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Sweden Launches MOAR QE, As Krugman Paradise Quadruples Down After Dovish Draghi

Sweden Launches MOAR QE, As Krugman Paradise Quadruples Down After Dovish Draghi

Over the last six months, we’ve documented Sweden’s descent into the Keynesian Twilight Zone in great detail.

Once upon a time, the Riksbank actually tried to raise rates, only to be lambasted by a furious Paul Krugman who accused the central bank of unnecessarily transforming Sweden from “recovery rockstar” to deflationary deathtrap. Tragically, the Riksbank listened to Krugman and reversed course in 2011. Before you knew it, rates had plunged 35 basis points into NIRP-dom. Unemployment subsequently fell, but the promised lift in inflation didn’t quite pan out. Sweden did, however, get a massive housing bubble for their trouble:

h/t @auaurelija

Obviously, those charts beg the question of why in the world Sweden (or Denmarkor Norway for that matter… or hell, even the US) are trying to contend that there’s no inflationary impulse, but let’s leave that for another day.

As for the Riksbank’s QE program, things began to go awry during the summer when the central bank managed to buy such a large percentage of the stock of government bonds that market depth was affected, causing investors to reconsider the trade off between liquidity and the benefits of frontrunning central bank asset purchases. In short, government bond yields began to rise in what perhaps marked the first instance of QE actually breaking.

But that didn’t stop the Riksbank from doubling down and increasing their asset purchases just a week later.

Since then, it’s been touch and go, with Stefan Ingves looking warily south towards Frankfurt hoping Mario Draghi doesn’t do something that sends the krona soaring on the way to ushering in a deflationary impulse.

Well, that’s exactly what Draghi did last week when the ECB telegraphed either a further depo rate cut, an expansion of PSPP, or both in December. That pretty much sealed the deal for the Riksbank – either cut, expand QE, or concede defeat in the global currency wars.

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

Economists vs. Economics

Economists vs. Economics

Ever since the late nineteenth century, when economics, increasingly embracing mathematics and statistics, developed scientific pretensions, its practitioners have been accused of a variety of sins. The charges – including hubris, neglect of social goals beyond incomes, excessive attention to formal techniques, and failure to predict major economic developments such as financial crises – have usually come from outsiders, or from a heterodox fringe. But lately it seems that even the field’s leaders are unhappy.

Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate who also writes a newspaper column, has made a habit of slamming the latest generation of models in macroeconomics for neglecting old-fashioned Keynesian truths. Paul Romer, one of the originators of new growth theory, has accused some leading names, including the Nobel laureate Robert Lucas, of what he calls “mathiness” – using math to obfuscate rather than clarify.

Richard Thaler, a distinguished behavioral economist at the University of Chicago, has taken the profession to task for ignoring real-world behavior in favor of models that assume people are rational optimizers. And finance professor Luigi Zingales, also at the University of Chicago, has charged that his fellow finance specialists have led society astray by overstating the benefits produced by the financial industry.

This kind of critical examination by the discipline’s big names is healthy and welcome – especially in a field that has often lacked much self-reflection. I, too, have taken aim at the discipline’s sacred cows – free markets and free trade – often enough.

But there is a disconcerting undertone to this new round of criticism that needs to be made explicit – and rejected. Economics is not the kind of science in which there could ever be one true model that works best in all contexts. The point is not “to reach a consensus about which model is right,” as Romer puts it, but to figure out which model applies best in a given setting. 

Read more at https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economists-versus-economics-by-dani-rodrik-2015-09#xgLwXaG0L2E8thiJ.99

 

 

Krugman’s Dopey Diatribe Deifying The Public Debt

Krugman’s Dopey Diatribe Deifying The Public Debt

Actually, dopey does not even begin to describe Paul Krugman’s latest spot of tommyrot. But least it appear that the good professor is being caricaturized, here are his own words. In a world drowning in government debt what we desperately need, by golly, is more of  the same:

That is, there’s a reasonable argument to be made that part of what ails the world economy right now is that governments aren’t deep enough in debt.

