413 items | 32 visits
Links on the meltdown of financial and economic markets.
Updated on Jul 03, 12
Created on Feb 14, 09
Category: Business & Finance
URL:
"IN 2007, the great ship of the American economy began encountering darkening skies. In 2008, it was suddenly faced with a violent storm which blew it miles off course, well south of where it ought to have been. The country's leaders didn't know how far from their charted path they'd been swept, but they recognised a need to make a course correction. Now, three years later, a look at the maps tells us that the storm was more powerful than previously believed, and it left the vessel much farther south than anyone had expected. The course corrections made earlier? Far too small to bring the ship back to its previous path. Yet none of America's leaders are trying to steer the ship back northward. Indeed, many seem anxious to yank on the tiller and drag the economy farther south still."
Sluggish growth is no mystery: No one has any money
Zombie Economics
How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us.
By John Quiggin.
The Crisis of Neoliberalism
By Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy.
The gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression has been covered in the media largely from the top down, told primarily from the perspective of the Obama Administration and big business, and reflected the voices and ideas of people in institutions more than those of everyday Americans, according to a new study by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Review of:
The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey
A Companion to Marx’s ‘Capital’ by David Harvey
Plus comments on The Limits of Capital
So far, so good. Except, there's a hole. That hole is that the Fed hasn't followed the simple "Taylor rule." In fact, there's been a significant gap between Taylor rule and interest rates. Or more exactly, two of them.
The first was between 1994 and 1998 -- the Fed was consistently above the Taylor rule. This lead several more left-leaning economists to call for lower interest rates to get more growth. The second was between 2001 and 2008 - the Fed was consistently below the Taylor rule. What a coincidence. So the argument that the Fed was a transparent carrier of the economic demand for funds breaks down. The other point is that there is a simple explanation for all three - short term rates, inflation, and budget deficits moving in tandem over the last 10 years, namely that they represent the same thing, not a market that is clearing, but three different forms of the same thing, namely, risk aversion.
But all the tools in the world are useless if we lack the imagination needed to build the right models. Models are built to answer specific questions.
We need to take a close look at how the sociology of our profession led to an outcome where people were made to feel embarrassed for even asking certain types of questions. People will always be passionate in defense of their life's work, so it's not the rhetoric itself that is of concern, the problem comes when factors such as ideology or control of journals and other outlets for the dissemination of research stand in the way of promising alternative lines of inquiry. I don't know for sure the extent to which the ability of a small number of people in the field to control the academic discourse led to a concentration of power that stood in the way of alternative lines of investigation, or the extent to which the ideology that markets prices always tend to move toward their long-run equilibrium values caused us to ignore voices that foresaw the developing bubble and coming crisis. But something caused most of us to ask the wrong questions, and to dismiss the people who got it right, and I think one of our first orders of business is to understand how and why that happened.
The number problems we face are now hopeless. America will never be able to cover its current outstanding debt. We're effectively finished at all three levels: household, corporate, and government.
THE MYTH OF THE RATIONAL MARKET A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street.By Justin Fox
THE SAGES Warren Buffett, George Soros, Paul Volcker, and the Maelstrom of Markets By Charles R. Morris
Mainstream financial journalism is doing its level, eye-rolling, heavy-sighing best to stuff Matt Taibbi back into the alt-press hole he came from, but he’s not going along with it, and the mainstreamers in any case are making a big mistake.
The Rolling Stone writer cemented his status as the enfant terrible of the business press with “The Great American Bubble Machine,” a 10,000-word excoriation of Goldman Sachs, a muckraker’s-eye view of Goldman history, exploring the bank’s and Wall Street’s contributions to various financial disasters
The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle, who doesn’t lay a glove on Taibbi in this attack, is unintentionally revealing of a certain strain of financial journalism thinking:
Taibbi is a gifted narrative journalist, whose verbal talents I greatly admire. But financial meltdowns don’t offer villains, for the simple reason that no one person or even one group is powerful enough to take down a whole system.
“Financial meltdowns don’t offer villains?” Does anyone believe that?
And wait a minute: Are we really so sure that “one group,” Wall Street, was not central to this crisis and that its increasing influence over government at all levels—what gives, for instance, with ex-Goldmanite Neil Levin deciding as New York State banking commissioner in 2000 not to regulate credit default swaps as insurance?—was not decisive? And isn’t Goldman Wall Street’s leading firm?
Good explanation of Wall Street trading and impact of high frequency trading.
It’s hard to imagine a better illustration than high-frequency trading. The stock market is supposed to allocate capital to its most productive uses, for example by helping companies with good ideas raise money. But it’s hard to see how traders who place their orders one-thirtieth of a second faster than anyone else do anything to improve that social function.
413 items | 32 visits
Links on the meltdown of financial and economic markets.
Updated on Jul 03, 12
Created on Feb 14, 09
Category: Business & Finance
URL: