Home » Posts tagged 'john maynard keynes' (Page 3)

Tag Archives: john maynard keynes

Lost From the Get-Go

There must be some dark corner of Hell warming up for modern, mainstream economists. They helped bring on the worst bubble ever… with their theories of efficient markets and modern portfolio management. They failed to see it for what it was. Then, when trouble came, they made it worse. But instead of atoning in a dank cell, these same economists strut onto the stage to congratulate themselves.

Keynes The scalawag himself. Keynes provided governments with the “scientific” fig leaf fore interventionism that economists had previously denied them. The cost in terms of economic and technological progress is incalculable. Photo via MIT Press

“The Greatest Depression that could so easily have happened in 2009 but did not is the tribute that the world owes to economics”, wrote Arvind Subramanian in The Financial Times.

Arvind Arvind Subramanian: congratulating mainstream economists (a sub-set of society that includes him) for failing to foresee a mess their own advice has produced. The chutzpa of this guy is really admirable. He is of course correct that it is difficult to make forecasts (in fact, economics as a science has nothing to do with making predictions), but anyone who didn’t see the 2008 crisis coming had to be blind as a fricking bat. Even housewives could see it coming, but a very long list of prominent professional economists and “policymakers” evidently couldn’t. Fine, but these are the same people that insist that they know what to do about it. That is decidedly not so. They have now produced what will turn out to be an even greater mess. Photo credit: Bijoy Ghosh

We were lost from the get-go, trying to interpret the sentence. It is as tangled and puerile as the staggering conceit behind it. Then, Mr. Subramanian sets up the stage props:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Keynesian House Of Denial

April 18, 2016

The Keynesian House Of Denial

We use the term “Keynesian” loosely to stand for economic interventionists of all schools. The followers of JM Keynes and Milton Friedman alike fit that category. So do some of the more rabid supply siders who claim the power to stimulate ultra-high economic growth with the tools of tax policy alone.

The common denominator is economic statism. That is, the assumption that the state, including its central banking branch, is indispensable to economic progress and prosperity.

As the various denominations of the Keynesian economic church have it, capitalism is always veering toward the ditch of under-performance and recession when left to its own devices and natural tendencies; and, if neglected by the wise policy-makers of the central state too long, it lapses toward outright depression and collapse.

Our purpose here is not to correct the particular philosophical and analytic errors associated with each of these Keynesian or statist variants. On any given day we make it pretty clear the central banking based mutation of modern Keynesianism is predicated on two cardinal errors. Namely, the myth of demand deficiency and the false presumption that central bank pegging of interest rates, yield curves and other financial prices will enhance macro-economic performance while not harming the efficiency, stability and efficacy of money and capital markets.

That’s completely wrong. The very worst thing the state can do is meddle with and falsify financial market prices. Sooner or later cheap debt, repressed volatility, stock market “puts” and artificially inflated asset prices drain the genius of markets out of capitalism. What remains in the financial system is raw speculation for the purpose of rent gathering and leverage for the purpose of supercharged gambling.

On the other hand, what gets lost is true capital formation, honest price discovery and allocative efficiency. These are the building blocks of true macroeconomic expansion and rising wealth.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Keynes in 1939: The Coming War Will Solve our Unemployment Problem

April 2, 2016

Keynes in 1939: The Coming War Will Solve our Unemployment Problem

On the eve of World War II, Keynes delivered the following chilling address on the BBC, talking about the “great experiment” of curing unemployment through war expenditure:

J. M. Keynes, When the Day of Peace Comes

Two years later to the day, in a lecture delivered shortly after his arrival in the U.S., Mises described how the great experiment really looked like:

We are witnesses to the most frightful and phenomenal occurrence in human history: the decay of Western civilization. London, one of the centers of this civilization… is almost completely destroyed. The buildings of the Parliament of Westminster are in ruins; the House of Commons holds its assemblies in the catacombs. […] The theater of war is spreading, and the day seems not distant when peace will have lost its last refuge. It is a moral and material collapse without precedent.

The Follies and Fallacies of Keynesian Economics

February 22, 2016

THE FOLLIES AND FALLACIES OF KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS

Eighty years go, on February 4, 1936, one of the most influential books of the last one hundred years was published, British economist, John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. With it was born what has become known as Keynesian Economics.

