Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?
Update: seemingly not
Update: Oh yeah!
Monday, November 14, 2011
Economics as she ought to be done
I am filled with a certain degree of probably unjustified optimism by this from Claudio Borio at the BIS. I don't agree with the central argument, I think (in particular, I really don't like the way that Borio dismisses the accounting identities and insists that the gross financing flows are what matter - surely if what you're interested in is the effect on securities and real estate prices, the net demand is exactly what you want to know, not the gross). But he is totally, totally addressing the right questions, and as a statement of the opposite case to my argument on the "global bezzle" below, it's basically the only one I've seen that I really think I need to take seriously. It bears slow, careful, repeated reading I think - if you can't be arsed with that, Borio ends up concluding that the problem wasn't the flows themselves, it was an excessively accomodative policy stance toward the flows, with an excess of what he calls "elasticity" in the system.
So basically his view is that between the bankers and the central bankers, they created too much credit; my view is that they created a lot of credit because they had a big imbalance to intermediate. Both of us agree that the key decision made was the decision to accomodate the monetary consequences of international savings flows, and we disagree about the importance of internal feedback effects within the system.
In unrelated news, I think I am going to call up everyone I know who is involved in political activism and blame them for the Iraq War. I am not proposing to ask whether they were actually responsible for it, or indeed to cut them any slack for having opposed it. I'm just going to declare that they are all part of the same system, and that they haven't suffered enough compared to the Iraqi people. The bloody arrogance of those Greens and Trotskyists, trying to pretend that it was nothing to do with them! They're all just politicsters and their claims that their kind of "politics" aren't the same kind of "politics" that gave us Guantanamo Bay are just more evidence that the whole system needs to be torn apart and reformed, in some way which I don't propose to specify or indeed learn the first thing about. I don't want to hear about any historical or systematic explanations; the Iraq War happened because some politicians ordered it, and this proves that all politicians of any type are corrupt and awful people. Yes I am still bitter.
this item posted by the management 11/14/2011 11:17:00 PM
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