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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Long Run Lira? – John H. Cochrane
26 april
Luigi Zingales inaugurated a series of essays in Il Sole 24 Ore, an Italian newspaper, on whether Italy should stay in or get out of the Euro, and graciously asked me to contribute. My view, here in English, here in Italian.
To be clear, I kept to Luigi’s terms of the debate. This piece is only about whether Italy is better off in the long run, with a common currency. Whether it gets anything out of an exit, a devaluation, a default now is for another day. And this is just about currency, not about leaving the EU, not about debt or austerity, not about whether europe needs a fiscal union, or the rest of it. (Some subsequent correspondence verifies the wisdom, but also the difficulty, of talking about one thing at a time.)
Return to the Lira? A long-run view (Not very good English title)
The euro isn’t perfect, but it isn’t bad. (Much better Italian title)
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Housing’s Echo Bubble Now Exceeds the 2006-07 Bubble Peak – Charles Hugh Smith
25 april 25
If you need some evidence that the echo-bubble in housing is global, take a look at this chart of Sweden’s housing bubble.
A funny thing often occurs after a mania-fueled asset bubble pops: an echo-bubble inflates a few years later, as monetary authorities and all the institutions that depend on rising asset valuations go all-in to reflate the crushed asset class.
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Chilling Thing Insiders Said about Canada’s House Price Bubble – Wolf Richter
29 april
What are homes & mortgages worth when push comes to shove?
Home Capital is Canada’s biggest “alternative” mortgage lender. It’s not a bank – which today is part of its problem because it cannot create money to lend out; it has to obtain it first by attracting deposits and borrowing money through other channels. Through its subsidiary, Home Trust, it specializes in high-profit mortgages to risky borrowers, with dented credit or unreliable incomes who don’t qualify for mortgage insurance and were turned down by the banks. This includes subprime borrowers.
Since revelations of liar loans – What, liar loans in Canada?! – surfaced in 2015, things have gone to heck. Now it’s experiencing a run on its deposits. Teetering at the abyss, it obtained a $2 billion bailout loan on Thursday. The terms are onerous. And on Friday, the crux of the deal emerged – the amount of mortgages it has to post as collateral. It’s a doozie.
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One size does not fit all: On the heterogeneous impact of free trade agreements – Scott Baier, Yoto Yotov, Thomas Zylkin
28 april
There is a large empirical literature examining the effects of free trade agreements. However, most studies to date have focused on a common average effect across all agreements or have assumed that the effects are common across similar types of agreements. This column examines heterogeneity in the effects of free trade agreements. Along with across-agreement heterogeneity, substantial within-agreement heterogeneity is observed. The effects of a specific agreement can be starkly different for two trading partners.
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Central Banks’ Obsession with Price Stability Leads to Economic Instability – Frank Shostak
28 april
For most economists the key factor that sets the foundation for healthy economic fundamentals is a stable price level as depicted by the consumer price index.
According to this way of thinking, a stable price level doesn’t obscure the visibility of the relative changes in the prices of goods and services, and enables businesses to see clearly market signals that are conveyed by the relative changes in the prices of goods and services. Consequently, it is held, this leads to the efficient use of the economy’s scarce resources and hence results in better economic fundamentals.
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Exchange rate prediction redux – Yin-Wong Cheung, Menzie Chinn, Antonio Garcia Pascual, Yi Zhang
27 april
Previous assessments of nominal exchange rate determination have focused on a narrow set of models. Using data for six currencies, this column examines the performance of an expanded set of models at various forecast horizons. No model consistently outperforms a random walk benchmark, although the purchasing power parity model does fairly well. Overall, combinations of model, specification, and currency that work in one period will not necessarily work well in another.
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Case Study In Depression And Denial – Jeffrey Snider
28 april
Back on March 10, the New York Fed’s attempt at real-time GDP forecasting predicted that the Q1 2017 estimate would be 3.2%. That would have qualified as another decent quarter, the second out of the past three and somewhat in keeping with “reflation.” As we know today, the advance figure calculated by the Commerce Department amounted to just 0.69% growth in Q1.
The point is not to cherry pick the highest quarterly prediction and make fun of FRBNY. At the same time in mid-March the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow competing model had already collapsed below 1%. Like the New York version, the Atlanta tracker had early on projected better than 3% growth for the quarter. It was at one time in early February just shy of 3.5%, higher than at any point for the other one.
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Economy “Surprises” to Downside, Growth Near Zero. Atlanta Fed GDPNow Forecast just about Nailed it – Wolf Richter
28 april
Lousy consumer spending & the “weather.” Inflation hits Fed target.
