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Thank heaven for Tom Hoenig, the only proven-honest central banker we’ve got. Yes, I know he’s moved on from the KC Fed to serve as Vice Chairman of the FDIC. He actually might do a lot more good over there, anyway. In recent months, we’ve heard how Wall Street’s Blood-sucking Vampire Squids have reformed themselves. They no longer pose any danger to our economy. They’ve written “living wills” that describe how they’ll safely bury themselves without Uncle Sam’s help next time they implode. You see, it doesn’t matter that they remain big—indeed, the biggest behemoths are much bigger than they were before they caused the last Global Financial Crisis. They are no longer “too big to fail” because they’ve all got plans to unwind their dangerous positions when stuff hits the fan. This is very important to Wall Street and Washington because Dodd-Frank requires downsizing and simplification of the Vampire Squids if they remain a threat. Big financial institutions that are highly interconnected can cause a relatively small problem with one bank’s assets to snowball into a national and international crisis that forces Uncle Sam to intervene to bail-out the miscreants. We know that the biggest half-dozen US banks are huge and have highly interconnected balance sheets. We know they have legacy garbage on their balance sheets, and they are… Read More

When the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) came to Greece’s rescue in May 2010 with a 110 billion euro bailout loan in order to avoid the default of a eurozone member state (a second bailout loan worth 130 billion euros was activated in March 2012), the intentions of the rescue plan were multifold. First, the EU-IMF duo (with the IMF in the role of junior partner) wanted to protect the interests of the foreign banks and the financial institutions that had loaned Greece billions of euros. Greece’s gross foreign debt amounted to over 410 billion euros by the end of 2009, so a default would have led to substantial losses for foreign banks and bondholders, but also to the collapse of the Greek banking system itself, as the European Central Bank (ECB) would be obliged in such an event to refuse to fund Greek banks. Second, by bailing out Greece, the EU wanted to avoid the risk of negative contagion effects spreading across the euro area. A Greek default would have led to a financial meltdown across the euro area and perhaps to the end of the euro altogether. Third, with Germany as Europe’s hegemonic power, there was a clear intention to punish Greece for its allegedly “profligate” ways (although it was large inflows of capital… Read More

From time to time, I call attention to solid coverage of the Federal Reserve in the popular press, for example this post, which links to an interesting William Greider profile of Ben Bernanke. Nicholas Lemann profiles the new Fed chair in the July 21 issue of The New Yorker. One of the key themes of the newer article is that Yellen is “the most liberal [Fed chair] since Marriner Eccles,” and an “unrepentant Keynesian.” The article usefully contrasts Yellen’s policy views with those of orthodox macroeconomics. Yellen identifies as an adherent of the philosophy that government is capable of greatly improving on the outcomes of a modern capitalist system. (For many, this is the essence of what is known as the liberal view in the US political realm. Yellen’s liberalism will matter (1) in financial regulation, and (2) in macro policy, where the Fed is influential.) Of course,  there are many varieties of liberalism. Here is a perhaps-characteristic Yellen quote from the article, explaining economics as a personal career choice: “What I really liked about economics was that it provided a rigorous, analytical way of thinking about issues that have great impact on people’s lives.  Economics is a subject that really relates to core aspects of human well-being, and there’s a methodology for thinking about these things. This was a… Read More

by Julie L. Hotchkiss, a research economist and senior policy adviser at the Atlanta Fed, and Fernando Rios-Avila, a research scholar at the Levy Institute A recent Policy Note published by the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College shows that what we thought had been a decade of essentially flat real wages (since 2002) has actually been a decade of declining real wages. Replicating the second figure in that Policy Note, Chart 1 shows that holding experience (i.e., age) and education fixed at their levels in 1994, real wages per hour are at levels not seen since 1997. In other words, growth in experience and education within the workforce during the past decade has propped up wages. The implication for inequality of this growth in education and experience was only touched on in the Policy Note that Levy published. In this post, we investigate more fully what contribution growth in educational attainment has made to the growth in wage inequality since 1994.

