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This is the first of a series of blog posts on the Brazilian crisis by Felipe Rezende.   There are two major crises Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff is facing: one is a political crisis and the other is Brazil’s sharpest recession in 25 years. Brazil’s Political Crisis The political crisis has two main pillars: a) a vast corruption scandal (with evidence of a kickback scheme funneling billions of dollars from state-run firms and, more recently, in a massive data leak over possible tax evasion, Brazilian politicians linked to offshore companies in the Panama Papers); and b) impeachment proceedings to move forward against President Dilma Rousseff. The Federal Court of Accounts (TCU) announced in 2015 that it had rejected the accounts of Rousseff’s administration for the year 2014. In a unanimous vote, the TCU ruled Dilma Rousseff’s government manipulated its accounts in 2014 to “disguise fiscal deficits” as she campaigned for re-election. The allegation is that Ms. Rousseff manipulated Brazil’s account books to hide a growing fiscal deficit. The argument is that the federal government borrowed money from public banks (which is forbidden by the Fiscal Responsibility Law) to pay for social programs. So, they argued she allegedly committed an administrative crime. Once we understand how the government spends and what bonds are for, then we can analyze TCU’s decision. The… Read More

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The preliminary program has been posted for the 25th Annual Hyman Minsky Conference, being held April 12-13 here at Blithewood on the Bard College campus. The deadline for registration is April 1st. Tuesday, April 12 8:30−9:00 a.m. Registration 9:00−9:15 a.m. Welcome and Introduction Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, President, Levy Institute 9:15−10:30 a.m. Session 1. GLOBAL FRAGILITY AND EMERGING MARKETS OUTLOOK MODERATOR: Theo Francis, Special Writer, The Wall Street Journal SPEAKER: Jan Kregel, Senior Scholar, Levy Institute; Professor, Tallinn University of Technology Fernando J. Cardim de Carvalho, Senior Scholar, Levy Institute; Emeritus Professor of Economics, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro 10:30 a.m. − 12:30 p.m. Session 2. COMMODITIES AND DERIVATIVES REGULATION MODERATOR: Izabella Kaminska, Journalist, Financial Times SPEAKERS: Michael Greenberger, Professor, School of Law, and Director, Center for Health and Homeland Security, The University of Maryland Robert A. Johnson, President, Institute for New Economic Thinking; Senior Fellow and Director, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute Michael Masters, Founder and Chairman of the Board, Better Markets 12:30−2:15 p.m. Lunch SPEAKER: Robert J. Barbera, Codirector, Center for Financial Economics, The Johns Hopkins University “Six Degrees of Separation: Why the Fed’s Strategy of Precautionary Unemployment Is Nutty” 2:15−4:45 p.m. Session 3. IS THE CURRENT CREDIT STRUCTURE CONDUCIVE TO FINANCIALLY STABLE RECOVERY? MODERATOR: TBD SPEAKERS: Henry Kaufman, President, Henry Kaufman & Company, Inc. Richard Berner, Director, Office of Financial Research, US… Read More

[iframe width=”427″ height=”240″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/EOFjduXU9N8?;start=1289″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe]   Related: “Euroland’s Original Sin” (pdf)

Bloomberg just published an article focused on the rise of Modern Money Theory (MMT), featuring comments by Senior Scholar Randall Wray: The 20-something-year-old doctrine, on the fringes of economic thought, is getting a hearing with an unconventional take on government spending in nations with their own currency. Such countries, the MMTers argue, face no risk of fiscal crisis. They may owe debts in, say, dollars or yen — but they’re also the monopoly creators of dollars or yen, so can always meet their obligations. For the same reason, they don’t need to finance spending by collecting taxes, or even selling bonds. […] No one’s saying there are no limits. Real resources can be a constraint — how much labor is available to build that road? Taxes are an essential tool, to ensure demand for the currency and cool the economy if it overheats. But the MMTers argue there’s plenty of room to spend without triggering inflation.

These are not happy times for Europe. Ukraine, Russia, and rising anti-democratic influences in Hungary and Poland represent latent threats at the European Union’s eastern front. The prospect of Brexit is a more acute one at its western front. After letting loose manifold conflicting forces that continue shaping internal politics in many EU countries and setting them on collision course with their partners, the refugee situation appears to be on the verge of bestowing another humanitarian crisis on the union’s most vulnerable and unfortunate member: Greece. Never mind the Catalan question: it almost appears minor by comparison, but actually represents yet another fundamental challenge to the European project. “Misfortune seldom comes alone,” a German saying goes; the nation that is increasingly pulling the strings in European affairs but appears at risk of alienating itself even more so than its partners while doing it. Considering all this, the European political authorities may almost be forgiven for having lost sight of the smoldering crisis of the euro, the union’s flagship endeavor that was meant to foster prosperity and political union – but turned out to deliver quite the opposite. One key player, the European Central Bank (ECB), does not wish to partake in the peculiar mix of denial and delusion about the state of the euro. As the specter of deflation and… Read More

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The eurozone has been in crisis since 2008. By the end of 2015 domestic demand was still 3 percent below its pre-crisis peak. Throughout, the European Central Bank (ECB) has acted as the eurozone’s prime crisis manager.  As capital flows reversed and inter-bank lending seized up, the ECB provided emergency liquidity to keep banking systems afloat. However, for legal and political reasons, the ECB was restrained in supporting sovereign debt. But, given that there are close linkages between banks and sovereigns, supporting only one party in the duo proved insufficient. From 2011–2012, interest rate differentials between eurozone members soared and credit dried up, as the risk of default on national debt and currency redenomination became investors’ foremost concern. In the end, Mario Draghi’s famous promise to “do what it takes” calmed the markets – at least for now. The ECB’s monetary policy course was rather less helpful. The ECB is legendary for its reluctance to ease interest rates in the face of downside risks, and it even prematurely hiked rates in 2011. And so it took the ECB until the summer of 2014 to finally contemplate unconventional monetary policy measures to counter deflation risks, which were by then acute. Meanwhile, the ECB has indeed adopted a negative interest rate policy, pushing short-term money market rates below zero. It has also… Read More

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Servaas Storm means well. He is alarmed that the eurozone’s official strategy of “internal devaluation” might do more harm than good by unnecessarily forcing countries that have lost their competitiveness into deflation (see here, here, and here). This is a very real concern indeed and Storm should be applauded for raging against the colossal folly that is wrecking Europe. Unfortunately, Storm goes astray in seemingly dismissing any role for unit labor cost competitiveness and German wage moderation in causing the still unresolved eurozone crisis in the first place. Referring to bits and pieces of evidence derived from mostly partial-equilibrium empirics of one type or another, Storm fails to notice that no coherent macroeconomic analysis of the eurozone crisis emerges unless German wage moderation gets assigned a prominent role in the play. At the heart of the whole confusion is Storm’s attempt to attribute to those who emphasize German wage moderation as a key causal factor in the eurozone crisis the view that “expenditure switching” would explain 100 percent of the eurozone’s internal current account imbalances (and related balance sheet troubles). This would be a very peculiar view indeed – and I am not aware of anyone who actually holds it. Certainly the proponents of the “wage moderation hypothesis” that I know, including those who responded to Storm’s “critical analysis” (see… Read More