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In a recent speech at the Levy Institute conference on “The Eurozone Crisis, Greece, and the Experience of Austerity” held in Athens, Mr. Yves Mersch, a member of the Executive Board and General Council at the ECB, made it clear that the success of the troika plan for the Greek economy requires the current account balance to improve as the public deficit is reduced. In his own words, To facilitate an export-led recovery, this trend [decreasing competitiveness] has to be corrected and there is no way this can be achieved in the short run other than by adjusting prices and costs. I know the difficulties that such adjustment creates and the criticisms that are leveled against it. But we are in a monetary union and this is how adjustment works. Sharing a currency brings considerable microeconomic benefits but it requires that relative prices can adjust to offset shocks. The troika requests for a reduction in costs have been met by Greeks, as our first chart shows. Indeed, nominal wages(1) have fallen by 23 percent from their peak in the first quarter of 2010, and real wages(2) have fallen by 27.8 percent over the same period. While it is true that prices started to fall later than wages, and therefore the improvement in competitiveness has been limited, its impact on exports… Read More

Dimitri Papadimitriou, in Reuters’ “Great Debate” series: The U.S. needs an export strategy led by research and development, and it needs it now. A serious federal commitment to R&D would help arrest the long-term decline in manufacturing, and return America to its preeminent and competitive positions in high tech. At the same time, increasing sales of these once-key exports abroad would improve our also-declining balance of trade. It’s the best shot the U.S. has to energize its weak economic recovery. R&D investment in products sold in foreign markets would yield a greater contribution to economic growth than any other feasible approach today. It would raise GDP, lower unemployment, and rehabilitate production operations in ways that would reverberate worldwide. … For our R&D/export model, we posited a modest infusion of $160 billion per year — about 1 percent of GDP — until 2016. We saw unemployment fall to less than 5 percent by 2016, compared with CBO forecasts that unemployment will remain over 7 percent. Real GDP growth — instead of hovering around 3.5 percent, by CBO estimates, on the current path — gradually rose to near 5.5 percent by the end of the period. Read it here. The research underlying these proposals and projections can be found in the Levy Institute’s most recent US macroeconomic analysis: “Rescuing the Recovery: Prospects… Read More

With support from the Ford Foundation, the Levy Institute is accepting applications for the 2014 Hyman P. Minsky Summer Seminar: Levy Institute Blithewood Annandale-on-Hudson, New York June 13–21, 2014 The Levy Institute’s Summer Seminar provides a rigorous discussion of both the theoretical and the applied aspects of Minsky’s economics, with an examination of meaningful prescriptive policies relevant to the current economic and financial crisis. Organized by Jan Kregel, Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, and L. Randall Wray, the Seminar program is geared toward graduate students and those at the beginning of their academic or professional careers. The teaching staff includes well-known economists concentrating on and expanding Minsky’s work. Applications to the Summer Seminar may be made to Susan Howard at the Levy Institute ([email protected]) and should include a current curriculum vitae. Admission to the Seminar includes provision of room and board on the Bard College campus. A limited number of small travel reimbursements of $100 for US fellows and $300 for foreign fellows, respectively, are available to participants. Due to limited space availability, the deadline for applications is March 1, 2014. To get a sense of the range of topics and speakers, here is a look at last year’s schedule, which included a closing lecture by Paul McCulley.

In “America’s misplaced lecture to Germany,” Gideon Rachman ends up offering a singularly misplaced defense of Germany. Quite similar to the typical stories one hears on this matter in Germany itself, Rachman appears to be unaware of how self-contradictory his arguments really are. To begin with, after describing the Federal Reserve’s QE policies as both a vital support to the world economy and an addictive drug, he goes on to identify the markets’ reaction to tapering by the Fed as the “biggest threat to the global economy in the coming year.” Does he suggest here that, once adopted, QE policies can never be reversed without causing market turbulences and that QE policies, therefore, should never have been adopted in the first place? That would beg the question as to what else would have provided that vital support to the world economy which Rachman himself attributes to these very policies. The real issue here is why such overburdening responsibility for supporting the global economy has come to rest on the Federal Reserve’s shoulders. Apparently without seeing the connection, Rachman supplies one reason himself: the “particularly mindless game” of toying with defaulting on the national debt on the part of the US Congress that has accompanied harsh fiscal contraction in the US this year. Another reason is to be seen in the… Read More

