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.

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Causes of the Eurozone Crisis: A nuanced view – Lars P Feld, Christoph M Schmidt, Isabel Schnabel, Volker Wieland
22 maart
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. In the midst of a crisis, it is of course very hard to understand causality. This column uses the benefit of hindsight to present a nuanced view of the causes of the Eurozone Crisis as seen by members of the German Council of Economic Experts. To prevent the same crisis happening again, the Maastricht Treaty needs to be revitalised to enhance the future stability of the Eurozone and relieve the ECB of its role as crisis manager.
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Job Growth Doesn’t Mean We’re Getting Richer – Ryan McMaken
25 maart
In response to recent claims by the Obama administration and others that “millions of jobs” have recently been created, I examined the data here at mises.org to see if the claims were true. It turns out that job growth since the 2008 recession has actually been quite weak, and hardly something to boast about.
Nevertheless, our conclusions from these analyses tend to rest on the idea that job growth is synonymous with gains in wealth and economic prosperity.
But is that a good assumption?
In an unhampered market, the answer would be no, for several reasons.
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***Brexit Meltdown at the Bank of England – Don Quijones
24 maart
But it’s supposed to be “independent” from national politics.
Project Fear — the massive PR campaign aimed at sowing and watering the seeds of dread about the potential consequences of a YES vote in the upcoming referendum on a British exit from the EU — is in full bloom. In the event of a wrong answer, all manner of biblical disasters can be expected to befall the nation, the British public is constantly being warned.
The country’s national income will shrink, hundreds of thousands if not millions of jobs will vanish, the City of London’s core industry — financial engineering — will migrate across the channel, the currency will collapse, house prices will plummet, European firms will stop selling products to Brits, the U.S. government will impose massive tariffs on British imports, and even Britain’s already dismal climate will get worse.
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Central banks as central planners – John Cochrane
25 maart
Two news items cropped up this week on the general topic of central banks as emergent central planers.: a nice WSJ editorial by James Mackintosh on QE extended to buying corporate debt, and the Fed’s proposed rule governing “Macroprudential” countercyclical capital buffers. The ECB also has a new Macroprudential Bulletin with similar ideas that I will not cover because the post is already too long. (Some earlier thoughts on the issue here. As usual, if the quotes aren’t showing right, come back to the original of this post here.)
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Bank Earnings Get Mauled by “Leveraged Loan” Time Bomb – Wolf Richter
23 maart
Banks have a few, let’s say, issues, among them: a source of big-fat investment banking fees is collapsing before their very eyes.
S&P Capital IQ reported today that there was an improvement in the “distress ratio” of junk bonds, after nearly a year of brutal deterioration that had pushed it beyond where it had been right after Lehman’s bankruptcy. The recent surge in oil prices seems to have lifted all boats for a brief period. But not “leveraged loans.” Their distress ratio spiked to the highest levels since the Financial Crisis!
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Completing Maastricht 2.0 to safeguard the future of the Eurozone – Lars P Feld, Christoph M Schmidt, Isabel Schnabel, Volker Wieland
23 maart
Economists continue to debate how to safeguard the Eurozone, with some countries exiting the Crisis and some still reeling from it. This column, by members of the German Council of Economic Experts, concludes that reforms have mostly moved the Eurozone in the direction of ‘Maastricht 2.0’, stabilising the Eurozone. But it’s clear that more needs to be done.
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“Free” Trade, Jobs and Income Inequality: It’s Not As Easy As We Might Think – Charles Hugh Smith
22 maart
Cheap imports, offshoring of production and the global expansion of financial markets have driven U.S. corporate and financial profits to unprecedented heights.
Globalization (a.k.a. “free” trade) has become an election issue for two reasons: many voters blame “free” trade with China and other nations for job losses in the U.S. and rising income inequality as globalization’s “winners” in the U.S. outpace its far more numerous “losers.”
A recent article in the New York Times looks at the issue from the perspective of recent economic studies: On Trade, Angry Voters Have a Point (via Lew G.)
The case for globalization based on the fact that it helps expand the economic pie by 3 percent becomes much weaker when it also changes the distribution of the slices by 50 percent.
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Three Reasons to Be Bearish Right Now – Jeff Clark
23 maart
There are so many reasons to be bearish right now, I can’t count all of them. Dozens of indicators are flashing “warning” signs. The market looks dangerous. Almost everything is pointing toward an intermediate-term decline coming soon.
