LARS P. SYLL

That’s the right spirit – Ed Miliband proposes an updated Glass-Steagall Act

In an interview with the Observer, the Labour leader Ed Miliband says he will confront the City of London with what is seen as the nuclear option for reform if the banks fail to separate their “casino” investment operations from services to account holders, savers and businesses …

In terms that will anger the investment banking industry, Miliband tells the Observer a Labour government, as one of its first acts, would push through a modern-day equivalent of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which split the commercial and investment operations of US banks after the 1929 stock market crash …

Speaking ahead of Labour’s annual conference, which opens in Manchester on Sunday, Miliband says banks must concentrate on core functions such as lending to small businesses “rather than playing the international money markets”. Such behaviour puts ordinary customers at risk of having to share the consequences of failed investments.

Echoing concerns expressed last month by Sir Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, who believes that reforms proposed last year by Sir John Vickers are being “watered down” after lobbying by the banks, Miliband says it is time to stop backsliding, and to change banking culture for good. The recent Libor scandal involving the fiddling of inter-bank interest rates and the £10bn scandal over mis-selling of payment protection insurance showed the culture was still rotten …

“The banks and the government can change direction and say they are going to implement the spirit and principle of Vickers to the full. That means the hard ringfence between retail and investment banking. We need real separation, real culture change. Or we will legislate.”

The Guardian

Greg Mankiw on Finance

Greg Mankiw has added a new chapter on the financial system to the 8th edition of his intermediate textbook Macroeconomics.

Having read it, yours truly have to confess of not being particularly impressed.

After thoroughly neglecting anything resembling a real-world finance system, Mankiw appends the new chapter to the other nineteen chapters where finance more or less is equated to the neoclassical thought-construction of a “market for loanable funds.”

On the subject of financial crises he admits that

perhaps we should view speculative excess and its ramifications as an inherent feature of market economies … but preventing them entirely may be too much to ask given our current knowledge.

This is of course self-evident for all of us who understand that both ontologically and epistemologically founded uncertainty makes any such hopes totally unfounded. But it’s rather odd to read this in a book that bases its models on assumptions of rational expectations, representative actors and dynamically stochastic general equilibrium – assumptions that convey the view that markets – give or take a few rigidities and menu costs – are efficient! For being one of many neoclassical economists so proud of their (unreal, yes, but) consistent models, Mankiw here certainly is flagrantly inconsistent!

And as if being afraid that all the talk of financial crises might weaken the student’s faith in the financial system, Mankiw, in his concluding remarks, has to add a more Panglossian warning that we

should not lose sight of the great benefits that the system brings … By bringing together those who want to save and those who want to invest, the financial system promotes economic growth and overall prosperity

Really?

Finance has its own dimension, and if taken seriously, its effect on an analysis must modify the whole theoretical system and not just be added as an unsystematic appendage. Finance is fundamental to our understanding of modern economies, and acting like the baker’s apprentice who, having forgotten to add yeast to the dough, throws it into the oven afterwards, simply isn’t enough.

Finanskrisernas lösning

Anta att du har ett kooperativ där en grupp föräldrar ställer upp och sitter barnvakt mot betalning i form av andelsbevis (kuponger) som berättigar innehavaren en timmes barnvakt. Anta vidare att systemet garanterar att varje förälder sitter barnvakt lika många timmar som man själv använder barnvakt.

Problemet med denna form av barnvaktssystem är att det kräver tillräckligt många kuponger i cirkulation. Risken finns att föräldrar som för tillfället inte har behov av barnvakt bjuder ut sina tjänster i större omfattning för att kunna ackumulera reserver av kuponger för användning i framtiden, när man tror sig ha mer behov av barnvakt.

Över tiden kan detta resultera i en kumulativ process som gör att alldeles för få kuponger cirkulerar. De som vill ackumulera kuponger efterfrågar ingen barnpassning, de som behöver barnpassning har svårt att hitta barnvaktsuppdrag, vilket i sin tur gör att föräldrar är ännu ovilligare att spendera sina reserver o s v. Lågkonjunktur för barnvaktskooperativet är ett faktum. Orsak: för låg effektiv efterfrågan. Istället för att konsumera barnvaktstid ackumulerar man kuponger.

