Kalecki

Political Aspects of Full Employment

"Kalecki" at EV saying monetary policy doesn't work.

Steve Randy Waldmann

That wasn't full employment monetary policy. That was monetary policy taking advantage of "opportunistic disinlflation" in order to keep labor markets wrong. Meanwhile financial markets were deregulated. Deregulating financial markets is not monetary policy. Waldman is wrong here.

Game of Thrones: Catch the Throne: The Mixtape, Volume 2

via the Soundcloud

Sumner on Krugman and Europe

Krugman on European Growth and the Euro

For simplicity, suppose we started with US and eurozone interest rates being equal. After the monetary injection the eurozone rates are lower.  So the euro is expected to appreciate.  But in the long run it’s expected to be 10% lower.  That means the immediate effect of a monetary stimulus shock must be a more that 10% decline in the euro.  Dornbusch called this exchange rate overshooting.  The model is composed of 4 theories (QTM, PPP, IPT, liquidity effect.)  Most of us are not as adept at juggling 4 theoretical balls in the air at the same time as Krugman, so we struggle with the concept.  As for empirical evidence, these things are hard to test. I’d argue that each component is pretty well established, and that’s good enough (and I suspect Krugman would agree.)  In any case, it’s too beautiful a theory not to use once and a while.  Here’s Krugman:

So, can we say anything about how the recent move in the euro fits into this story? One way, I’d suggest, is to ask how much of the move can be explained by changes in the real interest differential with the United States. US real 10-year rates are about the same as they were in the spring of 2014; German real rates at similar maturities (which I use as the comparable safe asset) have fallen from about 0 to minus 0.9. If people expected the euro/dollar rate to return to long-term normal a decade from now, this would imply a 9 percent decline right now. 

What we actually see is almost three times that move, suggesting that the main driver here is the perception of permanent, or at any rate very long term European weakness. And that’s a situation in which Europe’s weakness will be largely shared with the rest of the world — Europe will have its fall cushioned by trade surpluses, but the rest of us will be dragged down by the counterpart deficits. 

Now, this is not how most analysts approach the problem. They make a forecast for the exchange rate, then run this through some set of trade elasticities to get the effects on trade and hence on GDP. Such estimates currently indicate that the dollar will be a moderate-sized drag on US recovery, but no more. What the economic logic says, however, is that if that’s really true, the dollar will just keep heading higher until the drag gets less moderate.

Krugman’s looking at real rates to abstract from inflation.  While the Dornbusch overshooting model does a nice job of explaining the recent dramatic plunge in the euro, the model also predicts that the real exchange rate is unaffected in the long run. But that’s because interest rates are unaffected in the long run.  Krugman’s readers don’t know this, but unless I’m mistaken he’s arguing that the recent fall in long-term interest rates in Europe is the income effect, not the liquidity effect.  I actually like that argument, but it’s not the way Keynesians usually look at changes in long-term rates occurring in close proximity to QE.  Most Keynesians would say the ECB is driving bond long term bond yields lower.

So Krugman’s arguing that the big fall in the expected 10-year future exchange rate reflects worsening prospects for long term European growth, not just monetary stimulus.  That argument makes sense to me.  But he’s also arguing that this increasing long-term pessimism occurred at almost exactly the same time that expectations of short-term growth became more optimistic.  That might be true, but I kinda doubt it. And yet I can’t think of a better explanation for the fall in the future expected value of the euro.

So I’ll file this under “unresolved problems.”

DeLong rant

Time for a Rant!: Why Oh Why Cannot We Have Better Economists? by DeLong

Marking-One's-Beliefs-to-Market Should Be a Collective Endeavor...: Focus by DeLong

Krugman in 2005

A Whiff of Stagflation
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: April 18, 2005

We shouldn't overstate the case: we're not back to the economic misery of the 1970's. But the fact that we're already experiencing mild stagflation means that there will be no good options if something else goes wrong. 

Suppose, for example, that the consumer pullback visible in recent data turns out to be bigger than we now think, and growth stalls. (Not that long ago many economists thought that an oil price in the 50's would cause a recession.) Can the Fed stop raising interest rates and go back to rate cuts without causing the dollar to plunge and inflation to soar? 

Or suppose that there's some kind of oil supply disruption - or that warnings about declining production from Saudi oil fields turn out to be right. Suppose that Asian central banks decide that they already have too many dollars. Suppose that the housing bubble bursts. Any of these events could easily turn our mild case of stagflation into something much more serious.

Krugman and currency wars

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/its-always-1923/

It’s Always 1923
FEBRUARY 12, 2013 8:18 AM

David Glasner writes sensibly about the “currency war” issue and related subjects, set off by recent commentary by Irwin Stelzer. As Glasner says, expansionary monetary policy can cause currency depreciation — but it is not currency manipulation. There’s a world of difference between Chinese-style intervention-plus-tight-money and either the Fed’s quantitative easing or Japan’s new turn to inflation targeting.

But what really seems to get Glasner going is Stelzer’s bad history — bad history that is, one has to say, very widely accepted out there. No, the 1923 hyperinflation didn’t bring Hitler to power; it was the Brüning deflation and depression. Hard money and a gold standard obsession, not excessive money printing, was the proximate disaster.

One thing Glasner doesn’t do, though, is point out not just that Stelzer seems weirdly obsessed with inflation risks despite the complete absence of any evidence, but the unchanging nature of that obsession. A quick bit of googling says that Stelzer has been warning about an inflationary explosion for at least four years (pdf). (In the same piece he also insisted that it would be very hard to find anyone to buy all the bonds the US would be issuing).

This gets at one of the true wonders of this ongoing economic crisis: the inflation-and-soaring-rates crowd has been wrong, again and again, year after year, yet seems completely undaunted in its certainty that it possesses The Truth. You might think that someone, at some point, would have a creeping suspicion that he might be working with the wrong model. But it never seems to happen.