I give this book one star because the drone landed on my cat
December 3, 2013 § Leave a comment
If the government is in surplus, it means that the government is taking in more cash than it’s spending, which is the opposite of stimulus.
It’s also well known that the US trade deficit exploded during the late 90s, which means that ‘X-M’ was also a huge drag on GDP during his years.
So the trade deficit was subtracting from GDP, and the government was sucking up more money from the private sector than it was pushing out.
There was only one “sector” of the economy left to compensate: Private consumption. And private consumption compensated for the drags from government and trade in two ways.
First, the household savings rate collapsed during the Clinton years.
And even more ominously, household debt began to surge.
So already you can see how the crisis started to germinate under Clinton.
As his trade and budget policies became a drag on the economy, households spent and went into debt like never before.
Economist Stephanie Kelton expounded further…
“Now, you might ask, “What’s the matter with a negative private sector balance?”. We had that during the Clinton boom, and we had low inflation, decent growth and very low unemployment. The Goldilocks economy, as it was known. The great moderation. Again, few economists saw what was happening with any degree of clarity. My colleagues at the Levy Institute were not fooled. Wynne Godley wrote brilliant stuff during this period. While the CBO was predicting surpluses “as far as the eye can see” (15+ years in their forecasts), Wynne said it would never happen. He knew it couldn’t because the government could only run surpluses for 15+ years if the domestic private sector ran deficits for 15+ years. The CBO had it all wrong, and they had it wrong because they did not understand the implications of their forecast for the rest of the economy. The private sector cannot survive in negative territory. It cannot go on, year after year, spending more than its income. It is not like the US government…” read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Achille Volpe
The cessation was glibly attributed to the Great Fire: but in every other city in England the Plague ceased at about the same time
November 21, 2013 § Leave a comment
While virtually all mainstream economists believe in a long-term Say’s Law (supply creates demand, so the ultimate constraint on long term growth comes from the supply side), the real constraint on long-term growth in a developed capitalist economy is always on the demand side. (Note that there’s nothing new in the Summers/Krugman recognition of secular stagnation; David Levy called it a “contained depression” in 1991; Wallace Peterson announced a “silent depression” in 1994; and I demonstrated in 1999 that the problem is chronically constrained demand. At a recent Levy Institute conference in Rio, Paul McCulley laid out what he called a fundamental economic principle: Microeconomics and Macroeconomics are inherently different disciplines. Macro is demand-side; micro is supply-side. For any practical time horizon, demand always drives supply.)
I know what I’m saying is heretical, even though it is fully backed by all the data. And this stagnation is not due to a liquidity trap, or to a negative “natural” rate of interest. It is in the nature of the productivity of capitalist investment in plant and equipment. To put it in simple terms, the problem is that investment is just too damned productive. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Antonio Olmos
I must say, Amy, pretending to have intercourse with you has given me a great deal of satisfaction
December 12, 2012 § Leave a comment
I’ll let you in on a secret: before this crisis, when I thought about the budget deficit I was like everyone else in that I paid no attention to how the government budget interacted with the private and trade sector balances. This is a big error. If you do that, you treat the government budget deficit in isolation, when the reality is that the government is an integral part of an open economy with households and businesses that trade domestically and abroad. When the government balance changes, the balances for those businesses and households change too. If you are talking about deficits then, you need to know how changes in the government balance affect the rest of the economy.
Here’s the thing: when we exchange goods and services with each other, from an accounting perspective, it’s a wash; if you buy my goods, I get money and you get goods of equivalent value. If you pay for those goods with an I.O.U., with a debt, your liability, your deficit in the year we made the transaction, is exactly equal to the asset on my balance sheet and my surplus for the year. I mean this is basic accounting, folks. There’s no hocus pocus. Any person’s, any household’s, any business’s, any group’s, any government’s debt is someone else’s asset. Any person’s, any household’s, any business’s, any group’s, any government’s deficit is someone else’s surplus. Again, it’s basic accounting.
Think of it like exchange traded options and the profit and losses on the exchange. People buy and sell oil futures or soybean futures. At the end of the option period, they either have a loss or a profit and that period’s deficit or surplus is exactly offset by the deficit or surplus of the counterparties. When you sum up these deficits and surpluses they net to zero. Again, no hocus pocus. That’s how accounting works.
The same is true for national accounts. At the end of any accounting period, then, the sum of the sectoral financial balances must net to zero. The government balance – the private balance – capital account balance = 0. The government balance = the private balance + the capital account balance. See my post Economics 101 on government budget deficits for the full write-up. I credit British economist Wynne Godley for making this identity relevant to macro economics.
What does all this mean then? Put simply, the financial sector balances framework means that when the government sector runs a deficit, the non-government sector runs a surplus of equivalent size. So, to move any sector balance in an open economy, you need to move the other two balances exactly opposite in equivalent measure. To reduce the government deficit in any period, the private balance and the capital balance must increase by the exact same amount in that period.
Thinking about government deficits this way opens a whole new understanding of what cutting deficits means for the economy. What it should mean to you is that deficits are the effect and not the cause. Budget deficits are the result of the ex-post accounting identity between the sectoral balances and should not be a primary goal of public policy. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Francesca Woodman
my nerves are bad to-night 