Hur tar man sig ur denna lågkonjunktur? Man ökar helt enkelt utbudet på kuponger! Genom att utfärda fler kuponger, ökar kupongreserverna hos föräldrarna, som därigenom blir både mer villiga att sitta barnvakt och efterfråga banvakt o s v. Genom att trycka fler kuponger vänder man konjunkturnedgången.

Men ibland händer det likväl att vissa föräldrar kanske behöver mer barnvakt på kort tid än vad de hinner ackumulera i form av kuponger att betala med. Kooperativet kan då bestämma att föräldrar kan låna ett extra antal kuponger mot att man i framtiden betalar tillbaka dessa. För att systemet inte ska utnyttjas av rent okynne bestämmer man också att låntagarna utöver de lånade kupongerna betalar tillbaka ett antal ytterligare kuponger (ränta).

I normalfallet fungerar detta väl. Men om säsongsvariationen är stor (alla vill kanske helst ha barnpassning på våren) skulle man kunna hamna i en situation där även om kuponglånen kunde betalas tillbaka med noll procents ränta så skulle det finnas fler föräldrar som vill sitta barnvakt än föräldrar som efterfrågar barnvakt. Kooperativet befinner sig i en likviditetsfälla och lågkonjunkturen står åter för dörren.

Vad gör man? Man sätter priset på barnvaktstjänsten rätt – så klart. Värdet på de kuponger som tjänas in under ”lågsäsong” skrivs helt enkelt ner om föräldrar håller på dem till ”högsäsong”. Det innebär att föräldrar har incitament att spendera sina barnvaktskuponger snabbare istället för att lägga dem på hög (tesaurera), eftersom kupongernas reala värde minskar över tiden. Ungefär som pengar när man har inflation. Nedskrivning – och redan förväntningen om en framtida nedskrivning – av kupongernas respektive pengarnas värde innebär på så vis att man kan ta sig ur likviditetsfällan och få fart på kooperativ och ekonomi.

Vad säger oss då denna lilla parabel? Jo, att inflation kan hjälpa oss ta oss ur ekonomiska lågkonjunkturer och depressioner. Inflation får oss att spendera nu – vare sig det gäller barnvaktskuponger eller pengar – och ökar den effektiva efterfrågan och får fart på både kooperativ och ekonomin.

On Krugman’s reading list

As we all know Paul Krugman is very fond of referring to and defending the old and dear IS-LM model.

John Hicks, the man who invented it in his 1937 Econometrica review of Keynes’ General Theory – Mr. Keynes and the ‘Classics’. A Suggested Interpretation – returned to it in an article in 1980 – IS-LM: an explanation – in Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. Self-critically he wrote:

I accordingly conclude that the only way in which IS-LM analysis usefully survives — as anything more than a classroom gadget, to be superseded, later on, by something better – is in application to a particular kind of causal analysis, where the use of equilibrium methods, even a drastic use of equilibrium methods, is not inappropriate. I have deliberately interpreted the equilibrium concept, to be used in such analysis, in a very stringent manner (some would say a pedantic manner) not because I want to tell the applied economist, who uses such methods, that he is in fact committing himself to anything which must appear to him to be so ridiculous, but because I want to ask him to try to assure himself that the divergences between reality and the theoretical model, which he is using to explain it, are no more than divergences which he is entitled to overlook. I am quite prepared to believe that there are cases where he is entitled to overlook them. But the issue is one which needs to be faced in each case.

When one turns to questions of policy, looking toward the future instead of the past, the use of equilibrium methods is still more suspect. For one cannot prescribe policy without considering at least the possibility that policy may be changed. There can be no change of policy if everything is to go on as expected-if the economy is to remain in what (however approximately) may be regarded as its existing equilibrium. It may be hoped that, after the change in policy, the economy will somehow, at some time in the future, settle into what may be regarded, in the same sense, as a new equilibrium; but there must necessarily be a stage before that equilibrium is reached …

I have paid no attention, in this article, to another weakness of IS-LM analysis, of which I am fully aware; for it is a weakness which it shares with General Theory itself. It is well known that in later developments of Keynesian theory, the long-term rate of interest (which does figure, excessively, in Keynes’ own presentation and is presumably represented by the r of the diagram) has been taken down a peg from the position it appeared to occupy in Keynes. We now know that it is not enough to think of the rate of interest as the single link between the financial and industrial sectors of the economy; for that really implies that a borrower can borrow as much as he likes at the rate of interest charged, no attention being paid to the security offered. As soon as one attends to questions of security, and to the financial intermediation that arises out of them, it becomes apparent that the dichotomy between the two curves of the IS-LM diagram must not be pressed too hard.