And if it plays out the way it did when we had the same setup in November, stocks may give up all of the gains they’ve enjoyed over the past few weeks. So you need to be cautious right now. Here are three reasons why:
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Assuming Away Unemployment and Trade Deficits from the TPP – Timothy A. Wise, Jomo Kwame Sundaram
21 maart
In an old joke, a shipwrecked economist is asked for his counsel on how the stranded group can be rescued. “Assume we have a boat,” he begins.
Robert Lawrence and Tyler Moran, writing for the Peterson Institute for International Economics, seem to have missed the joke in their recent repeat of the same flawed assumptions of their colleagues’ hugely optimistic assessment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement which prompted our own paper, “Trading Down: Unemployment, Inequality, and Other Risks of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.”
Claiming to address contrarian findings that the TPP may well cause job losses and increase income inequality, Lawrence and Moran assume away the causes – downward pressure on wages and employment due to the consequent “race to the bottom” – which have made free trade agreements so controversial.
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Understanding the Great Recession – Mario Seccareccia, Marc Lavoie
22 maart
Some fundamental Keynesian and Post-Keynesian insights, with an analysis of possible mechanisms to achieve a sustained recovery.
Just as the Great Depression remained etched in the minds of both economists and policy makers for a very long time, undoubtedly so will the experience of the post-financial crisis Great Recession. In the case of the former, what most mainstream economists had inferred as principal lesson from the Great Depression was that wages and prices had just not fallen sufficiently to get real wages down to ensure a return to high employment and to generate sufficient positive wealth effects as A.C. Pigou had defended in 1943. Consequently, the culprit was wage and price rigidities and what was needed was a strong dose of deflation. But since the market mechanism was just too slow to get wages and prices to adjust downward, some form of New Deal fiscal policy was required to reduce unemployment.
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The Oil and Gas Fire Sale: How Bad Will Losses to Banks and Investors Be? – Yves Smith
22 maart
You can tell things are going a bit pear-shaped when single stories in the business press are so meaty as to warrant posts all on their own.
Today’s example is a Financial Times story, Oil and gas: Debt fears flare up, which gives a grim update on the wreckage in the wake of the energy price collapse, and how the damage to lenders has only started to play out.
None of the underlying themes will be new to readers. We’ve been warning for some time, first of the froth in the junk bond market, and its particularly high exposure to energy concerns, and then the correction last year. We were also one of the few to argue that the “cheap gas will prop up the economy” would be offset, and likely more than offset, by the losses of high-paying oil and shale gas jobs and the impact of direct (energy company) and indirect (real estate loans in oil boom areas) lending losses on banks and investors. We further stressed that the energy price rebound was not going to happen in a mere six months, as was the almost universal consensus in early 2015, because shale gas players had strong incentives to keep pumping until their money sources cut them off. Indeed, while we recognized that issue (identified by the Financial Times’ John Dizard) as a key driver that was widely ignored, if anything, we underestimated that an analogous set of imperatives – the need to fund national budgets – would also lead energy producing nations to maintain production levels even at what they would have recently regarded as depressed prices.
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***Recipe for Collapse: Rising Military and Social Welfare Spending – Charles Hugh Smith
23 maart
Leaders faced with unrest, rising demands and dwindling coffers always debauch their currency as the politically expedient “solution.”
Whatever you think of former Fed chair Alan Greenspan, he is one of the few public voices identifying runaway entitlement costs as a structural threat to the economy and nation. We can summarize Greenspan’s comments very succinctly: there is no free lunch. The more money that is siphoned off for entitlements, the less there is for investment needed to maintain productivity gains that are the foundation of future income generation
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***World Trade Collapses in Dollars, Languishes in Volume – Wolf Richter
25 maart
The Merchandise World Trade Monitor by the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, a division of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, tracks global imports and exports in two measures: by volume and by unit price in US dollars. And the just released data for January was a doozie beneath the lackluster surface.
The World Trade Monitor for January, as measured in seasonally adjusted volume, declined 0.4% from December and was up a measly 1.1% from January a year ago. While the sub-index for import volumes rose 3% from a year ago, export volumes fell 0.7%. This sort of “growth,” languishing between slightly negative and slightly positive has been the rule last year.
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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.