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Articles by Marcus Nunes

About the Author

Marcus Nunes
João Marcus Marinho Nunes is a partner of Phynance Estratégias Quantitativas e Investimentos and a professor of Economics at Fundação Getúlio Vargas in São Paulo, Brazil. He also blogs here: http://thefaintofheart.wordpress.com/
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World economy 3rd November 2014

ECB monetary policy places the EZ in an “increasing depression”

SAO PAOLO | By Marcus Nunes via Historinhas | Before it was Peter Coy with John Maynard Keynes Is the Economist the World Needs Now. Now it´s Anatole Kaletsky with The takeaway from six years of economic troubles? Keynes was right: The main lesson is that government decisions on taxes and public spending have turned out to be more important as drivers of economic activity than the monetary experiments with zero interest rates and quantitative easing that have dominated media and market attention.

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Markets 27th October 2014

Central Banks that make the same mistake are ‘rewarded’ with similar outcomes

SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes via Historinhas | While the Riksbank can focus exclusively on Sweden, the ECB has a more complicated task, having to ‘oversee’ a bunch of countries. Both central banks have an exclusive mandate: “Price stability”. While in Sweden that is understood as 2% inflation, in the EZ it is something slightly lower. Nevertheless, the two ‘countries’ central banks acted in tandem, tightening as a reaction to higher than target inflation due to oil price shocks.

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World economy 23rd October 2014

Australia: A “Swedish Governor” at the RBA?

SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes via Historinhas | It would be pretty depressing, so late in the game, to see “gold medalist” Australia fall into a Swedish-type trap. I hope Mr Lowe is a lone voice: Australian central bank Deputy Governor Philip Lowe urged vigilance on asset prices inflated by record-low interest rates and said government action is needed to encourage companies to invest.

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In Europe 20th October 2014

Europe: Calling a spade a spade

SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes via Historinhas | Tim Worstall comes out and calls a “spade a spade” in “Europe Doesn’t Have A Debt Crisis, Europe Has A Monetary Crisis”: The stock markets plunge over concerns about the eurozone; there’s a flight from lower quality sovereign bonds; Greek, Spanish and other periphery bond yields spike. It looks like the eurozone debt crisis is back. But this time around we really should get to grips with the fact that what we’ve got here is really not a debt crisis.

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World economy 15th October 2014

The Fed tightens and then is surprised with the outcome!

SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes via Historinhas | For the last 16 months the Fed has been on “tightening mode”. This is very clearly reflected in the chart for inflation expectations above. When Bernanke started the “taper talk” in May 13 inflation expectations came down and stayed down. Following the June 14 FOMC meeting, dedicated to discussions of “policy normalization” inflation expectations dived! How can they be surprised with the consequences.

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Markets 13th October 2014

Which “austerity”? Fiscal or monetary?

SAO PAOLO | By Marcus Nunces via Historinhas |Matt O´Brien has gone over to the “dark side” writing “Why is the recovery so weak? It’s the austerity, stupid.”: Welcome to Austerity U.S.A., where the deficit is back below 3 percent of GDP and growth is still disappointing—which aren’t unrelated facts. It started when the stimulus ran out. Then state and local governments had to balance their budgets amidst a still-weak economy. And finally, there was the debt ceiling deal with its staggered $2.1 trillion of cuts over the next decade.

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World economy 10th October 2014

The SS explanation of the crisis

SAO PAOLO | By Marcus Nunes via Historinhas | It comes from Martin Wolf´s “The Shifts and the Shocks” and is reviewed by Paul Krugman in the New York Review of Books. The following passage of his review nullifies the whole thing: In particular, Milton Friedman had convinced many economists that depression prevention is actually a fairly simple task, which can be carried out by technocrats at the central banks that control national money supplies. According to Friedman, the Great Depression occurred only because the Federal Reserve failed to do its job in the 1930s; if it had acted to rescue troubled banks and prevent a fall in the money supply, catastrophe would have been avoided.