Krugman et al

[Incognitus]

Ser possível acreditar nisso também mostra porque existem tantas pessoas contra o FMI, claro.

[Lark]

Ok, então está bem. Ficámos portanto a saber que existem idiotas que acham que quando se implementa austeridade o crescimento é imediato.

Quer dizer, já sabíamos que tais idiotas existiam -- nomeadamente na população em geral, especialmente na população de países sob intervenções do FMI.

Mas agora ficámos a saber que tais idiotas até existem entre decisores que, supostamente, já deveriam saber como funciona um programa do FMI e o que acontece no seu início. Isto na tua opinião que consideras provada, claro. Eu acho que essas pessoas estudaram um pouco e por isso sabem um pouco mais do que falam e portanto se dizem que a austeridade provoca crescimento, certamente não se referem ao momento imediato em que esta é implementada. Mas tu pelos vistos acreditas diferente.

não podia estar mais de acordo com isto que escreveste.
e já agora o krugman está ali a dizer que sim com a cabeça, em acordo total.

L

[Incognitus]

Então estamos de acordo. A austeridade não produz crescimento no curto prazo (muito pelo contrário, como seria de esperar)

Pelo que fazer um gráfico que compara a evolução do crescimento comparando países sem austeridade com países no meio de programas de austeridade não faz sentido.

[Lark]

Então estamos de acordo. A austeridade não produz crescimento no curto prazo (muito pelo contrário, como seria de esperar)

Pelo que fazer um gráfico que compara a evolução do crescimento comparando países sem austeridade com países no meio de programas de austeridade não faz sentido.

faz sentido para provar que o trichet é um idiota.

L

[Incognitus]

Então estamos de acordo. A austeridade não produz crescimento no curto prazo (muito pelo contrário, como seria de esperar)

Pelo que fazer um gráfico que compara a evolução do crescimento comparando países sem austeridade com países no meio de programas de austeridade não faz sentido.

faz sentido para provar que o trichet é um idiota.

L

Um significativo idiota, se estiver naquela posição sem nunca ter olhado para o que o FMI historicamente faz, e o que se passa nesses cenários no curto prazo. Não devido realmente ao FMI (que implementa austeridade) mas sim devido ao que precede a necessidade dessa austeridade, e quais os resultados económicos imediatos (que tanto fazem as pessoas odiar o FMI, não obstante não odiarem o que torna essas medidas inevitáveis).

[Zel]

o trichet nao eh nenhum idiota, isto eh coisa tao obvia que toda a gente sabe
ou estava a mentir e a fazer de politico ou tb podia estar a falar doutra escala temporal.

[Zel]

uma pergunta relacionado com o tema:

o que eh que impede os governos europeus de usarem os bancos dos respectivos estados para se financiarem sem disciplina de mercado  ? capitalizam o banco para obedecer a basel e depois toca a emitir divida para o banco comprar... qual eh o impedimento?

[Incognitus]

uma pergunta relacionado com o tema:

o que eh que impede os governos europeus de usarem os bancos dos respectivos estados para se financiarem sem disciplina de mercado  ? capitalizam o banco para obedecer a basel e depois toca a emitir divida para o banco comprar... qual eh o impedimento?

Não há excepto em casos como a Grécia em que o BCE fecha a torneira. Aliás, eu previ que isso ia acontecer há anos atrás e aconteceu forte e feio.

[Zel]

uma pergunta relacionado com o tema:

o que eh que impede os governos europeus de usarem os bancos dos respectivos estados para se financiarem sem disciplina de mercado  ? capitalizam o banco para obedecer a basel e depois toca a emitir divida para o banco comprar... qual eh o impedimento?

Não há excepto em casos como a Grécia em que o BCE fecha a torneira. Aliás, eu previ que isso ia acontecer há anos atrás e aconteceu forte e feio.

qual torneira?

[Incognitus]

uma pergunta relacionado com o tema:

o que eh que impede os governos europeus de usarem os bancos dos respectivos estados para se financiarem sem disciplina de mercado  ? capitalizam o banco para obedecer a basel e depois toca a emitir divida para o banco comprar... qual eh o impedimento?

Não há excepto em casos como a Grécia em que o BCE fecha a torneira. Aliás, eu previ que isso ia acontecer há anos atrás e aconteceu forte e feio.

qual torneira?

A torneira de aceitar dívida Grega para desconto. Depois só sobra a ELA e o BCE entretanto colocou um limite na dívida Grega que os próprios bancos Gregos podiam comprar.

