邢国鑫
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作者：邢国鑫 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
ECONOMY
Feldstein, Krugman Agree: Another War Would Help
http://www.nationaljournal.com/njonline/feldstein-krugman-agree-another-war-would-help-20101005
Economists From Both Sides Of The Political Spectrum Envision Grim Employment Scenarios For Years To Come
By Michael Hirsh
Updated: November 11, 2010 | 2:47 a.m.
October 5, 2010
Two wars are not enough.
America's economic outlook is so grim, and political solutions are so utterly absent, that only another large-scale war might be enough to lift the nation out of chronic high unemployment and slow growth, two prominent economists, a conservative and a liberal, said today.
Nobelist Paul Krugman, a New York Times columnist, and Harvard's Martin Feldstein, the former chairman of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers, achieved an unnerving degree of consensus about the future during an economic forum in Washington. Their views were shared by a third economist, Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs, who said the only economic scenarios he could visualize were either "pretty bad" or "very bad."
As far as returning to full employment, Krugman said his estimate is "basically never. There is nothing visible on the horizon that will make that happen." Krugman said the United States is caught in a post-recession trough so bleak that "we're going to look at Japan's 'lost decade' as a success story" by comparison.
Krugman and Feldstein, though often on opposite sides of the political fence on fiscal and tax policy, both appeared to share the view that political paralysis in Washington has rendered the necessary fiscal and monetary stimulus out of the question. Only a high-impact "exogenous" shock like a major war -- something similar to what Krugman called the "coordinated fiscal expansion known as World War II" -- would be enough to break the cycle. "I don't think we're about to launch a war against anybody," Feldstein said with tongue-in-cheek regret at the left-leaning forum, "America's Fiscal Choices," sponsored by four think tanks. "But Paul is right. That was the fiscal move that got us out" of the last downturn comparable to this one, the Great Depression.
Both reiterated their previously argued views that the Obama administration's stimulus was far too small to fill the output gap. Feldstein expressed a cautious optimism that if government did nothing, then a dramatic dollar depreciation around the world -- driven, ironically, by a lack of faith in Washington -- might boost exports and the economy. But Krugman and Hatzius appeared to disagree. "A loss of confidence in the dollar would coincide with instability in other markets," Hatzius said, and that would wipe out whatever economic benefits depreciation might supply. Hatzius said the most likely of his scenarios -- the "pretty bad" one -- called for unemployment to climb again to somewhere over 10 percent on growth of 1 percent to 2 percent through the early months of 2011, and no return to full employment before 2014. But he gave a 25 percent to 30 percent chance that his "very bad" alternative could develop: a double-dip recession over the next six to nine months.
Krugman added a third "catastrophic" alternative involving "a 50 percent probability of a government shutdown in the next two years," especially with the upcoming midterm elections expected to empower an even more right-leaning Republican Party.
The discussion -- put on by Demos, the Century Foundation, the Economic Policy Institute, and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities -- was entitled "Budget Policy, Short-Term Recovery and Long-Term Growth." The participants were so caught up in the pessimism of the moment that they never got to questions about budget policy or long-term growth.
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Economists from the Left and the Right Agree: Neither the U.S. Nor Europe Is Dealing With the Real Problem
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/economists-left-and-right-agree-neither-us-nor-europe-dealing-real-problem
Submitted by George Washington on 05/23/2011 20:58 -0400
src="http://player.ooyala.com/player.js?deepLinkEmbedCode=syZXRnMjoet4n2JbzdsVt3pII9J0B3qE&height=360&embedCode=syZXRnMjoet4n2JbzdsVt3pII9J0B3qE&video_pcode=oza2w6q8gX9WSkRx13bskffWIuyf&width=640&autoplay=1"></script>
Paul Krugman argues
that austerity has failed in Europe, but that the European Central Bank
" "i[s] just not willing to face up to the failure of its fantasies"
and to restructure Greek debt.
(In more Europe news, Moody's will issue a big credit warning on 14 of the UK's 18 biggest banks tomorrow).
And in the U.S., former Reagan head of the Office of Management and Budget - David Stockman - says that both Democrats and Republicans are now advocating for default
in America, since Democrats won't compromise on spending and
Republicans won't compromise on taxes. (Before Dems label Stockman as a
radical anti-taxer, remember that he recently said that the Bush tax cuts were "the biggest fiscal mistake in history", and that extending them won't stimulate the economy)
Today, economists from both sides of the political spectrum said that
no one in the U.S. or Europe are dealing with the real problems.