Yes, indeed. There is currently about $60 trillion of public debt outstanding on a worldwide basis compared to less than $20 trillion at the turn of the century. But somehow this isn’t enough, even though the gain in public debt——-from the US to Europe, Japan, China, Brazil and the rest of the debt saturated EM world—–actually exceeds the $35 billion growth of global GDP during the last 15 years.

But rather than explain why economic growth in most of the world is slowing to a crawl despite this unprecedented eruption of public debt, Krugman chose to smack down one of his patented strawmen. Noting that Rand Paul had lamented that 1835 was the last time the US was “debt free”, the Nobel prize winner offered up a big fat non sequitir:

Wags quickly noted that the U.S. economy has, on the whole, done pretty well these past 180 years, suggesting that having the government owe the private sector money might not be all that bad a thing. The British government, by the way, has been in debt for more than three centuries, an era spanning the Industrial Revolution, victory over Napoleon, and more.

Neither Rand Paul nor any other fiscal conservative ever said that public debt per se would freeze economic growth or technological progress hard in the horse and boggy age. The question is one of degree and of whether at today’s unprecedented public debt levels we get economic growth—–even at a tepid rate—–in spite of rather than because of soaring government debt.

 

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

Paul Krugman “What Ails The World Right Now Is That Governments Aren’t Deep Enough In Debt”

Paul Krugman “What Ails The World Right Now Is That Governments Aren’t Deep Enough In Debt”

This was written by a Nobel prize winning economist without a trace or sarcasm, irony or humor. It is excerpted, and presented without commentary.

From the NYT:

Debt Is Good

… the point simply that public debt isn’t as bad as legend has it? Or can government debt actually be a good thing?

Believe it or not, many economists argue that the economy needs a sufficient amount of public debt out there to function well. And how much is sufficient? Maybe more than we currently have. That is, there’s a reasonable argument to be made that part of what ails the world economy right now is that governments aren’t deep enough in debt.

I know that may sound crazy. After all, we’ve spent much of the past five or six years in a state of fiscal panic, with all the Very Serious People declaring that we must slash deficits and reduce debt now now now or we’ll turn into Greece, Greece I tell you.

But the power of the deficit scolds was always a triumph of ideology over evidence, and a growing number of genuinely serious people — most recently Narayana Kocherlakota, the departing president of the Minneapolis Fed — are making the case that we need more, not less, government debt.

Why?

One answer is that issuing debt is a way to pay for useful things, and we should do more of that when the price is right.The United States suffers from obvious deficiencies in roads, rails, water systems and more; meanwhile, the federal government can borrow at historically low interest rates. So this is a very good time to be borrowing and investing in the future, and a very bad time for what has actually happened: an unprecedented decline in public construction spending adjusted for population growth and inflation.

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

 

Economic Crisis Goes Mainstream – What Happens Next?

Economic Crisis Goes Mainstream – What Happens Next?

Last year, when alternative economic analysts were warning that the commodities crush and oil crash just after the taper of QE3 were blaring signals for a downshift in all other financial indicators, the general response in the mainstream was that we were overreacting and paranoid and that the commodities jolt was temporary. Perhaps the fact needs repeating that it’s not paranoia if they are really out to get you.

Only a short time later, it is truly amazing how the rhetoric from the mainstream economic yes-men is changing. The blind analysts who were cheerleading for the nonexistent global recovery are now being carefully relegated to the janitor’s closet over at The New York Times, where Paul Krugman’s office should be. Media outlets are begrudgingly admitting to global instabilities like, for instance, a U.S. interest rate hike leading to a return to recession. (Special note to the mainstream media: Take away the fruitless manipulation of indicators through Fed stimulus, and we never left the recession.) They also are now forced to acknowledge that China’s market crash and yuan devaluation have far-reaching implications for global crisis, whereas a year ago the claim was that China’s problems would stay in China. Even China’s own media are now warning of the chain of fiscally interdependent economies and what the nation’s downturn means for everyone.

