Alejandro Nadal
It must hurt when you show your hand without anybody calling your final bet. After all, why do you have to give free information to your opponents? This is what the infamous troika must feel right now after revealing its “rescue” plan for Cyprus. The parliament in Nicosia has flatly rejected the strategy, but the troika’s game plan has been unveiled at great political (and possibly financial) costs.
The little island in the eastern Mediterranean is responsible for only 0.2 per cent of the European Union’s GDP. But the architecture of the rescue plan has resuscitated primal fears about the future of the euro. Why is this so?
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James Heintz, Guest Blogger
The Group of 20 (G20) has declared itself the “premier global economic forum” and was created to tackle the most pressing challenges confronting the world economy today, including reducing instability and preventing future financial crises. The G20 has committed itself to a goal of shared and inclusive growth. Given this commitment, it is striking how little attention has been paid to issues of gender equality in its policy frameworks, summits, and declarations.
This report examines the G20’s strategies and their effects on gender equality. It finds that the G20 has not seriously considered the consequences for women and men when formulating policies and setting its agenda. There are indications that this situation has changed somewhat, with a commitment to gender equality made at the 2012 Los Cabos Summit in Mexico. Nevertheless, questions remain over whether gender equality will be taken seriously. Representation within the G20 is unbalanced – only 25 percent of the heads of state of the G20 member countries are currently women. The figure for the official government representatives, the “sherpas,” is lower – just 15 percent are women.
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Sunanda Sen, Guest Blogger
Concerns have been rising, in recent months, over the current state of China’s external balance and the future of the RMB. Apprehensions relate to the negative balances, which have been visible in China’s financial balance since the last quarter of 2011. The negative sums were respectively (-) $ 3.02 and (-)$ 4.21 billion during the second and third quarters of 2012, preceded by an even larger sum at (-)$ 29.0 billion in Q4 2011. Such deficits contrast with the surpluses in the financial account usually maintained, which were as much as $13.20 billion during Q4 of 2010. These changes have been matched by tendencies for its official reserves to slide downwards. For instance, there was a $ 6 trillion drop in official reserves between March and June 2012. Pressures on the RMB rate even led to its depreciation, from 6.30 per dollar in April 2012 to 6.41 by August 2012. The currency, however, reverted to its earlier phase of appreciation, with the rate moving up from RMB 6.38 to RMB 6.31 between 24th July 2012 and 18th January 2013.
Differences relating to the exchange rate have continued to prevail across officials and think tanks in China and the US, with the latter holding China’s exchange rate management responsible for the continuing global account imbalances between the two countries. With pressures on China to appreciate the currency, the US Treasury even came to the point on in April 2010 of deciding whether China can be treated as a currency manipulator. The on-going dynamics of China’s foreign exchange transactions can be better understood by tracking the following major breaks in China’s exchange rate policy:
First, an end to the prevailing fixed RMB-dollar rate in 2005, which came largely with pressures from the US. Despite the twin surpluses between the current and the capital account, China was maintaining, since 1997, a fixed exchange rate at around 8.27 RMB per dollar. The change to managed floating, still supported by direct purchases of foreign currency which were flowing in abundance with the twin surpluses, led the RMB to rise immediately to 8.11 per dollar, with gradual appreciations since then. With appreciations continuing, the change to a floating RMB did not, however, lead to currency speculation till the third quarter of 2011.
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Alejandro Nadal
The global financial crisis is breathing and evolving. In Europe it is treated as a sovereign debt crisis. But given the fact that the crisis exploded in the midst of the private financial sector, how did we get here?
Four decades ago, more precisely on January 3 1973, a new law on central banking was approved in France. The new statute for the Banque de France contained critical provisions for the independence of the monetary institute. Article 25 turns out to be particularly relevant for today’s debate on Europe’s crisis. It stated that the Treasury would not be able to resort to the Banque de France to borrow money.
This represented a historical transformation in public finance and left the State at the mercy of the private commercial banking system. Instead of using the money emission capacity of the central bank, the French government had now embarked on a new course, one that turned out to be a milestone in financial liberalization. Many other countries followed this example. Incidentally, when the law was passed Georges Pompidou was the President of France. He had been director of the Banque Rothschild between 1956-1962, a fact that generated suspicion as to the motivations of the Loi 73-7 of 1973.
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Thomas Palley
Last Monday, Federal Reserve Vice-Chair Janet Yellen gave the keynote speech at an AFL-CIO economic policy conference on restoring shared prosperity.
Dr. Yellen began by noting that the Federal Reserve “is the only agency assigned the job of pursuing maximum employment.” She then went on to acknowledge “the gulf between maximum employment and the very difficult conditions workers face today.” That gulf is the reason behind the Federal Reserve’s on-going actions to strengthen the recovery and why there is continued need for “forceful action to increase the pace of economic growth and job creation.”
Read more at:
http://www.aflcio.org/Blog/Economy/Yellen-to-Washington-D.C.-Fiscal-Austerity-Slows-Recovery
Panico and Purificato, Guest Bloggers
What is to be done to solve the European debt problem? In our view, fiscal policy enhancing growth and central bank interventions to reduce the interest rates on sovereign securities are necessary. To enact them, a satisfactory answer must be given to the moral hazard problem regarding the behaviour of national authorities: if the Euro governments help out national governments that are in budget difficulties, what is to prevent these nations from engaging in irresponsible budget policies in the future? The literature indicates viable solutions (Panico and Purificato). It suggests reforming the organization of the coordination process between monetary and fiscal policies in such a way as to minimize the moral hazard problem regarding the behaviour of the national Governments. A European fiscal agency can serve this purpose. It can fix, year after year, the ratio deficit-GDP for each country, taking into account the cyclical conditions and the needs of the economies, while realizing the objective of financial sustainability.