Within less than a decade after its appearance, the ideas in The General Theory had practically conquered the economics profession and become a guidebook for government economic policy. Few books, in so short a time, have gained such wide influence and generated so destructive an impact on public policy. What Keynes succeeded in doing was to provide a rationale for what governments always like to do: spend other people’s money and pander to special interests.

In the process Keynes helped undermine what had been three of the essential institutional ingredients of a free-market economy: the gold standard, balanced government budgets, and open competitive markets. In their place Keynes’s legacy has given us paper-money inflation, government deficit spending, and more political intervention throughout the market.

It would, of course, be an exaggeration to claim that without Keynes and the Keynesian Revolution inflation, deficit spending, and interventionism would not have occurred. For decades before the appearance of Keynes’s book, the political and ideological climate had been shifting toward ever-greater government involvement in social and economic affairs, due to the growing influence of collectivist ideas among intellectuals and policy-makers in Europe and America.

Keynes on Time Magazine Cover

Before Keynes: Wise Free Market Policies

But before the appearance of The General Theory, many of the advocates of such collectivist policies had to get around the main body of economic thinking which still argued that, in general, the best course was for government to keep its hands off the market, maintain a stable currency backed by gold, and restrain its own taxing and spending policies.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Modern Finance: I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone

February 3, 2016

Modern Finance: I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone

In his book Other People’s Money: The Real Business of Finance, author John Kay quotes Lord Keynes’s idiom, “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are generally distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” The men and women with authority over monetary matters are indeed mad. Mad enough to see interest rates, not as pricing the present versus the future, after all, the idea that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar in the future is axiomatic.

No, the Fed’s crystal ball sees lenders paying for the privilege of going without the present use of their money so the largest debtor in history can continue to operate. In the just released “2016 Supervisory Scenarios for Annual Stress Tests Required under the Dodd-Frank Act Stress Testing Rules and the Capital Plan Rule” the Fed, in its Severe Adverse Scenario, foresees,

As a result of the severe decline in real activity and subdued inflation, short-term Treasury rates fall to negative ½ percent by mid-2016 and remain at that level through the end of the scenario. For the purposes of this scenario, it is assumed that the adjustment to negative short-term interest rates proceeds with no additional financial market disruptions. The 10-year Treasury yield drops to about ¼ percent in the first quarter of 2016…

Really, rates going negative would mean “no additional financial market disruptions?” In a world with somewhere between $700 trillion and $1.2 quadrillion in derivatives exposure nothing out of the ordinary would happen? Some will pooh pooh the big numbers because on a net basis the exposure isn’t even close to 1000 times 1.2 trillion. But, as Zero Hedge explains, “net immediately becomes gross when just one counterparty in the collateral chains fails – case in point, the Lehman and AIG failures and the resulting scramble to bailout the entire world which cost trillions in taxpayer funds.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The World’s Most Famous Case Of Hyperinflation (Part 1)

January 16, 2016

The World’s Most Famous Case Of Hyperinflation (Part 1)

The Great War ended on the 11th hour of November 11th, 1918, when the signed armistice came into effect.

Though this peace would signal the end of the war, it would also help lead to a series of further destruction: this time the destruction of wealth and savings.

The world’s most famous hyperinflation event, which took place in Germany from 1921 and 1924, was a financial calamity that led millions of people to have their savings erased.

The Treaty of Versailles

Five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Treaty of Versailles was signed, officially ending the state of war between Germany and the Allies.

The terms of the agreement, which were essentially forced upon Germany, made the country:

Accept blame for the war
Agree to pay £6.6 billion in reparations (equal to $442 billion in USD today)
Forfeit territory in Europe as well as its colonies
Forbid Germany to have submarines or an air force, as well as a limited army and navy
Accept the Rhineland, a strategic area bordering France and other countries, to be fully demilitarized.

“I believe that the campaign for securing out of Germany the general costs of the war was one of the most serious acts of political unwisdom for which our statesmen have ever been responsible.”
– John Maynard Keynes, representative of the British Treasury

Keynes believed the sums being asked of Germany in reparations were many times more than it was possible for Germany to pay. He thought that this could create large amounts of instability with the global financial system.