The MSM are finally entertaining the obvious notion that the vast financial problems of the EUhave little to do with the crisis in Greece and more to do with crushing debt obligations and employment problems in primary nations like France and Italy.

And suddenly, pundits are once again concerned with Japan’s epidemic of mini-recessions and the truth of fiscal contraction that is not just a way of life, but an exponential dynamic that is getting worse fast, rather than staying static. 

 

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

 

 

Austrians vs. The World On Canadian Fiscal Austerity

Austrians vs. The World On Canadian Fiscal Austerity

I don’t know whether this is something the average Canadian discusses over coffee, but the sharp fiscal turnaround in the mid-1990s is still providing fodder for today’s economists to argue. In September 2014, I summarized the Canadian budget triumph, in which the federal government turned its deficit into a surplus largely through spending cuts, with the economy suffering no ill effects.

But I also explained that it’s crucial for Keynesians like Paul Krugman to explain away the success of this so-called austerity by pointing to falling interest rates. Thus, Krugman argued, it’s not that cutting government spending actually helps an economy, but rather it’s that looser monetary policy can pick up the gaping hole in Aggregate Demand.

In my first Mises CA post and then a follow-up, I gave various arguments and evidence to say that the Bank of Canada did not appear to have loosened policy. For example, the growth in the Bank of Canada’s assets almost came to a halt in 1996, and it was no higher in subsequent years than it had been earlier in the decade. Furthermore, CPI inflation showed no signs of heating up during the period when Krugman must claim that monetary policy loosened.

The one metric that lines up with Krugman’s story is that Canadian interest rates fell. But, I pointed out that this is exactly what we would expect to happen naturally, as the federal government greatly reduced its borrowing and fears of a bond crisis evaporated. After all, this was just the mirror image of what happens in a situation of high government deficits, when “crowding out” and fears of a default go hand in hand with high interest rates.

The debate flared up once again last month, prompted by another Krugman post in which he (again) said that the Canadian experience in the 1990s showed the importance of loose money to offset budget cuts. This time, Market Monetarist David Beckworth jumped into the fray, taking the Keynesian position.

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

Gold Prices Disprove Krugman

Gold Prices Disprove Krugman

Recently Krugman wrote an op ed ridiculing Ron Paul titled, “The Old Man and the CPI.”(In case you don’t get the reference, he’s alluding to Hemingway.) Ron Paul has responded in this video, but I want to focus on Krugman’s complains about gold bugs:

Ron Paul has been making the same prediction year after year — in fact, he’s been making this prediction at least since 1981!— and has been wrong year after year. It’s hard to think of a doctrine that has been as thoroughly refuted by events as goldbug economics. For a while gold prices did go up, although not for the reasons the goldbugs thought, but now even that has gone into reverse. So why would anyone pay money for this guy’s analysis?

This has been quite the cause for celebration among progressive economists. (I won’t link to some of the lesser lights and reward them for their smugness.) And it’s true that a simple story relating the Fed’s balance sheet to the price of gold doesn’t work out very well:

Gold vs Fed

In the chart above, total Fed assets (red line, left axis) are plotted against the price of gold (blue line, right axis). People who thought the price of gold would move in lockstep with the Fed’s QE programs were sitting pretty during QE and QE2, but then things turned around with QE3. It almost looks as if the commencement of QE3 (when the red line started stairclimbing up) was the catalyst for making gold plunge about $600 an ounce.

Nonetheless, suppose someone bought into the warnings of Ron Paul (and guys like me) when Bernanke began his unprecedented monetary inflation, back in late 2008 / early 2009, and began buying gold as a hedge. Depending on when exactly you got in, gold was selling for anywhere from $700 – $900 an ounce.

