Kevin P. Gallagher on BRICS Consensus

By Kevin P. Gallagher

Conveniently scheduled at the end of the World Cup, leaders of the BRICS countries travel to Brazil in mid-July for a meeting that presents them with a truly historic opportunity. While in Brazil, the BRICS hope to establish a new development bank and reserve currency pool arrangement. This action could strike a true trifecta — recharge global economic governance and the prospects for development as well as pressure the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — to get back on the right track. The two Bretton Woods institutions, both headquartered in Washington, with good reason originally put financial stability, employment and development as their core missions. That focus, however, became derailed in the last quarter of the 20th century. During the 1980s and 1990s, the World Bank and the IMF pushed the “Washington Consensus,” which offered countries financing but conditioned it on a doctrine of deregulation.

Read rest here.

Mark Weisbrot on BRICS reserve fund & development bank

Fed doesn't think that the natural rate of unemployment is 6.5%

Previously there was some talk about the Fed keeping the fed funds rate low as long as unemployment was higher than 6.5% and inflation was close to the 2% unofficial target. Since last month the unemployment rate crossed that barrier, and is now at 6.1%, there might have been doubts about what would Janet Yellen do or simply What Would Janet Do (WWJD).

The good news is that, quite correctly, Yellen seems to believe that the recovery is still weak, the labor market is slacking and there is no sign of impending inflation acceleration. So the natural rate (which does not exist) is NOT 6.5% for the Fed.

On the blogs

Why Macroeconomists, Not Bankers, Should Set Interest Rates - Mainly Macro

Economic Policies Pursuant to the Global Crisis: A Critique - Mainly Macro

Tom Engelhardt: An Exceptional Declince for the Exceptional County? The Empire as Basket Case - Naked Caplitalism

Nearly Half of New Small Businesses Established by Black And Hispanic Women Shut Down Within A Year - USAPP

Financial Interconnectedness and Systemic Risk: The Fed's FR Y-15 - TripleCrisis

Banking, Monetary Policy And The Political Economy Of Financial Regulation

To be published soon. A Festschrift for Jane D'Arsita. From the dust-jacket:

"Jane D’Arista is one of those towering figures who thinks way ahead of the conventional understandings. A generation ago she recognized the distorted architecture of finance and banking and described in lucid detail the reform agenda for restoring a stable and equitable system. Written in the tradition of D’Arista, the essays in this important collection point the way toward overcoming the recurrent financial disorders of our gilded age. Like Jane D’Arista’s work, this timely volume demands the attention of both policy experts and the politicians who must do the reconstruction."

William Greider, author of Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country

For more info go here.

Who should negotiate with the Vulture Funds

A bit of World Cup humor.

Si mandamos a @Mascherano a negociar con los fondos buitres trae vuelto !!!!!
— Toro Palladino (@Toropalladino) July 10, 2014

Translation: If we send Mascherano to negotiate with the Vulture Funds, he will bring back some change!!!!!

If you read in Portuguese, here is an interview with yours truly on the Vulture Funds.

NBER: Mutual Assistance between Federal Reserve Banks, 1913-1960

By Barry Eichengreen, Arnaud J. Mehl, Livia Chițu, & Gary Richardson

This paper reconstructs the forgotten history of mutual assistance among Reserve Banks in the early years of the Federal Reserve System. We use data on accommodation operations by the 12 Reserve Banks between 1913 and 1960 which enabled them to mutualise their gold reserves in emergency situations. Gold reserve sharing was especially important in response to liquidity crises and bank runs. Cooperation among reserve banks was essential for the cohesion and stability of the US monetary union. But fortunes could change quickly, with emergency recipients of gold turning into providers. Because regional imbalances did not grow endlessly, instead narrowing when region-specific liquidity shocks subsided, mutual assistance created only limited tensions. These findings speak to the current debate over TARGET2 balances in Europe.

Read rest here (subscription required).

CEPR: Latin American Growth in the 21st Century - The 'Commodities Boom' That Wasn't

By David Rosnick and Mark Weisbrot

This paper looks at whether the data support such a conclusion. It finds that there is no statistically significant relationship between the increase in the terms of trade (TOT) for Latin American countries and their GDP growth. There is, however, a positive relationship between the TOT increase and an improvement in the current account balance. It may be that this allowed countries to avoid balance of payments crises or constraints.

Read rest here.

Stop bashing GDP!

So everybody hates the Gross Domestic Product! The New York Times and the Financial Times have recently published articles criticizing the main measure of production in the economy. This is certainly not new, and criticism of the value of GDP for certain purposes, as a measure of well-being, for example, have led in the past to the creation of other variables like the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Index, which includes GDP per capita (actually Gross National Income per capita), life expectancy at birth and average years of schooling for adults.