The Catalysts

1. Germany had suspended the Mark’s convertibility into gold at the beginning of war.

This created two separate versions of the same currency:

Goldmark: The Goldmark refers to the version on the gold standard, with 2790 Mark equal to 1 kg of pure gold. This meant: 1 USD = 4 Goldmarks, £1 = 20.43 Goldmarks

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Are Negative Rates Fueling Deflation?

December 14, 2015

Are Negative Rates Fueling Deflation?

Those in power never understand markets. They are very myopic in their view of the world. The assumption that lowering interest rates will “stimulate” the economy has NEVER worked, not even once. Nevertheless, they assume they can manipulate society in the Marxist-Keynesian ideal world, but what if they are wrong?

By lowering interest rates, they ASSUME they will encourage people to borrow and thus expand the economy. They fail to comprehend that people will borrow only when they BELIEVE there is an opportunity to make money. Additionally, they told people to save for their retirement. Now they want to punish them for doing so by imposing negative interest rates (tax on money) to savings. They do not understand that lowering interest rates, when there is no confidence in the future anyhow, will not encourage people to start businesses and expand the economy. It wipes out the income of savers and then the only way to make and preserve money becomes ASSET investment, as in the stock market — not creating business startups.

So lowering interest rates is DEFLATIONARY, not inflationary, for it reduces disposable income. This is particularly true for the elderly who are forced back to work to compete for jobs, which increases youth unemployment.

Since the only way to make money has become ASSET INFLATION, they must withdraw money from banks and buy stocks. Now, they are in the hated class of the “rich” who are seen as the 1% because they are making money when the wage earner loses money as taxation rises and the economy declines. As taxes rise, machines are replacing workers and shrinking the job market, which only fuels more deflation. Then you have people like Hillary who say they will DOUBLE the minimum wage, which will cause companies to replace even more jobs with machines.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Krugman Con

October 29, 2015

The Krugman Con

Gold’s biggest enemy is a brilliant Nobel Prize winning economist, university professor and columnist for the New York Times. Sadly, he is also a con man.

Last week Paul Krugman wrote a column for the New York Times in which he called Republican Paul Ryan, a “con man.” The Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee’s sins, Krugman, a Nobel prize winning economist and a professor at City University of New York, argues, stem from a lack of detail in his budget plans, regarding proposed spending cuts and closed tax loopholes.

Calling a politician a con man is a bit like telling a pig farmer that he stinks. It’s practically part of the job description.

The claim is particularly rich, coming from Krugman, who in recent years has emerged as the de facto leader of a group of mainstream economists, whose advocacy of near unlimited government spending, borrowing and, most recently, money printing, will go down as one of history’s greatest cons.

Understanding how, what I call the “Krugman Con,” has been unfolding is crucial for precious metals advocates, because one of its core elements was the attempted elimination of the vital role played by gold. Indeed, the gold’s recent resurgence on the world stage is an indication that the con, is nearing its closing stages

Tax and spend. Borrow and spend. Print and spend.

Krugman’s sins, which relate to his advocacy of distortions of policies suggested by John Maynard Keynes, are arguably far worse than Ryan’s. As a university professor, Krugman has an obligation to be bound by a modicum of intellectual and academic rigor, rigor which is sadly absent in the advice he gives.

In his landmark work “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,” Keynes recommended that governments, through their spending, ought to play a stabilizing role in the economy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Goldman Sachs——-Perpetuator Of The Fed’s Jihad Against Savers

September 14, 2015

Goldman Sachs——-Perpetuator Of The Fed’s Jihad Against Savers

You can’t blame Janet Yellen entirely for the growing prospect that the Fed will take a powder on Wednesday and opt for the 81st straight month of ZIRP. After all, she’s basically a fuddy duddy school marm caught in a 1970s labor economics time warp—–a branch of the “home economics” taught by John Maynard Keynes after he turned protectionist in 1930.

Accordingly, she does apparently believe that the US economy resembles a giant bathtub, and that it is the Fed’s job to see that employment and output rise full to the brim. Nor does that mission take much special doing——-at least according to the primitive macroeconomic plumbing theories of Keynes’ disciples like her PhD supervisor, Professor James Tobin of Yale. Just crank the interest rate valve lower until the economic ether thereby released called aggregate demand works its magic.