The US economy surprised economists to the downside once again, a terrible habit it has picked up over the past years. GDP adjusted for inflation inched up only 0.7% “compound annual rate of change.” This means that if the economy keeps growing at this rate for four quarters in a row, economic growth for the entire year would only be 0.7%.
By comparison, in 2016, economic growth was 1.6%, matching 2011 for the worst rate since the Financial Crisis. So 0.7% is ugly. It was the weakest growth since Q1 2014.
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Drivers of the post-crisis slump in the Eurozone and the US – Robert Kollmann, Beatrice Pataracchia, Rafal Raciborski, Marco Ratto, Werner Roeger, Lukas Vogel
27 april
The Global Crisis led to a sharp contraction and long-lasting slump in both Eurozone and US real activity, but the post-crisis adjustment in the Eurozone and the US shows striking differences. This column argues that financial shocks were key determinants of the 2008-09 Great Recession, for both the Eurozone and the US. The post-2009 slump in the Eurozone mainly reflects a combination of adverse aggregate demand and supply shocks, in particular lower productivity growth, and persistent adverse shocks to capital investment linked to the poor health of the Eurozone financial system. Mono-causal explanations of the persistent slump are thus insufficient. Adverse financial shocks were less persistent for the US.
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Goldman Warns The Gap Between Stock Investors’ Hopes & Reality Is Close To An All-Time High – Tyler Durden
29 april
If US GDP growth were tracking sentiment data alone, Goldman estimates the US economy would be growing at its fastest rate of the post-crisis period… But as many saw yesterday – crushing the hopes and dreams of a multitude of over-confident asset-gatherers and commission-takers.
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Mapping the interconnectedness between EU banks and shadow banking entities – Jorge Abad, Marco D’Errico, Neill Killeen, Vera Luz, Tuomas Peltonen, Richard Portes, Teresa Urbano
25 april
The Global Crisis highlighted how linkages between banks and shadow banking entities can lead to the amplification of shocks across borders and sectors, prompting policymakers to seek to improve the monitoring framework for assessing the interconnectedness of the shadow banking system. This column documents the cross-sector and cross-border exposures of EU banks to globally domiciled shadow banking entities. Among the findings are that 60% of these exposures are to shadow banking entities domiciled outside the EU and hence outside its supervisory powers, and that approximately 65% of the exposures are to non-money market fund investment funds, finance companies, and securitisation entities.
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***Are Oil Prices to Blame for the Venezuelan Crisis? – Daniel Fernández Méndez
26 april
Many analysts are venturing to link the crisis that plagues the Venezuelan economy with the fall in the price of crude oil. With oil being one of the most important commodities in Venezuelan production and the country’s main export product, it seems that the fall in the price would bring any country with an economic structure similar to Venezuela’s into a crisis. Similarly, many assume that the problems in Ecuador have the same root as those in Venezuela, although less pronounced.
Certainly, one of the markets that has seen the most movement lately is oil. The price of an oil barrel today is 50% less than what it was in mid-2014. The price increased 47% in 2016.
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Damn the Deficits, Huge Tax Cuts Ahead! – Peter Schiff
28 april
Donald Trump has made good on one of his most audacious campaign promises by submitting what he describes as the biggest tax cut in U.S. History. For once, at least, this does not appear to be Trumpian braggadocio. It really may be the mother of all tax cuts. But if passed, what may this bunker buster do to the economy? While I have rarely met a tax cut I didn’t like, this one just may be more likely to send the economy into a downward spiral than it is to send up to orbit.
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*** Rising (Central Bank) Tide Turns Everyone into a Genius – Charles Hugh Smith
26 april
Until the system implodes–you’re a genius.
So you’ve ridden the markets higher–stocks, housing, commercial real estate, bat guano, quatloos, you name it–everything you touch turns to gold. What can we say, bucko, other than you’re a genius!
It’s a market truism that rising tides lift all boats. But that’s not the really important effect; what really matters is rising tides turn everyone into a genius–at least in their own minds.
Those of us who have been seduced by the Sirens’ songs of hubris know from bitter experience how easy it is to confuse a rising tide with speculative genius. When everything you touch keeps going higher, the only possible cause is…. your hot hand, of course!
Stocks–I’m a genius! Housing–I’m a genius! Commercial real estate–yes, well, I suppose the evidence is overwhelming–it does seem I’m a genius.
The only thing better than buy and hold is buy the dips and hold–and use margin or whatever leverage you have to buy more before the price goes even higher.
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Do we understand the impact of artificial intelligence on employment? – Georgios Petropoulos
27 april
Artificial intelligence is already transforming the world of work, but the future is hard to predict. Some see most jobs at risk of automatisation, while others argue robots will only take on a narrow range of tasks in the coming decades. Nevertheless, we need a broad debate to prepare the appropriate economic policy response to the new industrial revolution.
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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.