Contemporary capitalism is characterized by a political economy that revolves around finance capital, is based on a savage form of free market fundamentalism, and thrives on a wave of globalizing processes and global financial networks that have produced global economic oligarchies with the capacity to influence the shaping of policymaking across nations.[1] As such, the landscape of contemporary capitalism is shaped by three interrelated forces: financialization, neoliberalism, and globalization. All three of these elements constitute part of a coherent whole which has given rise to an entity called predatory capitalism.[2] On the Links between Financialization, Neoliberalism, and Globalization The three pillars on which contemporary predatory capitalism is structured—financialization, neoliberalism, and globalization—need to be understood on the basis of a structural connectivity model, although it is rather incorrect to reduce one to the other. Let me explain. The surge of financial capital long predates the current neoliberal era, and the financialization of the economy takes place independently of neoliberalism, although it is greatly enhanced by the weakening of regulatory regimes and the collusion between finance capital and political officials that prevails under the neoliberal order. Neoliberalism, with its emphasis on corporate power, deregulation, the marketization of society, the glorification of profit and the contempt for public goods and values, provides the ideological and political support needed for the financialization of the economy… Read More

Randall Wray did a guest post at FT Alphaville as part of a series devoted to the upcoming Mission-Oriented Finance conference. In his post, Wray counters the conventional story about the nature and significance of money with an alternate view drawing on Schumpeter’s notion of bankers as the “ephors” of capitalism: Bank and central bank money creation is limited by rules of thumb, underwriting standards, capital ratios and other imposed constraints. After abandoning the gold standard, there are no physical limits to money creation. We cannot run out of keystroke entries on bank balance sheets. This recognition is fundamental to issues surrounding finance. It is also scary. […] It is difficult to find examples of excessive money creation to finance productive uses. Rather, the main problem is that much or even most finance is created to fuel asset price bubbles. And that includes finance created both by our private banking ephors and our central banking ephors. The biggest challenge facing us today is not the lack of finance, but rather how to push finance to promote both the private and the public interest — through the capital development of our country. Read the post here.

What has struck me about Modi’s maiden budget is not the fiscal arithmetic, but the framework. And while this note confines itself to analyzing the budgetary framework rather than the numbers, it should be noted that the effectiveness of the fiscal arithmetic has gone for a toss with the announcement of token provisions on too many programmes with too little money. The underlying framework of the speech revealed the thematic priorities of the Modi government, which were twofold: (i) growth revival and (ii) macroeconomic stability. This sets the track. The general budget was simultaneously ensuring “continuity” and “change.” The continuity elements in the budget may be designed to ensure a bipartisan approach in tackling issues of national interest, especially in the case of fiscal consolidation and the “rights-based” public policy decisions (e.g., employer of last resort, food security) of earlier governments. However, the changes suggested in the budget, in terms of monetary framework, are disturbing.

C. J. Polychroniou interviewed Levy Institute President Dimitri Papadimitriou for the Sunday edition of Greece’s Eleftherotypia. What follows is an excerpt from the English version of that interview (part one of the Greek version is here): C. J. Polychroniou: After four years as the pariah of the financial markets, in the course of which 330 billion euros was granted/guaranteed in international bailouts in order to avoid an official bankruptcy, Greece has made a successful return to the international bond markets. Why did Greece return to the bond markets now when the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio is much bigger than it was back in 2010? Dimitri B. Papadimitriou: The return to the bond markets was an act of pure symbolism. The government purposely made the success of the austerity program dependent on achieving a primary surplus as opposed to the return to growth in output and employment. Recall that the idea of expansionary austerity embraced by the country’s international lenders was spectacularly discredited. Thus, the Troika (IMF, EU and European Central Bank ) and Greece’s compliant government needed to invent a new metric of success, and it was associated with achieving a primary surplus as large as it could be so that financial markets can be impressed. However, no one else is impressed, especially the international lenders, for three main reasons: (1)… Read More