[Zel]

uma pergunta relacionado com o tema:

o que eh que impede os governos europeus de usarem os bancos dos respectivos estados para se financiarem sem disciplina de mercado  ? capitalizam o banco para obedecer a basel e depois toca a emitir divida para o banco comprar... qual eh o impedimento?

Não há excepto em casos como a Grécia em que o BCE fecha a torneira. Aliás, eu previ que isso ia acontecer há anos atrás e aconteceu forte e feio.

qual torneira?

A torneira de aceitar dívida Grega para desconto. Depois só sobra a ELA e o BCE entretanto colocou um limite na dívida Grega que os próprios bancos Gregos podiam comprar.

mas isso nao acontece so quando ha problemas de liquidez? e se o banco do estado nao tiver problemas desses?

[Zel]

hoje aprendi uma coisa interessante, ha varios bancos centrais asiaticos que impedem os bancos de emprestar a actividades especulativas que nao entram no pib (financeiras)

a partida parece-me uma boa ideia

[Incognitus]

uma pergunta relacionado com o tema:

o que eh que impede os governos europeus de usarem os bancos dos respectivos estados para se financiarem sem disciplina de mercado  ? capitalizam o banco para obedecer a basel e depois toca a emitir divida para o banco comprar... qual eh o impedimento?

Não há excepto em casos como a Grécia em que o BCE fecha a torneira. Aliás, eu previ que isso ia acontecer há anos atrás e aconteceu forte e feio.

qual torneira?

A torneira de aceitar dívida Grega para desconto. Depois só sobra a ELA e o BCE entretanto colocou um limite na dívida Grega que os próprios bancos Gregos podiam comprar.

mas isso nao acontece so quando ha problemas de liquidez? e se o banco do estado nao tiver problemas desses?

Se não tiver é à la gardere. Mas quem tem maior vontade de fazer isso é quem tem problemas.

[Lark]

agora sim, o krugman está de saída de Princeton.

Paul Krugman - New York Times Blog

76 Semesters (Personal)

Blogging has been limited lately, because it’s the end of term and I have a lot of things to do (plus get ready for an extended visit to Oxford starting soon.) But today was a bit of a personal landmark. Regular readers may know that I’m taking early retirement from Princeton — which has been a wonderful place for me, but I’m just overextended — and taking up an appointment at CUNY Graduate Center, one with limited teaching.

And this morning I gave my last class — my last class at Princeton, and if we don’t count the graduate seminars I’ll give at CUNY, we could say my last class period.

I started as an assistant professor at Yale in the fall of 1977. So I’ve been a college professor for 76 semesters. It’s been a great ride. But time to move on.

krugman

[Zel]

fizeram bem em correr com ele, eh um mal-educado com tendencias jihadistas

[Lark]

Paul Krugman to Leave Princeton in 2015 to Take Role at CUNY

Feb. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Paul Krugman, a Nobel-prize winning economist who has used his New York Times column to champion greater government action to stimulate growth and create jobs, is leaving Princeton University for the City University of New York.

He will join the faculty of the Graduate Center as a professor in the Ph.D. program in economics and become a scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center, Krugman wrote today in his column for the New York Times. CUNY also released a statement on Krugman’s appointment.

“More and more of my work has focused on issues of income inequality,” Krugman, 61, wrote. “Nobody does more important work producing the hard data on which all of this work relies than the Luxembourg Income Study.”

Krugman’s appointment as a distinguished scholar will be effective in July 2014 and his faculty appointment in August 2015, CUNY said. He will continue writing his biweekly column and blog, “The Conscience of a Liberal.”

Krugman has been a professor at Princeton’s Department of Economics and in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs since 2000, according to the Ivy League school in New Jersey.

The economist said his move to CUNY is in no way a commentary on Princeton, which he said “has been a wonderful place for me professionally and personally.” He called both its public policy school and economics department “superb.”

Princeton ‘Loss’

“We’re aware that he will be retiring from Princeton,” Martin Mbugua, a spokesman for the university, said in a statement. “He’s been a valued member of our faculty and we appreciate his 14 years at Princeton. We wish him well in his future endeavors.”

Jonathan Lack, a Princeton student enrolled this term in Krugman’s class “The Great Recession, Causes, Consequences, and Remedies,” said he’s a very good lecturer with great enthusiasm for teaching.

“It’s a loss for the university whenever someone who’s a Nobel laureate decides to leave, so I think it will be tough for Princeton to see him go,” said Lack, 21, a senior. “That being said, it’s great that he’s going to pursue things that he’s passionate about and will continue with his productive professional career.”


