"If money isn't loosened up, this sucker could go down" - George W. Bush warned in September 2008

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Really good links - Deficit economics - Econometrics - Unemployment - Deflationary expectations

Brad DeLong - Deficit economics - "It deals with the case in which the macroeconomic market failure is one of promise-keeping on the part of the government. As the late economist Milton Friedman put it, for the government to spend is for the government to tax. Whenever the government spends money to purchase something, it is also promising explicitly or implicitly to tax somebody, either in the present or the future, either directly or indirectly, to pay for that purchase.
        The government can tax now to pay for spending later—and so run a budget surplus. The government can spend now and promise to tax later—and so run a budget deficit and increase the national debt. But what happens when the government runs up too great a debt and the political system tries to get the government to break its promise to tax, or even when investors and savers and managers and workers and spenders fear that the government will explicitly or implicitly try to break its promises? How to guard against such attempted promise-breaking by the government and what happens when attempted promise-breaking occurs is deficit economics. And once again it is not pretty: capital flight, disinvestment, stagflation, currency collapse, and hyperinflation."

Arnold Kling - Econometrics - "There simply is not enough information in the data to make a convincing case for any particular theory of macroeconomics."

Narayana Kocherlakota (President, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis) - Unemployment - "Of course, the key question is: How much of the current unemployment rate is really due to mismatch, as opposed to conditions that the Fed can readily ameliorate? The answer seems to be a lot. I mentioned that the relationship between unemployment and job openings was stable from December 2000 through June 2008. Were that stable relationship still in place today, and given the current job opening rate of 2.2 percent, we would have an unemployment rate of closer to 6.5 percent, not 9.5 percent. Most of the existing unemployment represents mismatch that is not readily amenable to monetary policy."

Narayana Kocherlakota (President, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis) - Deflationary expectations - "To sum up, over the long run, a low fed funds rate must lead to consistent—but low—levels of deflation. The good news is that it is certainly possible to eliminate this eventuality through smart policy choices. Right now, the real safe return on short-term investments is negative because of various headwinds in the real economy. Again, using our simple arithmetic, this negative real return combined with the near-zero fed funds rate means that inflation must be positive. Eventually, the real economy will improve sufficiently that the real return to safe short-term investments will normalize at its more typical positive level. The FOMC has to be ready to increase its target rate soon thereafter.
        That sounds easy—but it’s not. When real returns are normalized, inflationary expectations could well be negative, and there may still be a considerable amount of structural unemployment. If the FOMC hews too closely to conventional thinking, it might be inclined to keep its target rate low. That kind of reaction would simply re-enforce the deflationary expectations and lead to many years of deflation."

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