Back in 1937 John Hicks said that he was building a model of John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory. He wasn’t.

What Hicks acknowledges in 1980 is basically that his original review totally ignored the very core of Keynes’ theory – uncertainty. In doing this he actually turned the train of macroeconomics on the wrong tracks for decades. It’s about time that neoclassical economists – as Krugman, Mankiw, or what have you – set the record straight and stop promoting something that the creator himself admits was a total failure. Why not study the real thing itself – General Theory – in full and without looking the other way when it comes to non-ergodicity and uncertainty?

Stiglitz on Ricardian equivalence

Ricardian equivalence is taught in every graduate school in the country.

It is also sheer nonsense.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, twitter

On Ricardian equivalence and the alleged impossibility of fiscal stimulus, see here, here, here, here, and here.

Keynes and Modern Monetary Theory

[Bendixen says the] old ‘metallist’ view of money is superstitious, and Dr. Bendixen trounces it with the vigour of a convert. Money is the creation of the State; it is not true to say that gold is international currency, for international contracts are never made in terms of gold, but always in terms of some national monetary unit; there is no essential or important distinction between notes and metallic money; money is the measure of value, but to regard it as having value itself is a relic of the view that the value of money is regulated by the value of the substance of which it is made, and is like confusing a theatre ticket with the performance. With the exception of the last, the only true interpretation of which is purely dialectical, these ideas are undoubtedly of the right complexion. It is probably true that the old ‘metallist’ view and the theories of regulation of note issue based on it do greatly stand in the way of currency reform, whether we are thinking of economy and elasticity or of a change in the standard; and a gospel which can be made the basis of a crusade on these lines is likely to be very useful to the world, whatever its crudities or terminology.

J. M. Keynes, “Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel. by Ludwig von Mises; Geld und Kapital. by Friedrich Bendixen” (review), Economic Journal, 1914

The State, therefore, comes in first of all as the authority of law which enforces the payment of the thing which corresponds to the name or description in the contract. But it comes doubly when, in addition, it claims the right to determine and declare what thing corresponds to the name, and to vary its declaration from time to time – when, that is to say it claims the right to re-edit the dictionary. This right is claimed by all modern States and has been so claimed for some four thousand years at least. It is when this stage in the evolution of Money has been reached that Knapp’s Chartalism – the doctrine that money is peculiarly a creation of the State – is fully realized. . . . To-day all civilized money is, beyond the possibility of dispute, Chartalist.
…
Thus the long age of Commodity Money has at last passed finally away before the age of Representative Money. Gold has ceased to be a coin, a hoard, a tangible claim to wealth, of which the value cannot slip away so long as the hand of the individual clutches the material stuff. It has become a much more abstract thing–just a standard of value; and it only keeps this nominal status by being handed round from time to time in quite small quantities amongst a group of Central Banks, on the occasions when one of them has been inflating or deflating its managed representative money in a different degree from what is appropriate to the behaviour of its neighbours. Even the handing round is becoming a little old-fashioned, being the occasion of unnecessary travelling expenses, and the most modern way, called “ear-marking,” is to change the ownership without shifting the location. It is not a far step from this to the beginning of arrangements between Central Banks by which, without ever formally renouncing the rule of gold, the quantity of metal actually buried in their vaults may come to stand, by a modern alchemy, for what they please, and its value for what they choose. Thus gold, originally stationed in heaven with his consort silver, as Sun and Moon, having first doffed his sacred attributes and come to earth as an autocrat, may next descend to the sober status of a constitutional king with a cabinet of Banks; and it may never be necessary to proclaim a Republic. But this is not yet–the evolution may be quite otherwise. The friends of gold will have to be extremely wise and moderate if they are to avoid a Revolution.

J. M. Keynes, A Treatise on Money, 1930

Modeling in economics

Remember that a model is not the truth. It is a lie to help you get your point across. And in the case of modeling economic risk, your model is a lie about others, who are probably lying themselves. And what’s worse than a simple lie? A complicated lie.

Sam L. Savage The Flaw of Averages