(Here is a presentation I gave at the University of Denver at the annual J. Fagg Foster honors ceremony. Most of you will not know of Foster, but you should. While he did not publish much, he was the professor of a number of prominent institutionalists who attended DU in the early postwar period. I was lucky to have studied with his student, Marc Tool, and was introduced to Foster’s work at the very beginning of my studies of economics. My presentation below is based on two of Foster’s articles: J. Fagg Foster (1981) “Understandings and Misunderstandings of Keynesian Economics,” JEI, vol XV, No 4, p. 949-957.; and (1981) “The Reality of the Present and the Challenge of the Future”, JEI vol XV, No 4, p. 963-968. Both are from 1966, republished in a special issue of the Journal of Economic Issues, 1981. You should read them.) Is this the age of Keynes? That’s the question raised by Fagg Foster in 1966. In the 1960s the answer seemed obvious. Keynes dominated economics—or, at least, macroeconomics—and Keynesianism dominated policy. And it worked! Or, so most thought. Foster wasn’t sure. While he agreed that “[t]here probably has been no instance in history in which a pattern of ideas has had so much effect on the everyday life of everyone in so short… Read More

The funny-shaped surface in the Wolfram “CDF” below (software download link) depicts excess demand for goods. The flat one represents the zero line where supply and demand are equal. On each axis is a variable that affects the degree to which demand outpaces or falls short of supply: (1) firms’ share in the price of goods, after paying wages, which equals the pricing markup m divided by (1 + m); and  (2) the income and production generated by the private sector, measured by capacity utilization. The height dimension measures excess demand for goods. The sliding levers at the top of the CDF allow one to change (1) (“chi”) the percentage of disposable income spent by the wealthy households who own most stock, as well as all government-issued securities; (2) the rate of production by the public sector, which hires workers to produce services; and/or (3) the annual compound real interest rate (yield) on government securities. All of the other parameters are held constant as you move the levers. Click on the “plus” sign next to a lever, and further information appears. [WolframCDF source=”http://multiplier-effect.org/files/2014/04/3D-excess-demand-graphN5.cdf” width=”331″ height=”361″ altimage=”3D-excess-demand-graphN5.png” altimagewidth=”309″ altimageheight=”351″] Click here for a much larger, easier-to-read version of this CDF on a webpage of its own. At the curved line where the two surfaces intersect (the edge of the dark blue… Read More

In a new policy brief, Jan Kregel looks at a lesser-known, early period of Minsky’s work on financial reform. In the ’60s, Minsky was a consultant to a number of government agencies, including the Federal Reserve, on issues related to financial regulation. In this context, he came up with a new approach to bank examination, which he called “cash-flow based.” The new approach evaluated bank liquidity, not as an innate feature of a particular class of assets, but as a function of the balance sheet of the institutions under examination, the markets for those assets, the state of the macroeconomy and the financial system as a whole, and much else. In fact, as Kregel explains, what Minsky was after here was related to an early form of what we now call “macroprudential regulation.” The evolution of Minsky’s thought on this approach to bank examination is interesting enough in itself, but it’s also a reflection of Minsky’s broader thinking about financial regulation and reform. Minsky developed his regulatory proposals in the ’60s and ’70s with an eye to what was to become his well-known “financial instability hypothesis,” which is to say, his proposals were informed by a theory of endogenous financial instability: a theory in which financial crises are not only possible, but are to be expected; generated as a result… Read More

Chicago Fed President Charles Evans spoke at last week’s Minsky conference, and news reports have focused on his comments regarding the expectation that the Federal Reserve will wait at least six months after the end of QE before beginning to raise interest rates (Evans: “It could be six, it could be 16 months”; “If I had my druthers, I’d want more accommodation and I’d push it into 2016,” but “the actual, most likely case I think is probably late 2015”). But his speech might also be of interest to those who have been following the debate over whether the Federal Reserve is, let’s say, equally passionate about the two sides of its “dual mandate” (price stability and maximum employment). Right now, the Fed is missing both of its ostensible targets, with inflation below 2 percent and unemployment above the Fed’s estimate of the “natural” rate, which ranges from 5.2 to 5.6 percent (for Evans, it’s 5.25 percent). Many have suggested that the Fed appears much more concerned about inflation rising above 2 percent than it does about high unemployment, or below-target inflation, for that matter. In the video below, Evans shares his view of how the Fed should “score” its hits and misses on unemployment and inflation: the 9 percent unemployment rate we faced back in September 2011 can be… Read More