In fact, the NYTimes article basis for the supposedly dramatic "Rise and Fall of the GDP" is it's inability to measure well-being, and in it the author emphasizes its disadvantages when compared to the HDI. The NYTimes piece quotes Sen, the godfather of HDI, complaining about the "silliness about identifying growth with development." Of course, since GDP is only about the material growth of the economy, it would be an incomplete measure of development.

The most common type of critique is that GDP does not count many things, like environmental degradation, or happiness (yep, I know; check Putnam's ideas in the NYTimes piece; talk about silliness), or almost all non-market transactions for that matter, or is slow to adjust to new products and services introduced in the market, and that it's not particularly good for understanding inequality (Robert Reich's complaint in FT's piece; check the full list of complaints in both articles linked above). The best defense is provided by William Nordhaus, who argues compellingly that: “if you want to know why GDP matters, you can just put yourself back in the 1930 period, where we had no idea what was happening to our economy.”

First, GDP is not a measure of everything, and it certainly has limitations. But it does measure relatively well the material production in a given year, and provides the basis for understanding the process of accumulation, which is central for understanding the dynamics of capitalism. And actually, if you look at functional distribution of income in the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA), which are used to calculate GDP, you do have one of the best measures of income inequality! Yes growth of the flow of goods and services produced in a country in a year is not tantamount to development, but without growth developing countries cannot achieve the levels of well-being of advanced economies, so growth is kind of a pre-requiste (and yes, growth involves environmental degradation, and we should try to minimize it). Further, with GDP one can obtain a fairly good measure of productivity (labor productivity), which is the basis for the Wealth of Nations, if you believe that dude Adam Smith.

My beef with the profession is not the use of GDP growth as a measure of material progress, but the fact that a limited, supply-constrained, individual maximizing utility, market-friendly, neoclassical version of the process of growth and development is the dominant one. But GDP is fine. Like price indexes, which also are limited and sometimes inaccurate, is an essential tool for understanding the real world.

Tom Palley on Milton Friedman’s economics and political economy

By Thomas Palley

Milton Friedman’s influence on the economics profession has been enormous. In part, his success was due to political forces that have made neoliberalism the dominant global ideology, but Friedman also rode those forces and contributed to them. Friedman’s professional triumph is testament to the weak intellectual foundations of the economics profession which accepted ideas that are conceptually and empirically flawed. His success has taken economics back in a pre-Keynesian direction and squeezed Keynesianism out of the academy. Friedman’s thinking also frames so-called new Keynesian economics which is simply new classical macroeconomics with the addition of imperfect competition and nominal rigidities. By enabling the claim that macroeconomics is fully characterized by a divide between new Keynesian and new classical macroeconomics, new Keynesianism closes the pincer that excludes old Keynesianism. As long as that pincer holds, economics will remain under Friedman’s shadow.

Read paper here.

On the blogs

Pricing Power and Lower Potential GDP - Economist's view

The Great Recession's long-term damage - VOX

"Successful" Politics ... At Expense of General Welfare of the People? - Mike Norman Economics

Full Employment and the Path to Shared Prosperity (3 graphs) - Real World Economics Review

The Great Disinvestment - Paul Krugman

John King and Marc Lavoie and alternatives to the mainstream

An interview with John King (here), in the World Economic Association Newsletter. Also, chapter 1 of Marc Lavoie's new book on post-Keynesian economics available here.

PS: In Marc's book I'm included in a group of authors that can be classified in more than one category. In his words: "Many eclectic and productive economists go across all or at least two of the categories discussed above, and so could not fit neatly into one of the strands. This is the case of key senior authors such as Philip Arestis, Geoff Harcourt, John King , Barkley Rosser Jr and Edward Nell, or more junior ones like Steve Keen, Mathew Forstater, Mathias (sic) Vernengo and Louis-Philippe Rochon."

Dean Baker - Housing & The Downturn: It's Really Not That Complicated

By Dean Baker

Neil Irwin has a piece noting housing's importance in the downturn, which gets things half right. First, housing is typically important in economic cycles, as he says, but the picture is quite different than Irwin implies. In a typical recession housing construction falls because it is very sensitive to interest rates. Most recessions are brought on by the Fed raising interest rates to slow the economy. In these cases the decline in housing is a deliberate outcome of Fed policy, not an accidental outcome to be avoided. In contrast, the most recent downturn was brought on by a collapse of a housing bubble. This made it qualitatively different from most prior downturns (the 2001 recession was also bubble induced) in several different ways. First, construction was proceeding at an extraordinary rate of more than 6.0 percent of GDP before the collapse, compared to an average rate of just over 4.0 percent of GDP. This meant that housing contracted far more than it would in a typical downturn. Furthermore, because of the overbuilding of the bubble years, housing fell further than normal, hitting levels just above 2.0 percent of GDP. And, because the downturn was not brought on by a rise of interest rates it could not be reversed by a drop in interest rates.

Read rest here.