‘Public’ Focus

“Fairly obviously, the center of gravity of my work has shifted over time toward more of a public policy focus,” Krugman wrote today. “I also, to be honest, like the idea of being associated with a great public university.”

CUNY has more than 269,000 students in degree programs at 24 campuses across New York City, according to its website. Among its alumni are 12 Nobel prize winners, and former Intel Corp. Chief Executive Officer Andy Grove, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz and comedian Jerry Seinfeld.

The Luxembourg Income Study Center is a satellite of the LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg. LIS brings together data on income, wealth, employment and demographics from almost 50 countries and harmonizes the figures so they can be compared. More than 5,000 researchers have used the data in LIS’s 30-year history, said Janet Gornick, director of both centers.

“He, in recent years, has become extremely interested in inequality,” Gornick said of Krugman. “At some point we said to each other: ‘you should come to LIS.’”
Gornick co-edited a book published last year entitled “Income Inequality: Economic Disparities and the Middle Class in Affluent Countries” that drew on the LIS database.

Nobel Award

Krugman won the Nobel prize in economics in 2008 “for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which selects the winners, said at the time. His work showed how economies of scale influence trade and urbanization.

The award was controversial at the time because of Krugman’s repeated criticism of then President George W. Bush. A self-proclaimed liberal, Krugman regularly took Bush to task in his newspaper column, slamming the president personally for everything from the war in Iraq to his big tax cuts.

More recently, Krugman also has found fault with President Barack Obama and the U.S. Federal Reserve for not doing more to spur growth. He has repeatedly argued that the $831 billion stimulus package that Obama championed in 2009 was too small and that former Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke was too timid in taking action to boost gross domestic product.

Krugman made his reputation in the economics profession by arguing that countries could under certain circumstances gain competitive advantage through export subsidies and import barriers, contrary to the belief of free-trade proponents.

His research helped explain how the development of large-scale production for the world market has attracted more people to cities and led to higher wages. He analyzed how world trade came to be dominated by countries that both import and export similar products -- automobiles, for example -- and showed why it made sense for nations that are similar to trade with each other.

Bloomberg

[Lark]

Ideology and Integrity
MAY 1, 2015

The 2016 campaign should be almost entirely about issues. The parties are far apart on everything from the environment to fiscal policy to health care, and history tells us that what politicians say during a campaign is a good guide to how they will govern.

Nonetheless, many in the news media will try to make the campaign about personalities and character instead. And character isn’t totally irrelevant. The next president will surely encounter issues that aren’t currently on anyone’s agenda, so it matters how he or she is likely to react. But the character trait that will matter most isn’t one the press likes to focus on. In fact, it’s actively discouraged.

You see, you shouldn’t care whether a candidate is someone you’d like to have a beer with. Nor should you care about politicians’ sex lives, or even their spending habits unless they involve clear corruption. No, what you should really look for, in a world that keeps throwing nasty surprises at us, is intellectual integrity: the willingness to face facts even if they’re at odds with one’s preconceptions, the willingness to admit mistakes and change course.

And that’s a virtue in very short supply.

As you might guess, I’m thinking in particular about the sphere of economics, where the nasty surprises just keep coming. If nothing that has happened these past seven years or so has shaken any of your long-held economic beliefs, either you haven’t been paying attention or you haven’t been honest with yourself.

Times like these call for a combination of open-mindedness — willingness to entertain different ideas — and determination to do the best you can. As Franklin Roosevelt put it in a celebrated speech, “The country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

What we see instead in many public figures is, however, the behavior George Orwell described in one of his essays: “Believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.” Did I predict runaway inflation that never arrived? Well, the government is cooking the books, and besides, I never said what I said.

Just to be clear, I’m not calling for an end to ideology in politics, because that’s impossible. Everyone has an ideology, a view about how the world does and should work. Indeed, the most reckless and dangerous ideologues are often those who imagine themselves ideology-free — for example, self-proclaimed centrists — and are, therefore, unaware of their own biases. What you should seek, in yourself and others, is not an absence of ideology but an open mind, willing to consider the possibility that parts of the ideology may be wrong.

The press, I’m sorry to say, tends to punish open-mindedness, because gotcha journalism is easier and safer than policy analysis. Hillary Clinton supported trade agreements in the 1990s, but now she’s critical. It’s a flip-flop! Or, possibly, a case of learning from experience, which is something we should praise, not deride.

So what’s the state of intellectual integrity at this point in the election cycle? Pretty bad, at least on the Republican side of the field.