In advance of this week’s Ford–Levy Institute conference in Athens, Greece (Nov. 8–9), Jörg Bibow gave an interview with George Papageorgiou, senior editor of newmoney.gr, on the role German policy has played (and still plays) in generating and exacerbating many of the problems plaguing the eurozone periphery — something Bibow was warning about back in 2005 (see here, for instance). He also addressed where the eurozone needs to go from here, touching on a plan for a Euro Treasury he’ll be discussing at the Athens conference. The English text of the interview follows (Greek version here): You have been critical of German policy. How does it really affect the rest of Europe? In what ways does it cause harm to the peripheral economies? Yes, indeed, German policy bears foremost responsibility for the euro crises and German policy is key to Europe’s future. Germany is Europe’s largest economy. For that reason alone whatever happens in Germany inevitably significantly impacts the eurozone economy. For instance, when Germany prescribed itself an extra dose of wage repression and fiscal austerity in the early 2000s, this had rather fateful consequences for the currency union. For one thing, stagnant domestic demand in Germany constrained its euro partners’ exports to Germany. For another, stagnation in Germany provoked some degree of monetary easing from the ECB, monetary easing… Read More

A new issue of Accounting, Economics and Law has published a series of articles (open access) on Minsky and banking. In addition to my contribution, you can find some nice pieces by Thorvald Moe, Yuri Bondi, and Robert Boyer. According to Minsky, “A capitalist economy can be described by a set of interrelated balance sheets and income statements”. The assets on a balance sheet are either financial or real, held to yield income or to be sold or pledged. The liabilities represent a prior commitment to make payments on demand, on a specified date, or when some contingency occurs. Assets and liabilities are denominated in the money of account, and the excess of the value of assets over the value of liabilities is counted as nominal net worth. All economic units – households, firms, financial institutions, governments – take positions in assets by issuing liabilities, with margins of safety maintained for protection. One margin of safety is the excess of income expected to be generated by ownership of assets over the payment commitments entailed in the liabilities. Another is net worth – for a given expected income stream, the greater the value of assets relative to liabilities, the greater the margin of safety. And still another is the liquidity of the position: if assets can be sold quickly or pledged… Read More

Randall Wray and Éric Tymoigne just released a new working paper that rounds up and responds to various critiques of Modern Money Theory (MMT); critiques they organize into five categories: One of the main contributions of Modern Money Theory (MMT) has been to explain why monetarily sovereign governments have a very flexible policy space that is unencumbered by hard financial constraints. Through a detailed analysis of the institutions and practices surrounding the fiscal and monetary operations of the treasury and central bank of many nations, MMT has provided institutional and theoretical insights about the inner workings of economies with monetarily sovereign and nonsovereign governments. MMT has also provided policy insights with respect to financial stability, price stability, and full employment. As one may expect, several authors have been quite critical of MMT. Critiques of MMT can be grouped into five categories: views about the origins of money and the role of taxes in the acceptance of government currency, views about fiscal policy, views about monetary policy, the relevance of MMT conclusions for developing economies, and the validity of the policy recommendations of MMT. This paper addresses the critiques raised using the circuit approach and national accounting identities, and by progressively adding additional economic sectors. You occasionally see MMT loosely described as being “pro-deficit,” but Tymoigne and Wray explain that their… Read More

The next Minsky conference in the Levy Institute’s international series is taking place in Athens next week, November 8-9. The central theme, as you can probably guess from the location, is the ongoing eurozone crisis. This conference is organized as part of the Levy Institute’s international research agenda and in conjunction with the Ford Foundation Project on Financial Instability, which draws on Hyman Minsky’s extensive work on the structure of financial systems to ensure stability and the role of government in achieving a growing and equitable economy. Among the key topics the conference will address are: the challenges to global growth and employment posed by the continuing eurozone debt crisis; the impact of austerity on output and employment; the ramifications of the credit crunch for economic and financial markets; the larger implications of government deficits and debt crises for US and European economic policies; and central bank independence and financial reform. Keynote speakers will include Már Gudmundsson, governor of the Central Bank of Iceland (“Iceland’s Crisis and Recovery: Are There Lessons for the Eurozone and Its Member Countries?”), Yves Mersch, member of the ECB’s Executive Board and General Council (“Intergenerational Justice in Times of Sovereign Debt Crises”), and Lord Robert Skidelsky, Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick (“The Experience of Austerity: The UK”). You can find… Read More

