Blog

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

If one were asked to describe the formal economic and political processes that have shaped the condition of the eurozone since the eruption of the euro crisis in late 2009 in a terse and peremptory way, he or she might boldly and truly say this: “German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policies spearhead the unraveling of the European project while European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi seeks to keep the (neoliberal) game going.” Indeed, there is little doubt that Germany’s neo-mercantilism is the driving force leading a sizable segment of the eurozone’s economy on the path to stagnation and decline, while the ECB has been trying hard to carry out the role of a traditional central bank by fulfilling its duty as a lender of last resort in order to save the euro and preserve the eurozone. The ECB intervened in the euro crisis in May 2010 by buying up government bonds from Greece (even when a 110 billion euros bailout package had been approved for Greece), Spain, Portugal, and Ireland under its Securities Market Program. By 2011, the ECB was buying up Spanish and Italian bonds by the bucketload in order to force a drop in the bond yields of the two largest peripheral economies of the eurozone. With the end of the crisis in the periphery nowhere in sight,… Read More

With Syriza in the driver’s seat, Greece now has some hope for the end to austerity imposed by Germany and the troika. Here’s a good short piece in the New York Times by C. J. Polychroniou, a research associate and policy fellow at the Levy Economics Institute. As he explains, what Syriza wants is no more—and no less—radical than what the USA did in the 1930s to deal with its Great Depression: “the bulk of Syriza’s economic program for addressing the catastrophic crisis in Greece, which has evolved into a humanitarian crisis, is inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs.” The official press is reacting in horror! Oh the horror of bringing Democracy and Pinko policies into the Officially Neoliberal EMU regime! C.J. continues: “Interestingly, the task for the implementation of the employment program has been assigned to a colleague of mine at the Levy Institute, Rania Antonopoulos, who has been appointed deputy minister of Labor and Social Solidarity under a Syriza-led government.” Yes, Senior Scholar Rania Antonopoulos is director of the Gender Equality and the Economy program at the Levy Institute, specializing in macro-micro linkages of gender and economics, international competition, and globalization; job guarantee policies and their macroeconomic and employment impacts; social protection and poverty reduction; and the implications of paid and unpaid work on poverty… Read More

After a record-setting 23 straight quarters of shrinking GDP, the Greek economy was less awful in 2014, and an economic recovery of sorts might finally be under way. However, the Levy Institute’s latest projections (which are generated using a stock-flow consistent macroeconomic model tailored to Greece) indicate that Greece still faces years of anemic growth if it continues its current policies. Given the severity of the economic wounds inflicted on that country, a recovery led by market forces alone — that is, without any fiscal stimulus — likely means another decade or more before Greece climbs back to its precrisis levels of output and employment. In their latest report, Dimitri Papadimitriou, Michalis Nikiforos, and Gennaro Zezza observe that median income in Greece fell by 30 percent between 2010 and 2013, real GDP is now down to where it was in 2001, and the largest share of the unemployed have been out of work for a year or more. Carrying on with the status quo is no longer tenable — and looks very likely to be overturned in the next election. Using their stock-flow model for Greece, Papadimitriou, Nikiforos, and Zezza put together projections for three alternative policy scenarios: (1) a “New Deal” program of public investment and direct job creation funded by EU transfers; (2) a suspension of interest payments on… Read More

The ECB is to be congratulated on finally defying its German masters, who have long kept the euro’s guardian of stability in captivity. For a number of years, Germany’s unholy triangle of power over the land of the euro – Berlin, Frankfurt, Karlsruhe – has enforced a diktat that undermined both the euro economy and democracy, causing a deep socioeconomic crisis, the rise of nationalism, and anti-EU sentiments across the continent. At last, the ECB has liberated itself from the scourge of hyperinflation scaremongering that is the self-serving conviction – and declaration of intellectual bankruptcy – of the Germany political elite. It is fitting that the chance for a revival of democratic values and European solidarity is knocking on Athens’ door this weekend. In the markets’ perception, Mario Draghi over-delivered yesterday on his famous “whatever-it-takes” promise made at the height of the euro crisis in the summer of 2012. The euro and bond yields are down, stocks are up, party time is here. Things are going according to plan and everyone financial is in high spirits. The question is what Mario’s QE bazooka will really do beyond the markets – for the real economy, that is. The markets are not worried about that issue at this point. Or perhaps some are thinking ahead like this: if growth stays weak, there… Read More