Jeb Bush, for example, has declared that “I’m my own man” on foreign policy, but the list of advisers circulated by his aides included the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, who predicted that Iraqis would welcome us as liberators, and shows no signs of having learned from the blood bath that actually took place.

Meanwhile, as far as I can tell no important Republican figure has admitted that none of the terrible consequences that were supposed to follow health reform — mass cancellation of existing policies, soaring premiums, job destruction — has actually happened.

The point is that we’re not just talking about being wrong on specific policy questions. We’re talking about never admitting error, and never revising one’s views. Never being able to say that you were wrong is a serious character flaw even if the consequences of that refusal to admit error fall only on a few people. But moral cowardice should be outright disqualifying in anyone seeking high office.

Think about it. Suppose, as is all too possible, that the next president ends up confronting some kind of crisis — economic, environmental, foreign — undreamed of in his or her current political philosophy. We really, really don’t want the job of responding to that crisis dictated by someone who still can’t bring himself to admit that invading Iraq was a disaster but health reform wasn’t.

I still think this election should turn almost entirely on the issues. But if we must talk about character, let’s talk about what matters, namely intellectual integrity.

nyt

[Lark]

Bernanke and the Inflationistas

Ben Bernanke delivers a righteous smackdown of the Wall Street Journal editorial page:

It’s generous of the WSJ writers to note, as they do, that “economic forecasting isn’t easy.” They should know, since the Journal has been forecasting a breakout in inflation and a collapse in the dollar at least since 2006, when the FOMC decided not to raise the federal funds rate above 5-1/4 percent.

It has taken Ben almost no time in his blogging career to start sounding pretty much identical to Brad DeLong and perhaps other liberal econobloggers one might think of!

And BB is right, of course, that the WSJ has been consistently wrong on inflation, just as it has been consistently wrong on interest rates. It has spent a very long time peddling a specific kind of scare story — debt! printing presses! Zimbabwe! — that has been utterly wrong, but is never revised.

But what’s interesting here is that the Journal is far from alone in peddling this stuff — it’s also the staple of financial TV and many financial publications — and there are still many avid consumers after all these years of utter predictive failure.

We really need to stop pretending that this is any kind of rational argument. There’s something about inflation derp that goes straight to the ids of certain people — largely, one suspects, angry old men, though it would be nice to have hard evidence on the demographic. And they will keep regarding the Journal as the place to get the truth no matter how much money it costs them.

krugman

[Lark]

Ben S. Bernanke | April 30, 2015 10:45am

WSJ Editorial Page Watch: The Slow-Growth Fed?
 
For the second year in a row, the first-quarter Gross Domestic Product figures were disappointing. The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial entitled "The Slow-Growth Fed," uses the opportunity to argue (again) for tighter monetary policy. The editorialists point out that the Federal Open Market Committee's projections of economic growth have been too high since the financial crisis, which is true. Therefore (the WSJ concludes), monetary policy is not working and efforts to use it to support the recovery should be discontinued.

It's generous of the WSJ writers to note, as they do, that "economic forecasting isn't easy." They should know, since the Journal has been forecasting a breakout in inflation and a collapse in the dollar at least since 2006, when the FOMC decided not to raise the federal funds rate above 5-1/4 percent.

However, the WSJ editorialists draw some incorrect inferences from the FOMC's recent over-predictions of growth. Importantly, they fail to note that, while the FOMC (and virtually all private-sector economists) have been too optimistic about growth, they have also been consistently too pessimistic about unemployment, which has fallen more quickly than anticipated. The unemployment rate is a better indicator of cyclical conditions than the economic growth rate, and the relatively rapid decline in unemployment in recent years shows that the critical objective of putting people back to work is being met. Growth in output has been slow, despite solid job creation, because productivity gains have been slow—perhaps as the result of the financial crisis, which hammered new business formation and investment in research and development, perhaps for other reasons. But nobody claims that monetary policy can do much about productivity growth. Where it can be helpful is in supporting the return to full employment, and there the record has been reasonably good. Indeed, it seems clear that the Fed's aggressive actions are an important reason that job creation in the United States has outstripped that of other industrial countries by a wide margin.