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

 

 

 

4 Mainstream Media Articles Mocking Gold That Should Make You Think

4 Mainstream Media Articles Mocking Gold That Should Make You Think

Screen Shot 2015-07-29 at 11.20.51 AM

For those of you who have been reading my stuff since all the way back to my Wall Street years at Sanford Bernstein, thanks for staying along for the ride. I appreciate your support immensely considering that I essentially no longer write about financial markets at all, and for many of you, that remains your profession and primary area of interest.

There are many reasons why I stopped commenting on markets, but the main reason is that I started to recognize I wasn’t getting it right. In fact, in some cases I was getting it spectacularly wrong. Whenever this happens, I try to isolate the problem and fix it. In this case there was no fix, because much of why I was no longer getting it right was rooted in the fact that my heart, soul and passion had moved onto other things. My interests had expanded, and I started a blog to express myself on myriad other matters I deemed important. Providing relevant market information needs intense focus, and my focus had shifted elsewhere. I recognized that I wasn’t intellectually interested enough in centrally planned markets to provide insightful analysis, and so I stopped.

This doesn’t mean I won’t start up again. When central planners do lose control, I may indeed become far more interested in opining on such matters. Time will tell. In the interim, financial markets do still play an important role in the bigger picture of social, political and economic trends I passionately care about. The stability and increase in financial assets (stocks and bonds) is of huge importance to the propaganda machine, in particular keeping the non-oligarchic, non-politically connected 1% in line and believing the hype (see: The Stock Market: Food Stamps for the 1%).

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

 

Keynesians Wrong About Stimulus, Coming AND Going

Keynesians Wrong About Stimulus, Coming AND Going

In a previous post here at Mises CA I chronicled the hole Krugman keeps digging for himself regarding the botched warnings over the so-called “sequester” in 2013. Specifically, Krugman’s latest excuse is to say that when he argued back in 2013 that the sequester was a “fiscal doomsday machine” and “one of the worst policy ideas in our nation’s history,” he actually didn’t look carefully at the numbers. In retrospect, Krugman is now claiming, the Keynesian model wouldn’t have predicted a big impact from the budget sequester, because it was small potatoes compared to the overall size of the economy.

Besides the implicit admission that Krugman is throwing out such serious accusations (“fiscal doomsday machine” etc.) without checking the numbers, is the simple fact that Krugman is wrong. Back in 2013 there were plenty of Keynesian analysts who were very well-versed with the numbers, and were confident that the sequester would slow U.S. economic growth.

A great example of this is a March 1, 2013 post from Jared Bernstein. Here’s an excerpt:

Economists, including myself, agree on guesstimates about the magnitude of the sequester’s impact–it’s expected to suck about half-a-point off of growth this year and cost 500,000-1 million jobs.   That’s not recessionary but it means more slogging along of the type I bemoaned yesterday.

So how come on Larry Kudlow’s show last night it was one against four (about five minutes in) on this widely accepted point re the sequester’s impact on growth?…[U]nless you’ve got a good reason to think otherwise–and I heard nothing approach reason in the segment–you’ve got to go with the arithmetic, which in this case means subtraction of an estimated $66 billion in (calendar year!) 2013 outlays.

Clearly, the Kudlow-crew refuses to accept this math…But here’s my question: under what micro-economics do such multipliers not exist?  

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

The Dangers of European Dis-Union

The Dangers of European Dis-Union


The near collapse of the Greek economy and the harsh austerity package forced on Athens by the European Union has led to increasing commentary in recent weeks on what the developments might mean for the “European project” – the one-time seemingly inevitable drive on the European continent for an “ever closer union” based on principles of economic, social and territorial cohesion and solidarity among EU member states.

Far from a demonstration of cohesion and solidarity, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugmannoted in a July 12 op-ed, the lesson learned over the past few weeks is that “being a member of the eurozone means that the creditors can destroy your economy if you step out of line.” In Krugman’s view, the fundamental economics are simple enough: “imposing harsh austerity without debt relief is a doomed policy no matter how willing the country is to accept suffering.”