In the context of last Tuesday’s State of the Union, Pavlina Tcherneva was interviewed by Wall Street Journal Live‘s Sara Murray on the issue of the effectiveness of policies to combat widening income inequality. [iframe width=”475″ height=”288″ src=”http://video-api.wsj.com/api-video/player/iframe.html?guid=84206A51-1034-4E5F-A37D-363CBF7499CD” autoplay=”0″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe]   In the interview, Tcherneva comments that while some of the progressive taxation policies outlined by the President may be part of the solution, we ought to be focusing more on raising wages at the bottom and middle of the income distribution through the promotion of tight full employment — with direct job creation policies playing a key role. She notes that the President’s proposal to create more infrastructure jobs would help on that front, but that we are still well short of full employment.* Tcherneva memorably captured the increasing severity of the problem — economic expansions that have left the bottom 90 percent further and further behind — with the chart below. She lays out a brief summary of her alternative, “bottom-up” approach to fiscal policy in this one-pager: “Growth for Whom?” *(Note that Tcherneva’s concept of tight full employment would ultimately bring the unemployment rate below what is conventionally understood as “full employment.” With a maximal job guarantee policy, anyone ready and willing to work would have access to a paid job in the public, nonprofit, or… Read More

When French president François Hollande pre-announced the ECB Governing Council’s long-awaited adoption of “quantitative easing” at its meeting tomorrow, German chancellor Angela Merkel was quick to respond by pointing out that this was still the independent ECB’s decision alone. It was good of her to do so. For in recent times one could not help getting the impression that the German political elite had forgotten all about that precious centerpiece of German monetary orthodoxy: that the independence of the central bank was the most important safeguard of solidity in the world. Against the background of an ill-informed German public and an ideology-stricken German media landscape that excels in nothing more than keeping alive hyperinflation phobia even as the land of the euro is at acute risk of sinking ever deeper into the morass of deflation, Germany’s body politic got carried away with their self-righteous assumption that it was in everyone’s best interest to accept the reality of German hegemony over Euroland in all matters of economic policy, including monetary policy. Yesterday’s Financial Times quoted the former ECB governing council member Athanasios Orphanides on what would appear to be a rather intolerable (since illegal) state of affairs: “It is as if it’s accepted that the euro area’s modus operandi is to clear things with Germany, and for the ECB to constrain… Read More

Wolfgang Münchau is one of those rare sensible voices in the international media reporting on the euro crisis. He has been consistently right in his gloomy assessments of euro crisis management in recent years. He is also correct in pointing out that the observed deflationary trend in the eurozone is not primarily due to any recent oil price shock but mainly driven by the chosen deflationary intra-area “rebalancing” path: with German wage-price inflation well below the 2-percent stability norm, everybody else is forced into deflation to restore their competitiveness. (See here: “Beware what you wish for when it comes to ECB measures”) But Münchau got it pretty wrong in his FT column this week suggesting that so-called helicopter drops of money would constitute monetary policy. Milton Friedman famously used the helicopter analogy in pushing his monetarist mantra, but he forgot to mention that central banks are not in the business of running money-dropping helicopters. Friedman’s story went like this: “In our hypothetical world in which paper money is the only medium of circulation, consider first a stationary situation in which the quantity of money has been constant for a long time, and so have other conditions. Individual members of the community are subject to enough uncertainty that they find cash balances useful to cope with unanticipated discrepancies between receipts and… Read More

If you, too, are living in one of the sub-zero climes right now, you might want some stimulating reading: 1) Here’s one of the best and fairest summaries of MMT that I’ve seen, by Joe Guinan. As Joe says: “Few matters of economic importance are as woefully misunderstood as modern money. It can seem a fiendishly complicated subject, even to economists. Schumpeter confessed to never having understood money to his own satisfaction, while Keynes claimed to know of only three people who really grasped it: ‘A Professor at another university; one of my students; and a rather junior clerk at the Bank of England’.” Reminds me of the time Robert Heilbroner called me up after reading my draft 1998 book, Understanding Modern Money, apologizing because he could not write a blurb for the jacket. Money is, he said, the scariest topic there is, and your book is going to scare the hell out of everybody. And by Jove he was right. Anyway, Joe goes on to argue that MMT seems to have the theory, description of real world operations, and policy right, but needs some better political economy. I agree. Geoff Ingham has done some pretty spectacular work on that, but we need more. 2) As you probably know, something like 90 percent of Americans do not have passports. Presumably, few have… Read More