Category: Economic Theory
The analysis published under this category are as follows.Sunday, April 01, 2012
Savings, investment, and the Keynesian preference / Stock-Markets / Economic Theory
Neo-classical economists underestimate the importance of the link between savings and investment. The two should be regarded as linked together: you need savings to be available for investment in new production for the future.
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Monday, March 26, 2012
Economic Forecasting: The Model Solution / Economics / Economic Theory
In their economic analyses economists utilize a range of statistical methods that vary from highly complex models to a simple display of historical data. It is generally held that by means of statistical correlations one can organize historical data into a useful body of information, which in turn can serve as the basis for assessments of the state of the economy. In short, it is held that through the application of statistical methods on historical data, one can extract the facts of reality regarding the state of the economy.
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Sunday, February 19, 2012
Ten Myths About Capitalism / Politics / Economic Theory
Capitalism in the neoliberal version has exhausted itself. Financial sharks do not want to lose profits, and shift the main burden of debt to the retirees and the poor. A ghost of the "European Spring" is haunting the Old World and the opponents of capitalism explain people how their lives are being destroyed. This is the topic of the article of a Portuguese economist Guilherme Alves Coelho.
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Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Decline of U.S. Economy is the Logical Outcome of Keynesian Economics / Politics / Economic Theory
The Unholy Alliance of John Maynard Keyne
Perhaps the greatest modern champion of central economic planning was the 20th century English economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes, who was a political socialist and for a time a central banker, advocated the idea that the government should play a large, active role in the economy. Among the consequences of Keynes’ economic theories, whether intended or unintended, is the fact that Western economies today are characterized by large, central governments, central banks and massive debts.
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Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Solution to America's Economic Gridlock Crisis / Economics / Economic Theory
How do we resolve the current political gridlock over healthcare, the economy, and a myriad of other problems? It is clear that there are no easy solutions, and putting off making choices will just make the ultimate cost we pay that much more expensive.
This week for our Outside the Box we deal with just this question, in a piece from a master of logic and reasoning and one of my favorite writers. I absorb everything I can get my hands on from Dr. Woody Brock. He has written a new book, called American Gridlock: Why the Left and Right are Both Wrong" ( www.amazon.com/gridlock). I am doing something very unusual and giving him two back-to-back editions of Outside the Box, this week and next, to outline his own book in his own words. He generously agreed to do so, as he (and I) are passionate about the topic of getting to a solution. If we do not solve this crisis in the making, it will impair our future generations for a long time, not to mention its effects on our own lives.
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Friday, January 27, 2012
Is the United States in a Liquidity Trap? / Economics / Economic Theory
If nothing else, we've learned that the liquidity trap is neither a figment of our imaginations nor something that only happens in Japan; it's a very real threat, and if and when it ends we should nonetheless be guarding against its return — which means that there's a very strong case both for a higher inflation target, and for aggressive policy when unemployment is high at low inflation.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Premature U.S. Dollar Obituaries, Mainstream Economist Lessons from Great Depression Not Learned / Economics / Economic Theory
A pair of articles by Austrian economist professor Antal E. Fekete just might have one wondering who is more in the loony bin, mainstream economists like Krugman or those consistently chanting about the death of the dollar coupled with hyperinflation.
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Monday, January 16, 2012
Economic Crisis and the Theory of the Cycle / Economics / Economic Theory
Jesus Huerta de Soto writes: The three years that have passed since the world financial crisis and subsequent economic recession hit have provided Austrian economists with a golden opportunity to popularize their theory of the economic cycle and their dynamic analysis of social conditions. In my own case, I could never have imagined at the beginning of 1998, when the first edition of my book Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles appeared, that 12 years later, due undoubtedly to a financial crisis and economic recession unparalleled in the world since the Great Depression of 1929, a crisis and recession which no other economic paradigm managed to predict and adequately explain, my book would be translated into 14 languages and published (so far) in nine countries and several editions (two in the United States and four in Spain).
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Friday, December 30, 2011
Rising Systemic Risk and Multiple Black Swans, Gaping Chasm between Economics and Physics / Economics / Economic Theory
Violation of the Laws of Physics?
Does today's dominant economic and financial thinking violate the laws of physics? Mainstream finance and economics have long been inconsistent with the underlying laws of thermodynamics, which are fast catching up as a result of globalisation. At present, economics is the study of how people transform nature to meet their needs and it treats the exploitation of finite natural resources including energy, water, air, arable land and oceans as externalities, which they are not. For example, we cannot pollute and damage natural ecosystems and their local communities ad infinitum without severe repercussions to their underlying sustainability. It is widely recognised both within the distinguished ATCA 5000 community across 120 countries and beyond that exchange rates instability, equity and commodity market speculation -- particularly fuel, food and finance -- and resultant volatilities as well as unsustainable levels of external debt are the main causes of asymmetric threats and disruption at the international level manifest as known unknowns, ie, low probability high impact risks and unknown unknowns or black swans.
