May 25, 2015 | By Benjamin Cole via Marcus Nunes‘Historinhas | The International Monetary Fund on May 22 badgered the Bank of Japan to adopt a more aggressive growth stance, even though the island nation posted Q1 real GDP growth of 2.4%, and an annual inflation rate of 2.3%—along with an unemployment rate of 3.4%.
SAO PAULO | May 15, 2015 | By Marcus Nunes via Historinhas | It´s such a bad ‘target’ that the Fed has been compelled to move the target frequently over the past couple of years, all the way from 6.5% to 5%-5.2%!
May 8, 2015 | By Benjamin Cole via Marcus Nunes‘ Historinhas | I have plugged for QE-offset or -financed tax cuts for a long time. I did not know that former Fed Chairman and now multi-millionaire consultant Ben Bernanke also explicitly believed in the same thing.
BANGKOK | May 3, 2015 | By Benjamin Cole via Marcus Nunes‘ Historinhas | I have complained before in this space about the macroeconomic defeatism seen among both left- and right-wing economists. We are told that due to demographics and lower productivity, future economic growth must be muted. Not so.
SAO PAULO | February 24, 2015 | By Marcus Nunes via Historinhas | It took three years, but in late 2011 Poland finally botched up and went the way of the majority of countries, letting NGDP fall way below trend. They didn’t (correctly) react to the 2007-08 oil price rise, like the US, UK, EZ, etc. and fared well, but didn’t resist when oil prices picked up again in 2010-11, when, among the initial group, only the ECB was dumb enough to react.
SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes via Historinhas | And now Sweden joins the “below zero” club and will also join the QE club. According to Riksbank Governor Ingves: “We are prepared to make monetary policy more expansionary,” Governor Stefan Ingves said at a press conference. The bank doesn’t see a lower limit on rates and can buy as much in government bonds as is “appropriate,” he said. It´s never too late, but it is worth remembering all the arguments put forth by Lars Svensson before he quit the Board in disgust.
By Benjamin Cole via Historinhas | The unemployment in Greece is 25 percent. The Greek economy has shrunk by 29% since 2009. That is a full-blown economic depression, an outright failure of macroeconomic policy.
By Benjamin Cole via Historinhas | The Swiss National Bank gave up trying to peg the Swiss franc to the Euro, and let the Swiss currency shoot to the moon. Some bankers were squeamish about a large SNB balance sheet, which the bank was garnering by printing Swiss francs and buying non-Swiss bonds.
Guest post by Benjamin Cole via Historinhas | What to make of the recent dust-up around Rogoff World, in which the U.S. would pursue a cashless, deflationary federal police state characterized by negative interest rates? Harvard don Ken Rogoff has suggested this is the best macroeconomic option going forward. My take-away? The economics profession is deep into dementia.
SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes via Historinhas | In an interview he dwells on financial fragility and the Great Recession was an “inconvenience”: “Of course, we had to cope with a number of additional challenges on top of the grave and immediate threat of the collapse of the system. We had also to cope with the Great Recession, but very fortunately not the Great Depression that we would have had had we not acted swiftly and boldly at the start of the crisis. Even so, the Great Recession added to the difficulty.”