Commentary

Germany’s Federal Statistical Office released its first estimate of German GDP in 2012 at a press conference held in Wiesbaden yesterday: “German economy withstands the European economic crisis in 2012.” Reporting that growth slowed markedly in Germany last year, down to only 0.7 percent from 3 percent in 2011 and 4.2 percent in 2010, the international media seemed to pin the slump (the Office’s estimate assumes a contraction in GDP of 0.5 percent in the final quarter) on the euro crisis (FT.com:  “Germany hit by debt crisis turbulence”; WSJ.com: “Euro crisis damps German growth”). It is rather unsurprising that German exports have not been doing so well in the crisis-stricken countries of the euro area of late. Germany’s trade and current account surpluses with its euro partners have declined significantly. But so far the crisis has actually been a mixed blessing overall. For one thing, benefiting from its haven status, Germany’s interest rates and financing costs are extremely favorable. While lending support to property markets, finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble enjoyed a nice windfall too, as Germany’s general government budget ended the year with a small surplus, in part owing to savings on debt interest payments (much in contrast to his partners elsewhere in the area). But that is far from all.

Next week, January 24th, the Modern Money and Public Purpose seminar at Columbia University will feature a special session with top leadership from the Greek opposition party, SYRIZA, including leader of the opposition Alexis Tsipras and economy critic George Stathakis (who gave an entertaining talk at the November Minsky conference in Berlin—see Session 3 for audio).  This special event will also feature the Levy Institute’s Mathew Forstater and our director of the Gender Equality and the Economy program, Rania Antonopoulos.  See here for a full schedule and list of participants.

Below is the video from the latest session of the Modern Money and Public Purpose seminar at Columbia University, featuring Jan Kregel and Forbes‘ John Harvey.  The session touched on the sustainability of fiscal and trade deficits, why economists need to study accounting, the risks of paying down the government debt, the real meaning of “fiscal responsibility,” and the assumptions about the appropriate size of government that are sowing confusion in the budget debate.

So far, a large part of the discussion of whether the Treasury should mint (or convincingly threaten to mint) a trillion-dollar platinum coin in response to the congressional threat to refuse to raise the debt limit (see here for background) hovers around questions of legality or ill-defined “seriousness.”  (On the political front, the administration’s press secretary passed up an opportunity on Wednesday to explicitly rule out the idea.  On the legal front, Matthew Yglesias suggests a theory in which the government is not just permitted but obligated to mint the coin.) But the platinum coin discussion actually touches on fundamental issues that go beyond legality or political decorum; issues about the understanding (and misunderstanding) of money.  (Recently, both Joe Weisenthal and Paul Krugman moved the conversation in this direction.) One suspects that some objections to the large-denomination platinum coin on the grounds of “silliness” are motivated by simple incredulity about the nature of money.  Behind a lot of the Dr. Evil-themed snickering there lurks a very common “metallist” conception:  an insistence that money must always be backed by something like gold, or in the case of the trillion-dollar coin, that its value is given by the value of the platinum in the coin; something other than the mere fiat of government.  To those who are moved by the argument that…more

In the latest phase of our endless budget brinksmanship, congressional Republicans will attempt to extract policy concessions in return for raising the debt limit (Republicans are not only demanding cuts to Social Security and Medicare—they are brazenly demanding that Democrats propose, and therefore own, these unpopular cuts).  The administration and key allies are claiming they will not negotiate over the debt limit. At stake in this standoff is not just whether the federal government will default on its financial commitments (which is to say, whether Congress will absurdly prevent the government from paying the bills that Congress has legally obligated it to rack up) but also whether we will move one step further toward making these standoffs a customary part of the (mal)functioning of government. In the context of some key changes made by the Dodd-Frank Act, this new normal on the debt ceiling has disquieting implications for how the federal government will respond when the next financial crisis hits.  Dodd-Frank doesn’t do much to prevent the next crisis from emerging, but it does change the way the government can respond.  At last year’s Minsky conference in New York (see Session 6), Morgan Ricks noted that a number of organizations that played a large role in the response to the financial meltdown (Fed, Treasury, FDIC) have seen their discretionary authority…more