Niall
Ferguson told Bloomberg that no one has the political will to deal with
Greece, and so Europe might experience a crisis as big as the 2008
crash in the U.S.:
Paul Krugman argues
that austerity has failed in Europe, but that the European Central Bank
" "i[s] just not willing to face up to the failure of its fantasies"
and to restructure Greek debt.
(In more Europe news, Moody's will issue a big credit warning on 14 of the UK's 18 biggest banks tomorrow).
And in the U.S., former Reagan head of the Office of Management and Budget - David Stockman - says that both Democrats and Republicans are now advocating for default
in America, since Democrats won't compromise on spending and
Republicans won't compromise on taxes. (Before Dems label Stockman as a
radical anti-taxer, remember that he recently said that the Bush tax cuts were "the biggest fiscal mistake in history", and that extending them won't stimulate the economy)
China's currency
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/10/chinas_currency
War is hell
Oct 6th 2010, 15:28 by R.A. | LONDON
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BACK in March, I wrote a post in which I mused that Paul Krugman's zeal for an aggressive American approach to the Chinese currency issue "looks like nothing so much as the argumentation deployed by the Bush adminstration as it rushed to war in Iraq". Mr Krugman did not take kindly to the remark, responding (with considerable snark) that he wasn't lining up suspect allies and falsifying evidence. And he wasn't. But that wasn't my point. Rather, I was suggesting that Mr Krugman was acting with unecessary impatience and was ignoring potentially costly negative outcomes to such a policy.
As it turns out, Mr Krugman wasn't ignoring the potential for nasty outcomes; he was actively hoping for them. Earlier this week, he wrote:
And look, if China continues on its present course, eventually we will have some serious currency and trade conflict. Furthermore, we should.
I have to say, when I saw that I did a double-take. Surely Paul Krugman—scholar, Nobelist, and very smart guy—wouldn't outright advocate for a serious trade conflict, right? Surely he's wary of moving the relationship between the world's two biggest economic powers in an explicitly hostile direction, isn't he? When have similar moves ever turned out well in the past? And surely, if he did advocate such a thing, he'd clearly lay out the potential costs and benefits, acknowledge that things could work out differently than he'd planned, and explain why the risk was nonetheless worth taking, right?
But of course, he's done no such thing. And readers, let me tell you, if someone else, of a different political persuasion, tried to argue for such a ludicrous policy move on such flimsy grounds he would fry them. He wouldn't show them the least rhetorical mercy.
I kept waiting for the backlash to Mr Krugman's assertion; surely we haven't all lost our minds and decided that now, of all times, is the right time for the world's largest economy to go antagonising the world's second largest economy. But the backlash didn't appear. On the contrary, Martin Wolf jumped aboard the currency war train:
Has the time for a currency war with China arrived? The answer looks increasingly to be yes. The politics and economics of an assault on Chinese exchange rate policy are increasingly convincing. The idea is, of course, deeply disturbing. But I no longer believe there is an alternative.
To Mr Wolf's credit, he at least tries to be somewhat systematic in coming to this conclusion.
We have to address four questions. Is China a “currency manipulator”? If it is, does it matter? What might China reasonably be asked to do? Finally, can other countries shift China’s policies, with limited collateral damage?
China is obviously manipulating its currency. It obviously matters though Mr Wolf concedes, as Mr Krugman is oddly unwilling to, that other factors are shaping the current balance of deficits and surpluses. A Chinese revaluation, by itself, would not elminate the American trade deficit.
Mr Wolf is also refreshingly reasonable in discussing what China could be asked to do:
An adjustment in the nominal exchange rate is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the rebalancing of the world economy: not necessary, because higher inflation could bring about changes in relative prices, instead; not sufficient, because it would still require an increase in domestic spending, relative to output. At most, therefore, an adjustment in the nominal exchange rate is a facilitator of a wider set of desired adjustments...
In any such discussions, one would have to address Chinese concerns that letting the exchange rate appreciate significantly would not only damage export industry, but risk a “lost decade” similar to that of Japan in the 1990s.
So while Mr Wolf appears to be on Mr Krugman's side, he tells us here that nominal exchange rate appreciation is not necessary for global rebalancing and that it might have significant negative effects on the Chinese economy, to which developed nations should be sensitive. But here is the kicker. Mr Wolf finally seeks to figure out what might be done about the situation:
This leads to the final question: how might China be cajoled or coerced into changing its policies? Negotiation remains a hope. The rest of Group of 20 leading countries should unite in calling for these changes. But if negotiation continues to fail, alternatives must be considered.