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras (center) with French President Francois Hollande (left) and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (right).

Krugman is not alone in his bleak appraisal of the situation. In testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats on July 14 on the topic of “The European Union’s Future,” prominent American academic Stephen Walt said that the EU, despite its past achievements, now suffers from growing tensions and several self-inflicted wounds.

 

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

From Whence Cometh Our Wealth—–The People’s Labor Or The Fed’s Printing Press?

From Whence Cometh Our Wealth—–The People’s Labor Or The Fed’s Printing Press?

It is hard to believe that in these allegedly enlightened times this question even needs to be asked. Are there really educated adults who believe that by dropping helicopter money conjured from thin air, the central bank can actually make society wealthier?

Well, yes there are. They spread this lunacy from the most respectable MSM platforms. And, no, I’m not talking about professor Krugman and his New York Times column. At least, he pontificates from a Keynesian framework that has a respectable, if erroneous, intellectual heritage.

What I am talking about here is the mindless bunkum issued by so-called financial journalists who swish around Wall Street and Washington exchanging knowing tidbits with policy-makers, deal-makers and each other. Call it the bubble finance “narrative”, and recognize that its gets more uncoupled from economic facts, logic and plausibility with each passing day in the casino.

The estimable folks at The Automatic Earth put a bright spotlight on this crucial matter this morning, even if not by design. Their trademark daily vintage photo was a 1911 picture of a family including all the kids picking berries in the field; they were making GDP the old fashioned way.

In its usual manner, the site’s “debt rattle” list of links to timely reads followed, and the first was a Bloomberg View opinion piece called“QE For The People: Monetary Policy For The Next Recession” by one Clive Crook. It was actually a case for literally dropping central bank money from the skies to enable policy-makers to better “support demand and keep their economies running”.

In thoughtfully supplying a photo of a helicopter in full flight to accompany Crook’s discourse, the Bloomberg graphics department crystalized the essential economic issue of our times. Namely, whether wealth is made by the Berrie Pickers or the Money Printers.

 

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

THE SCIENCE FICTIONAL FOUNDATION UNDER PAUL KRUGMAN, PART ONE

THE SCIENCE FICTIONAL FOUNDATION UNDER PAUL KRUGMAN, PART ONE

Paul Krugman, a few years ago, wrote at length to extol the magnum opus of science fiction grandmaster, Isaac Asimov, the Foundation Trilogy. Prof. Krugman’s reflections thereon are of keen interest.

I met Asimov once, 40+ years ago, at a world science fiction convention. I even got him to autograph my Science Fiction Book Club copy of “The Foundation Trilogy.” This compilation of three novels is an SF classic. I, then and since, found it too dull to read in full. (Asimov’s I, Robot then was much more engaging to this long-ago SF geek. But nothing Asimov wrote really rivaled Heinlein’s early, nor Arthur C. Clarke’s best, novels.)

Prof. Paul Krugman, galactically more influential than me, declares that he found the the Foundation Trilogy his formative inspiration. Therein hangs a tale: one of technocracy, which he exalts, versus mere common sense.

Prof. Krugman’s reflections were published in the UK Guardian at the end of 2012: Paul Krugman: Asimov’s Foundation novels grounded my economics (apparently, a reprint of Prof. Krugman’s introduction to the Folio Society edition of the same). Prof. Krugman there wrote, “I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon, using my understanding of the mathematics of human behaviour to save civilisation.”

There is an unsubtle irony to Prof. Krugman’s opening observation that:

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

 

 

Paul Krugman is wrong about the UK and borrowing

Paul Krugman is wrong about the UK and borrowing

Paul Krugman once did something or other quite good on the economics of trade, winning him the Nobel Prize. He also wrote some rather good stuff in the 1990s about the euro and about how Japan might escape its then-malaise. Quite a lot of orthodox economists were (and remain) fans of his writings on these topics. But regarding his analysis of government deficit reduction programmes and the options European governments in particular have had – and more specifically about how, regardless of how much they might have been borrowing they should always borrow more…not so much.