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Tuesday, December 27, 2011
What Happened To Economic Growth? / Economics / Economic Theory
The magical invention of economic growth needs the magic of invention, and technological-type invention is always around and available the optimists tell us. When it isn’t, like now, doctoring the numbers and letting them doctor themselves with false overvalued monetary units "measuring" the growth that is not there will pass muster, the optimists don’t tell us. Doctoring growth that isn't also draws on productivity gains that aren't, using the same vastly overvalued money units that "measure" growth: for how many years have we had productivity gains (or claims) at 6% or more every year ? In plenty of national cases, simply inverting claimed productivity gains, and claimed rates of inflation, will give a much more honest picture of what is going on. This now longstanding and traditional doctoring of the data, both deliberate and inadvertent, extended over 10 and 15 years or more, gives us vastly different readouts for the real situation: which is bad.
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Wednesday, December 07, 2011
Psychopathic Economics 101 / Politics / Economic Theory
Psychopaths flew financial weapons of mass destruction (derivatives) into the twin towers of our economy, the housing market and the stock market. Ten trillion dollars of wealth imploded in a cloud of dust.
Ninety-nine percent of the economic experts – financial planners, economists, economic professors, brokers, and investors – missed the largest bubble in history as well as the systemic risk that the bubble posed.
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Wednesday, November 23, 2011
A Case for Free-Market Bank Regulation / Economics / Economic Theory
America (BAC) has rescinded its plan to charge customers a $5 monthly debit-card fee. Shall we praise bank regulators for their swift action in preventing the exorbitant charge? Well, no. Then we'll credit politicians for legislating against greedy, big-bank profiteering, right? Wrong again. The free market drove BAC to drop the debit-card fee.
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Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Understand Everything Fundamentally, The entropic force is fundamental / Economics / Economic Theory
Historic and recent scientific developments add to our understanding of how the entropic force from physics may govern everything in nature, including ecosystems and economics. This can be applied to fundamental analysis of potential political outcomes, macroeconomics, and paradigmatic epochal shifts, e.g. the current shift from the industrial to the knowledge age.
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Friday, November 11, 2011
We Must Crush the Army of Krugmanites into Submission - Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Nouriel Roubini, Martin Wolf / Politics / Economic Theory
Two days ago, Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf made an attempt at Thinking through the unthinkable. The "unthinkable" was the breakup of the Eurozone.
Reflections on the Easily Thinkable
For starters, a eurozone breakup is hardly unthinkable given that no currency union in history has ever survived in the absence of a fiscal union, and the Eurozone has no such fiscal union
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Friday, November 04, 2011
Is Debt Necessary for Economic Recovery? / Economics / Economic Theory
Since the crisis began, one of the dominant themes in arguments over proper government policy has been the Keynesian view that it is crucial to prop up total spending. The added twist during this particular recession is the crushing burden of private-sector debt, which allegedly makes it all the more urgent for governments to run fiscal deficits.
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Thursday, November 03, 2011
Look at the U.S. Postal Service and see the future of the Federal Government / Economics / Economic Theory
Niall Ferguson is my favorite Establishment analyst, because he is an historian who understands a lot about free markets. He writes for the literati. He starred in a PBS series that was worth viewing, and another is scheduled in 2012. He teaches at Harvard University and the Harvard Business School.
He thinks America is running an empire, and he thinks it will not survive much longer. As with all empires, it is going to run out of wealth to support it. So, when he wrote a piece for the Daily Beast, Newsweek, I read it.
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Monday, October 31, 2011
Is Economics Worthless Ideology? / Politics / Economic Theory
In fêting the latest recipients of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, Christopher Sims and Thomas Sargent, the New York Times editorializes that somehow this is a "victory" for empiricism over theory. Although the editors don't come right out and attack theory, they make their point clear by declaring that the latest award is a "challenge to politicians who are driven more by ideology than by serious consideration of the real-world consequences of their actions." In other words, any worldview that might be influenced by real-live economic theory that reflects human action must be wrong because Sims and Sargent won the Nobel.
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Monday, October 24, 2011
Savings, The Paradox of Thrift Debunked / Economics / Economic Theory
Ever since John Maynard Keynes popularized the Paradox of Thrift, economists, central bankers and politicians have labored under the misapprehension that high levels of savings are bad for the economy and inhibit growth. The Paradox of Thrift simply states: Increased savings means there are less buyers for goods produced, so the nation as a whole will tend to produce less.
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Sunday, October 23, 2011
Economic Growth Is Obsolete / Economics / Economic Theory
The last 'classic economic growth interval' can be almost exactly defined as the years 2004-2007.
After that, we enter a zone of permanent disaster for the late, unlamented by myself, Growth Economy which can only and does only operate in a series of boom-slump cycles. What we have now, since 2008 is however different: this slump is vastly greater than the nicely doctored official economic numbers can show. True numbers would not only be terrifying, but also hard to believe.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Does The Economy Need a Referee? / Economics / Economic Theory
I recently appeared on Max Keiser’s "On The Edge" program. Unbeknownst to the viewer, we were having major communication problems. Max only could hear a small portion of what I said and I, likewise. But, right at the very end of the interview the communications worked again… that’s when the interview finally got interesting. Max stated that we “need a referee” in the economy. I replied, “I disagree. We don’t need a referee, I’m an anarchist…”
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