The organisation of monetary policy in the euro area is based on effective forms of coordination that minimise the uncertainty on how the national central banks implement the decisions taken at the European level. In fiscal policy, instead, national governments can agree on decisions at super-national level, but behave differently at home without suffering negative consequences. Opportunistic behaviour is then possible and this leads the monetary authorities and national Governments to defend themselves from the unreliable behaviour of the others. Under these conditions, the search for a sensible policy for the whole area is an empty aspiration.
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Alejandro Nadal
In 1964 Mr. Jerome Daly took a mortgage for $14,000 US dollars from the First National Bank of Montgomery in Minnesota. In 1967 he was $476 in arrears, the bank initiated foreclosure proceedings and bought the property at a sheriff’s sale. The bank then sued for possession and a jury trial was held in December 1968 in a township with a very appropriate name, Credit River.
Daly argued that the mortgage contract was null and void because it lacked consideration on the part of the bank. In legal parlance this means that in any contract both parties must exchange something of inherent value. When the bank had granted the loan it had simply inserted an entry in a ledger, thus “creating money out of thin air.” Because the bank did not commit anything of value into the contract, there was no consideration and the contract was null and void. The plaintiff had no legal base to claim Daly’s house.
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Leonce Ndikumana
Following the intense debate on the fiscal deficit during the U.S. presidential campaign, fiscal consolidation continues to dominate discussions in policy circles and academia. The large fiscal deficit in the U.S. and sovereign debt woes in the Eurozone are used by proponents of the “small government” mantra as a means to advance the belief that fiscal consolidation is the only way to bring the economy back to sustained growth and full employment. While the arguments are not new, the current circumstances of a global recession and a slow recovery in the U.S. make it somehow easier for proponents of this school of thought to fool the public into believing that tying the hands of the government is the only road to salvation.
African countries and developing countries in general know too well about the ravages of austerity programs; they certainly would not want to revisit the era of the 1980s that left permanent scars from fiscal retrenchment. While arguments for the alleged benefits of fiscal consolidation in terms of accelerated recovery and long-run growth are built on shaky empirical grounds in the case of developed countries,[1] they are even more tenuous for African countries. First is the chimera of “expansionary fiscal contraction” whereby fiscal consolidation is arguably supposed to boost growth through expansion of private spending driven by improved business confidence. In the case of developing countries, fiscal retrenchment typically involves substantial cuts in public expenditures including infrastructure, which worsens rather than improves the business environment by raising production costs. So, “expansionary fiscal contraction” isn’t, and can’t be, a developing country phenomenon.
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Gerald Epstein
Prognostication is a fool’s errand…maybe that’s why we economists like to do so much of it, especially this time of year.
John Maynard Keynes was no fool, but even he couldn’t help making forecasts. Keynes famously predicted, for example, that over time there would be such abundance of capital that investments would yield close to 0%, bringing about the “euthanasia of the rentier.” Though interest rates are now quite low, the rentiers are still, unfortunately, going strong.
Keynes’ willingness to engage in such forecasts is all the more interesting because, better than most economists – then and now — Keynes understood the pitfalls of economic prediction. As emphasized by my colleague James Crotty, among others, central to Keynes’ economic thought is the notion of “fundamental uncertainty.” That is, the economy is constantly in a state of flux, especially in times of profound structural change, so about the future “we simply do not know.”
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Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer
The GDP figures published in the Eurostat press release on the 15th of November 2012 for the Economic and Monetary Union (euro area) marked the confirmation of a double-dipped recession (with negative growth in quarters 2 and 3 of 2012). Gross domestic product was 0.6 per cent lower in the third quarter of 2012 compared with 12 months earlier. Germany and France have so far managed to escape the double dip for the present, but most other countries, including the more hawkish on fiscal austerity (such as Netherlands, Finland) recorded lower output in 2012 Q3 compared with 2011 Q3. For other European Union (EU) countries, the UK had emerged from its double-dip recession with Olympic boosted growth in Q3 after three quarters of negative growth, leaving 2012Q3 GDP at same level as 12 months earlier. Output remains below its 2007 level in the EU and in the European Monetary Union (EMU) — indicating, in effect, at least a lost half-decade.
The return of recession is symbolic of the failure of the austerity programmes, which have been striking down economic activity throughout the EU and EMU. It should give rise to some thoughts as to why the austerity programmes are not working to bring down budget deficits without damaging economic activity. There have been many claims that austerity does work in that the so-called fiscal consolidation brings down deficits and restores full employment – under the heading of expansionary fiscal consolidation. The national income accounts equality between income, output and expenditure necessarily means that a rise in output has to go alongside a rise in expenditure. A cut back in public expenditure can then only go alongside a rise in output if there is a more than compensating rise in private expenditure. The mainstream argument (wrapped up in arguments such as the Ricardian Equivalence Theorem) is that indeed cutting public expenditure will “restore confidence”, lower interest rates, etc., leading to higher private expenditure.
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