Did you get that? He began his column by arguing that there was no alternative to trade war. Now he writes that if negotiation fails, other alternatives must be sought. But why should negotiation fail? Perhaps because America has nothing to offer in return...
Meanwhile, China should demand complementary actions elsewhere, notably in the US.
So according to Mr Wolf, there is a basis for negotiation between America and China. Mr Krugman loves to argue that persuasion and diplomacy have failed to produce much of an appreciation in the Chinese currency, but as Mr Wolf admits, America hasn't really been negotiating its heart out, largely because efforts to boost America's domestic savings aren't all that popular.
In the short term, the biggest factor governing appreciation in the yuan is the strength of the Chinese economy (see Michael Pettis on this). When growth looks secure and inflation is roaring ahead, China appreciates. When China is worried, it doesn't. So if America wants China to appreciate, putting Chinese growth at risk would seem to be a counterproductive solution.
Meanwhile, rebalancing is the work of years. China and America have been building up their export and import orientation for decades, and this can't be reversed overnight. That suggests that a rapid revaluation will not have a large and immediate positive effect on the American economy, and it suggests that what positive effect there is will be offset, in part if not in whole, by the negative impact on the Chinese economy (which, the IMF will remind you, is expected to be the primary engine of global growth through 2011 at least). A Chinese revaluation makes for cruddy American countercyclical policy. Rebalancing should take pace gradually, through nominal exchange rate adjustments and complementary structural adjustments on both sides, and we have ample reason to believe that this is achievable, and little reason to threaten trade war over slow initial progress.
Finally, America has a whopping big alternative to both negotiations and trade war available to it—one which happens to be win-win. That is: pursue adequate fiscal and monetary stimulus. At the present nominal exchange rate, expansionary monetary policy in America would prove highly inflationary in China, which is a darn good reason for everyone in China (including those pesky exporters) to favour appreciation. And adequate stimulus would boost the global economic outlook, which would boost the Chinese economic outlook, and as explained above an improved Chinese outlook is the key factor in generating rapid appreciation.
Mr Krugman might respond that America's economic policymakers are too lame to do what they should do. Maybe so, though the Fed, at least, looks likely to ease further, thereby upping the pressure on China to revalue. But in general the argument that economic policy is bad so the government should try protectionism is one with a long and sordid past. Mr Krugman will probably call me a knee-jerk free trader with a poor understanding of the underlying economics for suggesting as much, but let's be honest, when has this ever worked? What country failed at macroeconomic management, opted instead to raise tariffs, and had everything turn up roses and candy?
Frankly, I'm disgusted all the way around. It is embarrassing for an economist of Mr Krugman's calibre to be arguing in such a prominent place, on such flimsy grounds, for such a risky policy. It is sad that this has generated so little criticism from economic pundits who should know better. And it's frustrating that America's heedless policymakers have led us to this place, by acting insufficiently to boost American demand, by acting insufficiently to remove disincentives to save among American households, and by allowing Congress' tariff-happy legislators to lead on the issue rather than pushing for meaningful multilateral talks on global imbalances.
But look, if you think the conversation is lame now, just wait until this time next year.
Paul Krugman: Let’s Spend Like It’s World War III
http://www.verumserum.com/?p=17004
John on September 6, 2010 at 11:51 am
Funny, I thought Krugman was against wars of choice. Apparently not. In today’s column, Krugman finally lets us know just how much stimulus was needed:
From an economic point of view World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit-financed government spending, on a scale that would never have been approved otherwise. Over the course of the war the federal government borrowed an amount equal to roughly twice the value of G.D.P. in 1940, the equivalent of roughly $30 trillion today.
…this slump can be cured. All it will take is a little bit of intellectual clarity, and a lot of political will.
I have no idea where Krugman is getting his figures. US GDP in 1940 was just shy of one trillion dollars. So Krugman appears to be saying the government borrowed $2 trillion in 1940 dollars, which would indeed be $30 trillion in today’s dollars (or more depending which method of adjustment is used).
However, just two years ago, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University public finance Professor Laura Bilmes issued a report which estimated the total cost of WWII in inflation adjusted dollars as around $5 trillion. What accounts for the difference? Who knows?
http://www.verumserum.com/media/2010/09/bondsbuildships-216x300.jpg
Either way, Krugman’s war of choice on a sagging economy is wrong-headed. Here’s why: We financed World War II without borrowing from China or anywhere else for that matter. In fact, the allies were borrowing from us both directly (the UK) and in the form of the lend-lease of equipment (UK, Soviet Union, France, China), some of which wasn’t paid off until a few years ago (2006). Where did all the money come from? Well, a significant portion of the war was paid for through the sale of War Bonds to US citizens. Americans bought bonds because we’d been attacked by “the Japs” and were equally determined to stop the Third Reich from over-taking Europe.
