Blog

If you haven’t read it already, Senior Scholar James Galbraith shared his take on the four-month Greek deal in Social Europe: there was never any chance for a loan agreement that would have wholly freed Greece’s hands. Loan agreements come with conditions. The only choices were an agreement with conditions, or no agreement and no conditions. The choice had to be made by February 28, beyond which date ECB support for the Greek banks would end. No agreement would have meant capital controls, or else bank failures, debt default, and early exit from the Euro. SYRIZA was not elected to take Greece out of Europe. Hence, in order to meet electoral commitments, the relationship between Athens and Europe had to be “extended” in some way acceptable to both. But extend what, exactly? There were two phrases at play, and neither was the vague “extend the bailout.” The phrase “extend the current programme” appeared in troika documents, implying acceptance of the existing terms and conditions. To the Greeks this was unacceptable, but the technically-more-correct “extend the loan agreement” was less problematic. The final document extends the “Master Financial Assistance Facility Agreement” which was better still. The MFFA is “underpinned by a set of commitments” but these are – technically – distinct. In short, the MFFA is extended but the commitments are to… Read More

Michalis Nikiforos, Dimitri Papadimitriou, and Gennaro Zezza, who put together the Levy Institute’s stock-flow consistent macroeconomic model and simulations for Greece, have just released a new policy note, the upshot of which is that restructuring Greece’s unsustainable public debt is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a sustained economic recovery in that country. They also point to an interesting historical precedent that ought to inform the ongoing discussion of Greece’s debt and the conditions imposed by its official creditors. The troika’s official story—about how Greece’s debt-to-GDP ratio will be brought down from its current 175 percent to 120 percent by 2022—is, as the authors put it, “wildly implausible.” The official forecasts depend upon large primary surpluses (in excess of 4 percent of GDP beginning in 2016) being accompanied by robust economic growth rates (based on, according to the official story, expanding net export surpluses and dazzling growth in private investment)—which is, the authors point out, virtually unprecedented. But even if it were possible for Greece to pay down its public debt through continuing austerity, Nikiforos, Papadimitriou, and Zezza argue that this should be opposed on both moral (with respect to consequentialist considerations and principles of fairness) and prudential grounds. In this context, they quote Keynes’s dissent regarding the terms imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles; a quotation… Read More

Levy Institute President Dimitri Papadimitriou discusses the four-month extension of Greece’s bailout agreement with its eurozone partners and the mood in Athens in this interview with Kathleen Hays and Vonnie Quinn.

Update 2/28: more details here. Sorry, I’ve been very busy in recent weeks, finishing up a book on Minsky and revising my Modern Money Primer for a second edition (more on both of those projects later). Meanwhile, Lola Books is gearing up to release the Primer in Spanish next week. I’ll be in Madrid for the launch and for a series of meetings. I’ll give two presentations that are open to the public. Details are below. Hope to see our Spanish friends there! March 5, 2015 I’ll make a presentation at the Izquierda Unida economic program. This event will officially introduce MMT into Spanish politics. Location: Sede Central de CC.OO. Address: c/ Fernández de la Hoz 12, planta baja; Madrid Time :19 h. See the event flyer below. March 7, 2015 Presentation of the Primer at the ‘Association pour la Taxation des Transactions financière et l’Aide aux Citoyens’ (Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and Aid to Citizens) Location: Fuhem Address: c/ Duque de Sexto 40; Madrid Time: 11 h.

The New York Times made waves this week with another piece on inequality, saying that it has not risen since 2007. The article was based on this paper by GWU’s Stephen Rose. The article also suggests that expansions are not a good way of looking at trends in inequality (as I have done in the past, also covered by the NYT). Instead, one needs to look at the business cycle. It also concludes that, thankfully, because of government tax and transfer policies, inequality has not been “that bad” over the last few years and governments can clearly do something about it. So what’s wrong with this picture? Here is the graph that appeared in the NYT (I’ve reproduced it below showing only the bottom 90% and top 10% of families using the same Saez data). Now let’s reproduce the exact same graph, using the same data but excluding capital gains. The trends reverse. The bottom 90% of families have lost proportionately more than the top 10% since 2007. Now, I am not fond of excluding capital gains (I am in favor of annuitizing them), because they are very important to income dynamics, but still, without capital gains, the bottom 90% lose proportionately more (relative to the top 10%) than with them. In any case, if we include the top 1%… Read More

In the interview below, James Galbraith provides a behind-the-scenes account of the latest rebuff of Greece’s offer by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble and talks about what lies ahead (in English and Greek): [iframe width=”448″ height=”252″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/_dI75VJUpZY?feature=player_detailpage” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe]