The WSJ also argues that, because monetary policy has not been a panacea for our economic troubles, we should stop using it. I agree that monetary policy is no panacea, and as Fed chairman I frequently said so. With short-term interest rates pinned near zero, monetary policy is not as powerful or as predictable as at other times. But the right inference is not that we should stop using monetary policy, but rather that we should bring to bear other policy tools as well. I am waiting for the WSJ to argue for a well-structured program of public infrastructure development, which would support growth in the near term by creating jobs and in the longer term by making our economy more productive. We shouldn't be giving up on monetary policy, which for the past few years has been pretty much the only game in town as far as economic policy goes. Instead, we should be looking for a better balance between monetary and other growth-promoting policies, including fiscal policy.

ben bernanke

[Lark]

This Is What Happens When Federal Reserve Chairmen Stop Being Polite and Start Getting Real
By Jonathan Chait  Follow @jonathanchait

Ben Bernanke is free to drop some truthbombs.

Now that he is no longer the chairman of the Federal Reserve and is now a blogger, Ben Bernanke is free to point out certain obvious truths he couldn’t say previously, such as the fact that The Wall Street Journal editorial page is run by crazy people. Bernanke is not quite putting it in those terms, alas, but his blogging career is young. In response to a Journal editorial calling for higher interest rates to tame inflation, Bernanke notes that the Journal has been wrongly forecasting higher inflation for nine years now:

It's generous of the WSJ writers to note, as they do, that "economic forecasting isn't easy." They should know, since the Journal has been forecasting a breakout in inflation and a collapse in the dollar at least since 2006, when the FOMC decided not to raise the federal funds rate above 5-1/4 percent.

The singed Journal editorial page replies today that this is not fair. According to the Journal’s editors, their editorials haven’t been forecasting higher inflation. “We’re not always right,” replies the Journal, “But we’ve been careful not to join some of our friends in predicting inflation from the Fed’s post-crisis policies. We’ve written that we are in uncharted monetary territory with risks and outcomes we lack the foresight to predict.”

So the Journal’s very tightly constructed defense is that they have published a continuous stream of op-ed columns by their ideological allies (“our friends”) hysterically predicting hyperinflation. And the editorials themselves have warned about “risks” and “outcomes” — i.e., rising inflation — without actually making a concrete prediction that inflation will rise.

First of all, the lay of the land, in case you missed it, is that inflation has stayed historically low for a very long time. This, via Paul Krugman, is a nice chart because it gratuitously ridicules inflation-hysteric Paul Ryan:

Bernanke links to a 2006 Journal editorial castigating the Fed for ignoring the threat of inflation. The Journal wrote:

The Fed's Open Market Committee decided not to raise interest rates again — not because inflation is contained but because it says the economy is slowing.
Uh, oh. Here we go again …
as we all learned the hard way in the 1970s, inflation can increase even when growth slows if the Fed has printed too much money and pricing pressures continue to pass through the economy.
And yesterday's data for second-quarter productivity and labor costs were far from reassuring on that score. …
Mr. Bernanke no doubt hopes that yesterday's pause is one that refreshes; we fear it has only postponed the ultimate day of reckoning.

According to the Journal, this was not a forecast of higher inflation. It was merely a series of warnings that higher inflation seemed to have arrived or would arrive soon.

Likewise, the Journal editors mused in 2009, “No wonder the Chinese and other dollar asset holders are nervous. They wonder — as do we — whether the unspoken Beltway strategy is to pay off this debt by inflating away its value.” This was also not a forecast. It was mere “wondering.

Then in 2011, the Journal editorialized:

Last September, the committee declared that it wanted prices to rise more rapidly, and on that score it has succeeded. The question now is whether the Fed's success in promoting inflation is undermining the economic recovery it claims to be supporting. …
As for Mr. Bernanke's confidence that inflation will be transitory, we hope he's right. But we also recall his confidence in May 2007 when he declared that "Given the fundamental factors in place that should support the demand for housing, we believe the effect of the troubles in the subprime sector on the broader housing market will likely be limited." We know how that turned out.
The headline to that editorial read, “Bernanke's Inflation Paradox: The Fed said it wanted higher prices. Voila!” It would take a team of lawyers and literary deconstructionists to make the case that this was not a forecast of higher inflation.

But let us assume the Journal is actually right about this. They did not forecast higher inflation. They merely denounced policies to reduce unemployment on the grounds that they were inflationary, warned that inflation was a serious danger, and claimed that the Fed had “succeeded” in “promoting inflation.” Somehow this did not amount to a falsifiable prediction, because the Journal avoided using the explicit terms that, according to its team of lawyers and linguists, amounted to a technical “forecast.”

Indeed, the Journal was, in its own words, “careful” to avoid committing itself to the conclusion that any sentient reader of its editorials might have reached, in much the same way that a mob leader, suspecting his phones might be tapped, would avoid explicitly ordering a crime. That’s a helpful defense if you’re trying to stay out of jail, but not if you want anybody to take your ideas seriously.

nymag