This is the key point Krugman omits: The enormous debt was voluntary. In essence, the American people offered the world the money, materials and labor necessary to win the war against totalitarian evil.
Krugman also forgets to mention that the “boom” which followed the war was significantly aided by the fact that the US was the one major manufacturing economy not affected by years of carpet-bombing. Even $30 trillion of deficit spending today would not produce a similar advantage unless we simultaneously bomb a large portion of the manufacturing base of the EU. Is this also part of Krugman’s plan? He doesn’t say.
Today, with no comparable threat on the horizon, Americans are loathe to make world war III scale sacrifices. That message has been echoing throughout the Tea Parties for over a year. A similar message of austerity has echoed on the left which has complained for more than five years about the cost of two wars in the Middle East. And yet, with Americans on the left and right proclaiming they are sick of the spending, Krugman’s column seems aimed at getting his liberal allies to ignore and then over-rule the American people (for their own good, of course). Simply put, Krugman wants to spend as if it’s World War III using involuntary foreign debt. That’s a very different thing.
Perhaps Krugman can’t see the difference between declaring war on Imperial Japan and the Nazis and propping up Barack Obama’s chances for re-election in 2012, but most Americans recognize that borrowing $30 trillion and spending it on make-work is not the same thing as a self-financed struggle to save the world from totalitarianism. This is a war of choice Americans should soundly reject.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Paul Krugman: The War on Logic
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/01/paul-krugman-the-war-on-logic.html
What's really behind the GOP's opposition to health care reform?:
The War on Logic, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: ...We are, I believe, witnessing something new in American politics..., the G.O.P. ... war on logic.
So, about that...: this week the House is expected to pass H.R. 2, the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act — its actual name. But Republicans have a small problem: they claim to care about budget deficits, yet the Congressional Budget Office says that repealing last year’s health reform would increase the deficit. So what, other than dismissing the nonpartisan budget office’s verdict as “their opinion” — as Mr. Boehner has — can the G.O.P. do?
The answer is contained in an ... “analysis” ... released by the speaker’s office, which purports to show that health care reform actually increases the deficit. Why? That’s where the war on logic comes in.
First of all, says the analysis, the true cost of reform includes the cost of the “doc fix.” What’s that?
Well, in 1997 Congress enacted a formula to determine Medicare payments to physicians. The formula was, however, flawed; it would lead to payments so low that doctors would stop accepting Medicare patients. Instead of changing the formula, however, Congress has consistently enacted one-year fixes. And Republicans claim that the estimated cost of future fixes, $208 billion over the next 10 years, should be considered a cost of health care reform. But the same spending would still be necessary if we were to undo reform. ...
There’s more like that: the G.O.P. also claims that $115 billion of other health care spending should be charged to health reform, even though the budget office has tried to explain that most of this spending would have taken place even without reform.
To be sure, the Republican analysis doesn’t rely entirely on spurious attributions of cost — it also relies on using three-card monte tricks to make money disappear. Health reform, says the budget office, will increase Social Security revenues and reduce Medicare costs. But the G.O.P. analysis says that these sums don’t count, because some people have said that these savings would also extend the life of these programs’ trust funds, so counting these savings as deficit reduction would be “double-counting,” because — well, actually it doesn’t make any sense, but it sounds impressive. ...
The key to understanding the G.O.P. analysis of health reform is that the party’s leaders are not, in fact, opposed to reform because they believe it will increase the deficit. Nor are they opposed because they seriously believe that it will be “job-killing” (which it won’t be). ... As I tried to explain in my last column, the modern G.O.P. has been taken over by an ideology in which the suffering of the unfortunate isn’t a proper concern of government, and alleviating that suffering at taxpayer expense is immoral, never mind how little it costs.
Given that their minds were made up from the beginning, top Republicans weren’t interested in and didn’t need any real policy analysis — in fact, they’re basically contemptuous of such analysis, something that shines through in their health care report. All they ever needed or wanted were some numbers and charts to wave at the press, fooling some people into believing that we’re having some kind of rational discussion. We aren’t.