Most analysis of the Greek debt crisis ignores an important reality: While Greece may be the villain du jour, every eurozone nation is profoundly short of cash. That’s because of a well-acknowledged, but not fully appreciated, flaw at the heart of eurozone financial architecture that converted a historically unprecedented number of nations from issuers of their own currency to users of a common currency. Greece is simply the first country to experience the extreme consequences of that loss of monetary sovereignty. With no independent source of funding, no currency of its own, no central bank to guarantee its government liabilities, it has had to ask others for help. And as a condition for securing that help, Greece has until now been forced to consent to radical austerity policies. As an analogy, consider a United States with a common currency but no Treasury to conduct macroeconomic policy, stabilization or stimulus spending. Imagine also that the Federal Reserve was banned by law from guaranteeing U.S. government debt. And imagine that one state, say, Illinois (think Germany) was the major net exporter, accumulating dollars (euros) while most other states (as is the case in the eurozone) were net importers, thereby bleeding dollars (or euros). Finally, imagine Illinois providing a loan to cash-strapped Georgia (think Greece), dictating that it implement slash-and-burn privatization of public… Read More

As deflation sets in in the economies of Europe and Japan, Robert Kuttner’s words in Debtor’s Prison: The Politics of Austerity versus Possibility—an interesting, readable new volume—complement those of many of the Levy Institute’s scholars. The book argues that during the financial crisis and its aftermath, policymakers continually relied on excessively optimistic projections of economic growth. Hence, stimulus plans adopted by Congress were not up to the task. Meanwhile, monetary policy could do little more than keep the crisis from worsening. As a result, the recovery remained exceedingly weak, and deficits overshot estimates to boot. Kuttner notes that in spite of the end of the recession, US growth rates on the order of 1.7 percent in 2011 and 2.2 percent in 2012 have not been high enough “to blast out of the deflationary trap.” The more recently released annual growth rate of 2.4 percent for 2014, as well as the 2.2 percent final figure for the year before, indicate that he is right when he argues against the political “consensus” that “borrowing money is the last thing the government should do.” In fact, fiscal policy still needs to be made more stimulative, perhaps through increased infrastructure spending. Kuttner decries a situation in which an “austerity lobby” is set to bat down such efforts in Washington. Also notably, Kuttner uses a… Read More

For our Spanish-speaking followers, my Modern Money Primer has just been released in Spanish and is available: Here’s the description of the book: El esfuerzo intelectual que se realizó en el campo de la física tras la aparición de la teoría de la relatividad o del modelo copernicano, no se llevó a cabo en la economía tras la aparición del dinero fíat. Teoría Monetaria Moderna es la plasmación de dicho esfuerzo intelectual. En este libro se expone claramente qué es el dinero en realidad y lo que es más importante se exponen las políticas económicas que deberían llevarse a cabo para llevar a la práctica un programa político coherente con dicha realidad. L. Randall Wray es doctor en economía y profesor en la Universidad de Missouri-Kansas City, así como director de investigaciones del Center for Full Employment and Price Stability. Además, pertenece al Levy Economics Institute of Bard College de Nueva York. I’ll be in Madrid for the book launch. See you there. More details to follow.

Here’s a nice piece: The Workers’ Think Tank: With an eye on the United States and Greece, scholars at the Levy Economics Institute are developing plans to ensure full employment, by Sasha Abramsky, The Nation. As Sasha notes, the Levy Institute has a novel approach to fighting unemployment: JOBS! Hardly anyone ever thinks about that—that the cause of unemployment is lack of jobs. For some reason, virtually all policymakers and economists (including progressives) think that jobs will magically appear. True, some suggest that US unemployment is created because China (et al.) “steals” jobs that are rightfully due to America. Hence, the solution is to steal them back. But why not just create more? Is it really that hard to come up with a list of things that people could usefully do, right here in America? As Sasha writes, things appear to have improved in America, “Yet scratch below the surface and you’ll see that the United States still has a considerable economic problem. While the official unemployment rate has fallen to 5.6 percent, the lowest since 2008, the percentage of the adult population participating in the labor market remains far lower than it was at the start of the recession. At least in part, headline unemployment numbers look respectable because millions of Americans have grown so discouraged about their prospects of finding work… Read More

Yesterday on the floor of the US Senate, Sen. Bernie Sanders delivered a speech featuring Pavlina Tcherneva’s widely-discussed chart, which illustrates how the bottom 90 percent’s share of income gains during economic expansions has shrunk to (literally) less than nothing. Watch (beginning at 26min50s): [iframe width=”461″ height=”351″ src=”//www.c-span.org/video/standalone/?c4525785″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe]

The recent 40 percent jump in the value of the Swiss Franc will have some effects similar to those of deflation where it seems to be taking hold, including Japan and much of Europe. When a currency increases in value, foreign debts in those currencies become more of a burden. The New York Times brings it home with the story of households in Poland and other European countries who have some foreign debt of their own—mortgages whose payments are suddenly much higher in their own currency, after the Swiss National Bank (the Swiss counterpart to the ECB and the Fed) stopped using foreign-currency operations to peg its currency against the Euro. In fact, the FT reports that mortgages in the Swiss currency make up 37 percent of Polish home loans. The Swiss decision was encouraged by a European Central Bank that is getting ready to push long-term interest rates down further through its own program of quantitative easing (QE). Instead of printing more Francs to buy Euro and other currency, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) allowed the Franc to rise in one big move, abandoning its peg to the depreciating Euro. This move will increase import demand in Switzerland from Poland and other European producers. But as always with a sudden devaluation, foreign-currency debtors suffer from a so-called currency mismatch… Read More