Keynes
By Roger E. A Farmer
In the FT’s Economists’ Forum, Benn Steil wrote a stimulating piece in which he argued that Keynes was wrong. His argument is that interpretations of Keynesian economics are all based on the assumption that wages and prices are sticky. But wages and prices are not sticky. Ergo – Keynes was wrong.
Why has the European Union suffered so badly in a crisis that began in the US? The answer is to be found in four weaknesses: first, Germany, the EU’s biggest economy, is heavily dependent on foreign spending; second, several western European economies are suffering from post-bubble collapses in demand; third, parts of central and eastern Europe are also being forced to cut spending; and, fourth, European banks proved vulnerable to both the US crisis and to difficulties nearer home. Given these realities, recovery is likely to be slow and painful.
By Stephen Grenville
Bill Poole’s suggestion for a market-based answer to too-big-to-fail is a useful contribution to the on-going debate, and this response is in the same spirit: we need debate to sort out how to fix a failed system.
The Poole proposal may be market-based, but it would introduce a substantial structural distortion by requiring banks to do something that is painfully expensive for them (this subordinated debt sits next to capital, and thus will be about as costly as capital). The market response would undermine its benefits. Even the old capital requirements (in effect much less than half the requirement of the Poole proposal) produced two market responses: evasion (as we have learned, capital ratios were actually much lower) and avoidance (the growth of the shadow banking sector, including institutions which turned out to be too-big-to-fail).
Martin Wolf and Jeffrey Sachs are among those to have joined the FT’s debate on aid. Visit the Arena blog to read their contributions.
By James W Dean and Richard G Lipsey
The enormous stimulus packages hastily put together by governments in most large economies encounter two sorts of criticisms from many conservative economists. Both criticisms are wrong.
The first is that spending will either be hurried and wasteful, or that it won’t come on stream until employment has recovered, and will therefore be inflationary.
Is the current crisis a watershed, with market-led globalisation, financial capitalism and western domination on the one side and protectionism, regulation and Asian predominance on the other? Or will historians judge it, instead, as an event caused by fools, signifying little? My own guess is that it will end up in between. It is neither a Great Depression, because the policy response has been so determined, nor capitalism’s 1989.
By Michael Pomerleano
The consequences of the banking crisis will linger for a long time. In a recent seminal paper, The Aftermath of Financial Crises, (December 19, 2008) Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff find that the outcome of severe financial crises share three characteristics.
By Benn Steil
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the US budget deficit will reach $1.85 trillion this year and $1.38 trillion in 2010, 13.1 per cent and 9.6 per cent of gross domestic product respectively. Much more worryingly, it projects deficits averaging more than $1 trillion a year for the next 10 years, which will raise the US public debt-to-GDP ratio to more than 80 per cent by 2019.
“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Thus wrote the Sicilian writer Giuseppe di Lampedusa, in The Leopard. This seems to me the guiding principle of the Obama presidency. To many Americans, he seems a flaming radical. To me, he is a pragmatic conservative, albeit one responding to extraordinary times. In his own way, Mr Obama is following the path trodden by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
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