Did World War II Get Us Out of the Depression? Paul Krugman Thinks So. I Don’t.
http://www.swifteconomics.com/2010/09/09/was-world-war-ii-good-for-the-economy-paul-krugman-thinks-so-i-dont/
By Andrew | September 9, 2010 A | A
inShare0
Dig hole... Fill hole back in... Become Rich!
Paul Krugman is back spouting more nonsense than ever. It’s not on par with his most epic screw up; when in 2002 he recommended “Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.” (Yes, he’s still considered a respectable economist.) This time around he starts off well enough, basically saying we’re smack dab in 1937, about to face a double dip recession. I agree, but then everything goes awry as he gives his reason: because we “didn’t spend enough.”
“From an economic point of view World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit-financed government spending, on a scale that would never have been approved otherwise. Over the course of the war the federal government borrowed an amount equal to roughly twice the value of G.D.P. in 1940 — the equivalent of roughly $30 trillion today… Deficit spending created an economic boom — and the boom laid the foundation for long-run prosperity.”
But guess what Paul, the economic boom didn’t begin until after the war ended… in other words, the economic boom began with the United States demobilized! Even under Krugman’s analysis, the boom sustained through a massive negative stimulus when the United States pulled back from a war economy. But the ‘war prosperity’ Krugman alludes to is a myth. During the war, GDP went up because the government set the price of everything and inflated the currency. And unemployment went down because several million men were drafted and sent overseas. On the home front, there was no such boom; price controls, rationing, shortages and restrictions were all the citizens of the United States saw between 1941 and 1945.
Indeed, Paul Krugman needs to read Robert Higgs on the subject of World War II. As Higgs points out:
“…from 1941 to 1943, real gross private domestic investment plunged by 64 percent; during the four years of the war, it never rose above 55 percent of its 1941 level [and] only in 1946 did it reach a new high.”
Keynesian economists were convinced the economy would fall back into depression after the war ended. As the famous American Keynesian Alvin Hansen said during World War II, “the government cannot just disband the Army, close down munitions factories, stop building ships, and remove all economic controls.” If they did that, we’d surely fall back into a depression. The “Great Depression of 1946″ obviously didn’t happen, (although the United States had some pretty wicked inflation in the late 1940′s, due to inflationary policies during the war). No, instead a return to normalcy was a return to prosperity, in fact, 1946 was the most productive year of the private sector in American history. But look at the drop in government spending after the war:
Government Spending as a Percentage of GDP
How does Krugman explain this? Furthermore, as I pointed out the first time I attempted to eviscerate this nonsense, even if World War II “helped” the United States, it’s simply an outlier. To quote myself:
“The United States went into a severe recession in 1920, just after World War I. Germany’s currency hyperinflated while the Austrian, Ottoman and Russian Empires simply collapsed. In the American Civil War, the South was reduced to rubble and the North suffered runaway inflation. After the Revolutionary War, the American currency hyperinflated (thus the saying “not worth a Continental”). Rome’s collapse was mostly due to corruption at home and military over extension abroad. Napoleon was so strapped for money after the early stages of the Napoleonic War, he had to sell the Louisiana territories to the United States for pennies on the dollar. The Franco-Prussian War was almost immediately followed by a speculative housing bust, which created the panic of 1873 and a global depression. Spain was more or less left to the ash bin of history, after the Spanish Armada was destroyed (shouldn’t there have been an enormous economic stimulus to rebuild?). The combination of spending on the Vietnam War and the Great Society lead to the stagflation of the 1970′s. In addition, the United States suffered recessions immediately following the Korean War, Gulf War and Serbian War. The Soviet Union collapsed after a long war in Afghanistan. Honestly, have the many sub-Saharan wars in Africa stimulated their economies? Has this economic strategy worked for Middle Eastern countries bogged down in decades of conflict? And really, if war is so good for an economy, why is our own economy collapsing all around us, while we are engaged in outrageously expensive boondoggles in Iraq and Afghanistan?”
Wars are bad… for everything.
And Paul Krguman, or any Keynesian for that matter, also needs to explain why the Depression of 1920 ended so quickly with no government intervention. I can’t find any discussion of it whatsoever. If anyone can find his explanation for it (or the many other short recessions with no or limited government interference, say 1857 or 1987). If someone has a Keynesian explanation, please let me know of it.
But until then, we need to recognize that the United States is completely underwater, Greece has already gone down; Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Iceland could very well be on the way, and Krugman apparently wants us to join them.
But Paul, seriously, there is no one big enough to bail us out. Sooner or later this insanity needs to stop.
作者：邢国鑫 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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战争离我们还远吗? 历史事件已经证明乱删行老虎的帖后果极其严重!