Here’s a piece I wrote with Yolanda Fernandez for the Asian Development Bank: Monetary and Fiscal Operations in the People’s Republic of China: An Alternative View of the Options Available You’ve no doubt read various analyses predicting the impending collapse of the Chinese financial sector, and arguments that China cannot continue to grow at a rapid pace. While we do think that China faces some challenges, we part company with the gloom and doom crowd. What most of them do not understand is that China is a sovereign country that issues its own currency. Affordability is not an issue. China has the fiscal capacity to resolve any financial crisis, and it can “afford” to grow fast if it chooses to do so. Our paper examines the fiscal and monetary policy options available to the PRC as a sovereign currency-issuing nation operating in a dollar standard world. The paper first summarizes a number of issues facing the PRC, including the possibility of slower growth and a number of domestic imbalances. Then, it analyzes current monetary and fiscal policy formation and examines some policy recommendations that have been advanced to deal with current areas of concern. The paper outlines the sovereign currency approach and uses it to analyze those concerns. Against this background, it is recommended that the central government’s fiscal stance… Read More

Larry Summers recently noted that the projected long-term budget deficit for the federal government basically disappears if we’re able to achieve annual economic growth rates that are 0.2 percentage points higher than the Congressional Budget Office assumes. The notion that eliminating the budget deficit is a valuable goal in and of itself deserves some pushback. But if you start from the premises of those who do think (or claim to think) there’s a problem with debt levels of the sort projected by the CBO, then debt hawks should be running around promoting any scheme they can think of that will boost growth. If the debt really is as big of a problem as they claim, this ought to be their first priority. And it’s a far better strategy than the current one, which seems to revolve around pushing for an increase in the eligibility ages for Social Security and Medicare. Now, it’s obviously the case that “push the US political system to pass policies that increase growth” isn’t an easy thing to accomplish, but there are a couple of reasons why this would be a better goal for (genuine) debt hawks to pursue. First, even if the FixtheDebters succeed in getting what they want, which seems to be a particular type of entitlement cut (raising the retirement age counts; reducing… Read More

Dimitri Papadimitriou, Greg Hannsgen, Michalis Nikiforos, and Gennaro Zezza have just published a new strategic analysis for the US economy, with a baseline projection and alternative policy simulations through the end of 2016. The report takes a closer look at the potential payoff of R&D investment in the context of a US export strategy. As Papadimitriou et al. point out, fiscal policy at the federal level is simply stuck on a self-defeating course, with nothing but further growth-killing contraction on the horizon. Their baseline projection shows that if we stay on the current fiscal path, in which the deficit continues to shrink rapidly, growth won’t be high enough to appreciably bring down the unemployment rate — as far out as 2016 unemployment would be just below 7 percent. The significant increases in federal spending that would be needed to accelerate the recovery and quickly bring down the unemployment rate don’t seem to be politically viable, to put it gently. So the authors turn to the external sector; more precisely, to an export-oriented strategy driven by innovation. Research and development may be an area in which a proposed increase in government investment would attract less rabid congressional opposition. And from the authors’ perspective, recent revisions to the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) now allow us to get a better handle… Read More

As is well known, Hyman Minsky was a student of Joseph Schumpeter’s at Harvard. Minsky’s “stages” theory of capitalist development, fleshed out during the later part of his life while he was here at the Levy Institute, arguably owes something to the influence of his former dissertation adviser. There’s a short paper in the archive from 1992, “Schumpeter and Finance” (pdf), in which Minsky presents a tight, clear summary of his vision of the evolution of capitalism and finance, right up to the present-day stage of “money manager capitalism.” You should read it for that reason alone (especially if your acquaintance with Minsky’s work extends only to his “financial instability hypothesis”), but it also contains a short passage that deserves to be quoted on its own, in which Minsky, in the context of a reminiscence of his teacher (“We talked about important things as well as about economics”), insists on the need to approach economics as the study of an “evolutionary beast”: “In 1948–49 the representative graduate student considered Schumpeter to be passé. Paying attention to him, joining him in his study was evidence of a lack of fundamental seriousness, of dilettantism. Given the command of mathematics that economists of that time possessed, Schumpeter’s model was not tractable. As a result his vision was ignored by the candidates striving to… Read More