 Augustus
The international co-movements of business cycles is a key determinant of trade and monetary policy, but the ways in which it is affected by technology, TFP, and trade openness are not fully understood. This column shows how such co-movements are affected by trade linkages and technology. It finds that non-technology shocks contribute more to international co-movement than TFP shocks, and that transmission plays a notable but small part in co-movements.
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GDP Growth Isn’t the Same Thing as Economic Growth – Frank Shostak
12 augustus
To gain insight into the state of an economy, most financial experts and commentators rely on a statistic called the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The GDP framework looks at the value of final goods and services produced during a particular time interval, usually a quarter or a year.
This statistic is constructed in accordance with the view that what drives an economy is not the production of wealth but rather its consumption. What matters here is the demand for final goods and services. Since consumer outlays are the largest part of the overall demand, it is commonly held that consumer demand is the key driver of economic growth.
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Externalities – and cheating – in the financial crisis – Marcus Miller, Lei Zhang
16 Augustus
Externalities can have a powerful effect on financial stability. This column studies the amplification effect that can operate despite value at risk regulation, which suffers from the ‘fallacy of composition’. It shows that the magnitudes of booms and busts are amplified by two significant externalities triggered by aggregate shocks: the endogeneity of bank equity due to mark-to-market accounting and of bank liquidity due to ‘fire-sales’ of securitised assets. In addition to economic models, legal and political factors should also be considered.
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Why Mises Opposed a Global Government for Managing Trade – Viraj Bhide
12 augustus
Besides its treatment of German national socialism, Mises’ Omnipotent Government also contains an analysis of the various suggestions for “world government” toward the end of the second World War. This article is a short commentary on Mises’ analysis of proposed international economic frameworks, their shortcomings and their subsequent outcomes.
After maintaining the distinction that he makes earlier in Omnipotent Government between the terms “socialism” and “interventionism,” Mises correctly foresees what later became the most important post-war technique of international economic planning. Namely, international agreements between sovereign states
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The Writing’s On The Wall – MN Gordon
16 augustus
One of the more disagreeable discrepancies of American life in the 21st century is the world according to Washington’s economic bureaus and the world as it actually is. In short, things don’t add up. What’s more, the propaganda’s so far off the mark it’s downright insulting.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports an unemployment rate of just 3.7 percent. The BLS also reports price inflation, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI), of 1.8 percent. Yet big city streets are lined with tents and panhandlers grumble “that’s all” when you spare them a dollar.
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***The effect of automatic enrolment on debt – John Beshears, James Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian, William Skimmyhorn
17 Augustus
Automatic enrolment in defined contribution pension plans might be the most common policy application of behavioural economics. But does automatic enrolment increase pension savings at the expense of increased household debt? This column examines a natural experiment in which the US Army began automatically enrolling its civilian employees in its retirement savings plan. It finds strong evidence against the hypothesis that automatic enrolment increases financial distress and debt.
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New Study Defending NYC’s Minimum Wage Law is Fake News – Tho Bishop
13 augustus
Last week Business Insider published an article with the eye-opening title “NYC’s $15 minimum wage hasn’t brought the restaurant apocalypse — it’s helped them thrive.”
Given the political momentum for the “Fight for 15” movement, culminating in the House voting in favor of a $15 national minimum wage last month, the article made for perfect social media fodder. Finally, proof that a basic understanding of labor economics is simply – to borrow from the last Democratic debate – another “right wing talking point.”
Unfortunately both the article and, more importantly, the study it is based on do not hold up particularly well upon any sort of serious analysis.
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“Explosive Upside” – Why Have Silver Prices Lagged Gold? – Goldmoney Insights
15 augustus
Silver prices have lagged gold prices since 2017 which has pushed the gold-to-silver ratio close to the all-time high. Silver prices are also significantly below what is predicted by our pricing model. We think that the reasons for this subdued performance are transitory and that silver will outperform gold again as the next precious metals cycle continues to rapidly unfold.
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Inflation Data Shows Tariffs Are Not a Tax on Consumers but on Foreign & US Corporations – Wolf Richter
13 augustus
Inflation runs hot in housing, medical services, health insurance, other items that are not imported.
The consumer price inflation data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which corroborates prior inflation data, says that, yes, prices are rising, but they’re rising sharply in services that are not impacted by imports and tariffs, such as rents and other housing costs, healthcare, education, and other services, and also in restaurants (where customers pay mostly for labor and rent). But inflation in durable goods, such as electronics, cars, and the like – where the tariffs would show up – was very low.
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***The Road to Hell Is Paved with Virtue-Signaling – Charles Hugh Smith
15 augustus
The idea that everything will be solved if we borrow a couple more trillion and give it away is the dominant paradigm.
Here in the decay phase of Imperial Pretensions, The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. It’s a line from Yeats’ poem The Second Coming, and it speaks to our current stumbling descent toward the abyss, where the worst invest their energies in virtue-signaling and the best retreat from the hopelessness of actually addressing our real-world problems.
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***The dissonance of the short and long term – Jon Danielsson, Robert Macrae
12 Augustus
The type of risk we most care about is long-term, what happens over years or decades, but we tend to manage that risk over short periods. This column argues that the dissonance of risk is that we measure and manage what we don’t care about and ignore what we do.
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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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