Krugman’s latest sally into European politico-economics is to bewail the state of “Britain’s Terrible, No-Good Economic Discourse” in the run-up to the General Election. He tells his unfortunate American readers that “economic discourse in Britain is dominated by a misleading fixation on budget deficits” and that “media organizations routinely present as fact propositions that are contentious if not just plain wrong”.

US readers should be aware that his “analysis” drifts between being contrary to the facts and being nonsense. Let’s start with the stuff he says that is contrary to the facts. Setting aside for now whether such a fixation would be “misleading”, economic discourse in Britain simply isn’t dominated by a fixation with government budget deficits.

 

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

 

BIS Slams The Fed: The Solution To Bubbles Is Not More Bubbles, It Is Avoiding Bubbles In The First Place

BIS Slams The Fed: The Solution To Bubbles Is Not More Bubbles, It Is Avoiding Bubbles In The First Place

On one hand there are hard-core Keynesians who will wave the flag of inflation as the only cure to a world drowning in debt, even after the mushroom cloud results of their policies going off around the globe “assure” GDP hits +? once every window in the world is shattered and has to be replaced…

… on the other, you have the BIS which with every passing day is becoming the citadel of Austrian thought, the latest example thanks to the BIS’ most recent quarterly review in which we read that not only is deflation not the “monster” the Bank of Japan and other Keynesian acolytes would like to make it appear…

The evidence from our long historical data set sheds new light on the costs of deflations.It raises questions about the prevailing view that goods and services price deflations, even if persistent, are always pernicious. It suggests that asset price deflations, and particularly house price deflations in the postwar era, have been more damaging. And it cautions against presuming that the interaction between debt and goods and services price deflation, as opposed to debt’s interaction with property price deflations, has played a significant role in past episodes of economic weakness.

… but more importantly and as Zero Hedge has said from day one, the BIS now says the solution to an asset bubble is not some incomprehensible jibberish of “macroprudential regulation” or a “bubble-busting” SWAT team at the Fednot another asset bubble (especially not one which leads to house price deflation, the same that is slamming the Chinese economy at this moment), which by now has become clear to all is the only “tool” in a central banker’s aresnal, and the remedy to debt isnot even more debt.

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

 

truthinesslessness

truthinesslessness

Nothing is stable, nothing is straightforward, everything is fixed, and nothing is fixed. O nation of busboys and WalMart greeters, awake and sing!

Can an empire founder on sheer credulousness? After last Friday’s jobs report, I think so. For a culture that luxuriates in statistical analysis (and the false idea that if you measure enough things, you can control them), it is rather amazing that we absolutely don’t care whether the measurements are truthful or not. Hence, an economist (sic) such as Paul Krugman of The New York Times might ask himself how it is that Zero Interest Rate Policy only trickles down to places where hamburgers are sold. PK was at it again in his Monday column, yammering about “rapid job growth,” “partying like it was 1995.” Wise men like him are pounding this country down a rat hole faster than you can say Romulus Augustulus.

Apparently the US Bureau of Labor Statistics missed the job bloodbath in the oil industry, especially over in Frackville where the latest western phenomenon is the ghost man-camp (along with ghost pole dancing parlors). It’s a veritable hemorrhagic fever of job layoff announcements: 9,000 here, 7,000, there, thousands of thousands everywhere — Halliburton, Schlumberger, Baker Hughes — like an Ebola ward in the oil services sector. Not to mention the cliff-drop of capital expenditure, meaning even steeper job losses ahead, Casey Jones. But nobody notices, I guess because they’re out at Ruby Tuesdays eating things bigger than their heads. Are the portions getting smaller, or are their heads shrinking?

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

 

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