Indeed, the good professor did help ignite a rip-roaring inflationary boom in one country during the Kennedy-Johnson years. Back then the world economy was still segmented and unmonetized enough to at last partially encompass a closed economy model of state managed pump-priming. That was especially possible because more than a billion potential workers were trapped in the economic Gulag of Mao’s China and the post-Stalinist Soviet bloc.

Never mind that today the US GDP bathtub leaks like a sieve and that massive trade, capital and financial flows transmit economic and financial impulses from around the globe. Accordingly, the marginal price of labor is set in the rice paddies of China, the call centers of Bangalore, the temp agency body shops of America and on the “bid for gigs” sites of the worldwide web.

call center

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is apparently the Keynesian chapel where Yellen worships, captures none of this; it ought to be put in the Francis Perkins memorial museum along with souvenirs from the WPA and FDR’s Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

OPEC Divorce And Self-Destruction Thanks To Saudi Oil Strategy?

August 30, 2015

OPEC Divorce And Self-Destruction Thanks To Saudi Oil Strategy?

“If you are the world’s leading energy economy, you produce energy, that’s what you do.”

“A government can stay irrational longer than it can stay solvent.”

“Even in the short term, you’re dead, if you commit suicide.”

The first quote modifies a GEICO commercial describing a free-range chicken (If you’re a free range chicken, you roam free, that’s what you do), the second, the famous John Maynard Keynes quote about markets (The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent), the third, another famous Keynes quote (In the long run, we’re all dead).

Together, the three quotes provide a framework for analyzing Saudi options heading into the December 4 OPEC meeting in Vienna and its choices vis-à-vis the OPEC outsiders (all members but Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Arab allies, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar)—reconciliation, separation, or divorce.

If You’re a Free Range Oil Producer…

Despite low oil prices, Saudi Arabia is maintaining its investment in its oil industry. Saudi Aramco Chairman Khalid Al-Falih indicated in March that Saudi Aramcowould not cut investment. James Crandell, a Cowen & Co. oil analyst cited in this article, who has tracked oil companies’ budgets for many years, estimates that Aramco and its Kuwaiti and UAE counterparts will increase their investment in oil exploration and production in 2015 by 4.5 percent to $38.1 billion. (If proportional to output, the Saudi share would be $24.5 billion).

On it’s website, the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA) identifies Saudi Arabia as the world’s premier energy economy, describes the outlook for the Saudi energy sector as never having been brighter or more secureand poised for unprecedented growth, diversification, and profitability, and asserts that the high oil revenue environment has spurred a boom in both oil and non-oil development projects.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Keynes Almost Prevented the Keynesian Revolution

August 15, 2015

How Keynes Almost Prevented the Keynesian Revolution

October 30, 1929. A brisk autumn’s day in Manhattan. The Savoy-Plaza Hotel’s thirty-three stories cast a long shadow over Central Park. At the base of the hotel a financier lies freshly fallen, motionless, while his last breath, wrenched from the lungs by force of impact, is now a red mist of gore in the air.

Sirens and uniforms. The suicide spot quickly becomes crowded by spectators, who form a vision-impairing ring-fence of backs, much to the annoyance of elbow-throwers at the periphery. Winston Churchill stands at his hotel window looking down on the mess. To nobody’s surprise, the police will find an empty wallet and five margin calls in the dead man’s pockets.1

Churchill’s curtains flutter shut, and we are left to wonder whether anyone — Churchill included — can yet see his clumsy, cigar-wielding hand in it all; whether anyone realizes that, had Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer only restored the gold standard at a lower exchange rate, as Keynes had recommended, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 could have been averted (or at least ameliorated).

Alas, by ignoring Keynes in 1925, Churchill triggered a calamity so severe that it not only inspired one man to kill himself beneath the British statesman’s very window but, more insidiously, also provided the impetus for the economics profession’s rejection of the “classical” axioms. As Keynes’s biographer Robert Skidelsky writes, Keynes “did not believe in the system of the ideas by which economists lived; he did not worship at the temple.” And while “in former times he would have been forced to recant, perhaps burnt at the stake, as it was … the exigencies of his times enabled him to force himself on his church.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why Keynesian voodoo doesn’t work?