Olivier Blanchard (the IMF’s chief economist) and Daniel Leigh tell us in their new working paper that IMF forecasters “significantly underestimated” how much damage austerity would inflict on employment and growth in Europe.  The authors are careful to insist that their results do not imply that austerity should be abandoned:  “The short-term effects of fiscal policy on economic activity are only one of the many factors that need to be considered in determining the appropriate pace of fiscal consolidation for any single economy.” Greece’s particular pace of fiscal consolidation, required by the EU-ECB-IMF “troika” as part of the Greek bailout deals, has helped deliver a rise in unemployment that looks like this: That’s from a new policy note by Giorgos Argitis.  Argitis focuses on the “Greek deal” reached this past November and concludes that it, along with the troika’s entire strategy to date, cannot succeed—even by its own cramped set of objectives.  “[T]he debt structure of the Greek public sector was not sustainable before, did not become sustainable after the ‘haircut’ in March 2012, and will not become sustainable as a result of the Eurogroup’s decision in November,” he writes. The problem is not just that austerity is creating devastating levels of unemployment (which, if you’ve been following the debate, is all-too-easily dismissed as a necessary cost—a sign of virtuous…more

This Saturday at 5pm Eastern, FDL will be hosting an online discussion (here) with the Levy Institute’s Randall Wray on his lastest book, Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems: In a challenge to conventional views on modern monetary and fiscal policy, this book presents a coherent analysis of how money is created, how it functions in global exchange rate regimes, and how the mystification of the nature of money has constrained governments, and prevented states from acting in the public interest.

Relative to what might have been, one shouldn’t be too depressed about the fiscal cliff deal.  There are no cuts to the country’s most successful anti-poverty program, Social Security, and no rise in the Medicare eligibility age.  Relative to the basic macroeconomic logic of the situation, however, the fiscal cliff deal is a policy mistake. Contrary to a wildly successful marketing campaign, the fiscal cliff was a crisis of too much austerity.  The deal approved by the House last night either cancels or delays for two months much of the austerity that was planned for 2013, but in the end we are still left with austerity-lite. If you insist on looking at it from the old “current law” baseline (which is to say, the law as it would have been if we had “gone over” the cliff), this deal expanded the deficit by some $4 trillion.  However, from the perspective of the baseline that matters for economic growth and employment, fiscal policy in 2013 will be more contractionary than it was in 2012.  Some already-existing measures like the expanded unemployment insurance benefits and a number of tax credits benefiting those with low incomes will continue, but there is no new stimulus in this deal; no infrastructure investment; no move to shore up public payrolls.  And relative to 2012, the government…more

by Joerg Bibow Mario Draghi’s pledge to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro has been widely hailed as a watershed event. Both the markets and euro politics have since been operating on the premise that the euro’s survival is ensured. Unfortunately, that is not a safe assumption at all. Not only because even agreement on the Single Supervisory Mechanism, the easiest element in any banking union-to-be, proved to be anything but easy. But even more so since concentrating energies on preventing future crises is somewhat premature anyway, as long as the current one remains largely unresolved. The point is that the policy strategy that has been adopted for overcoming the crisis, with or without any ECB liquidity promise in support of government bonds (i.e. Outright Monetary Transactions), is doomed to fail. The underlying causes of the crisis have been thoroughly misdiagnosed, and the medication ill-conceived as a result, while reforms of the flawed euro policy regime are so ill-designed as to ensure the euro’s final demise. The ultimate fear of the Maastricht regime’s designers was that fiscal profligacy of nations lacking Germany’s legendary “stability culture” could usher Euroland into hyperinflation. The Bundesbank’s worst nightmares seemed to come true when Greek budget deficit (ratio) numbers were revised strongly upwards in 2009. So the ill-named pact that has so far…more

Paul Krugman points out today that once you take into account the lingering effects of the recession, it may very well be the case that there is no significant near-term budget shortfall at all. Once the economy has recovered, the budget may already be destined to come in at a level that would stabilize public debt as a share of GDP.  The real problem we have in the short-run is that budget deficits are too low—and shrinking—not that they are too high and growing. The least unpersuasive case for worrying about the federal budget deficit focuses on the long-term increases in Medicare and Medicaid that will result if health care costs follow their projected, steep upward pathway.  If you accept this case (which should not simply be accepted as gospel), then you can stop listening to any purported “grand bargain” plan that does not address this projected rise in health care costs. Yet, if the news reports have any validity, the “entitlement reform” side of the fiscal cliff negotiations has become focused on a proposal to increase the Medicare eligibility age by two years.  This would deliver roughly $5 billion in savings to federal government in 2014.  You might say that, given the hardship it would cause to so many near-retirees, this seems like an awfully small sum.  But it’s…more

Stephanie Kelton was interviewed on RT’s “Capital Account” with Lauren Lyster on the subject of Modern Monetary Theory:

Registration is now open for the Levy Institute’s fourth Hyman P. Minsky Summer Seminar, to be held on the Bard College campus in June 2013. The annual Summer Seminar provides a rigorous discussion of both the theoretical and the applied aspects of Minsky’s economics, and is geared toward recent graduates, graduate students, and those at the beginning of their academic or professional careers. Application deadline: March 31, 2013. Apply early, as space is limited. See here for more information.