June 13, 2015

Why Keynesian voodoo doesn’t work?

Keynesian policy of manipulating economic “aggregates” through countercyclical macro-measures appeared to work when balance sheets was not stretched to the brink. As we wrote in “Goebbelnomics”

“If collective exuberance and apathy is the sole cause of the business cycle, then it logically follows that human emotions need to be manipulated accordingly. Only by doing so can policymakers smooth out the ups and downs in economic activity. And what better way to do that then to change the money supplied to the general public.”

While people called this the “most sickening article ever written” it is unfortunately what economics has come down to. Through fractional reserve banking and a central bank freed from the shackles of a barbarous relic, the money supply can be expanded without limit…or at least as long as the greater populace voluntarily will leverage up their balance sheet to buy stuff and simultaneously agree to their own servitude. Nothing more than collective manipulation on a scale that would make Goebbels himself envious.

The glaringly obvious result of such policies, gross capital consumption through malinvestments epitomized through a serial bubble economy, did not discourage our money masters. The best and brightest even suggest bubbles are the only remedy to what they believe is some sort of secular stagnation.

Just as drugs, the abuser must increase the dosage to feel the same high and spend accordingly.

However, as the first chart shows, the current recovery, albeit one of the longest on record, has also been the weakest.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Euthanasia Of The Saver

April 23, 2015

The Euthanasia Of The Saver

What have been the economic consequences of ultra-low interest rates? The answer might not be as hopeful as you may think.

While better known for the role of government in stimulating the economy, John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, also provided the intellectual framework for a big reduction in interest rates with two goals in mind: to reduce economic inequality and to achieve full employment.

Here’s what he had to say about the “rentier” (a quasi-Communist term for “saver”) in Chapter 24 of his seminal book “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”, published in 1936. It requires some effort to go through it (and even more to comprehend it, if at all) but because it influences so much of the current economic thinking it is worth it [our emphasis in bold]:

“The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse – David Graeber on “The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”

April 22, 2015

A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse – David Graeber on “The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”

Graeber’s argument is similar to one he made in a 2013 article called “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”, in which he argued that, in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the century technology would have advanced sufficiently that in countries such as the UK and the US we’d be on 15-hour weeks. “In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.”

But what happened between the Apollo moon landing and now? Graeber’s theory is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was mounting fear about a society of hippie proles with too much time on their hands. “The ruling class had a freak out about robots replacing all the workers. There was a general feeling that ‘My God, if it’s bad now with the hippies, imagine what it’ll be like if the entire working class becomes unemployed.’ You never know how conscious it was but decisions were made about research priorities.” Consider, he suggests, medicine and the life sciences since the late 1960s. “Cancer? No, that’s still here.” Instead, the most dramatic breakthroughs have been with drugs such as Ritalin, Zoloft and Prozac – all of which, Graeber writes, are “tailor-made, one might say, so that these new professional demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally, crazy”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

BusinessWeek Wants YOU To Become A Keynesian Debt Slave | Zero Hedge

October 30, 2014

BusinessWeek Wants YOU To Become A Keynesian Debt Slave | Zero Hedge.

There are those, increasingly more of them, including such shocking statist luminaries as Alan Greenspan (the person more responsible for today’s global depression than anyone else) and the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, who are realizing that the old debt=growth, saving=bad, spending=prosperity and inflation=utopia economic paradigm, the one unleashed by John Maynard Keynes, is the primary reason for today’s worldwide economic devastation, a condition where $100 trillion in global debt has brought global growth to a crawl, and which coupled with endless “wealth effect” printing by central banks who have deposited $10 trillion in electronic money at their favorite commercial banks with the explicit instruction to buy spoos, have bet everything on reflating the world out of its debt quagmire, instead having achieved a world that has never been more split between the haves and have nots.

And then there is BusinessWeek, which quite to the contrary, is urging its readers in its cover story, ignore common sense, and do more of the same that has led the world to dead economic end it finds itself in currently. In fact, as NYT’s Binyamin Appelbaumsummarizes it best, it calls “the world governments to become the slaves of a defunct economist. “

And spend, spend, spend, preferably on credit.

Because, supposedly, this time the resulting crash from yet another debt-funded binge will be… different?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: john maynard keynes

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Post navigation

Latest Posts