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Thursday, May 23, 2013

Kenneth Rogoff — Europe’s Lost Keynesians


Rogoff calls for debt writedowns.

Project Syndicate
Europe’s Lost Keynesians
Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University

4 comments:

  1. Rogoff still can't get it right!

    The best solution and one which is fair to non-debtors (e.g. German savers) is a universal and equal bailout with new fiat combined with leverage restrictions on the banks to prevent a new bubble. Heck, just ban ANY new credit creation (at least temporarily) and a vast amount of new fiat would need to be distributed just to prevent massive DEFLATION as existing credit was repaid with no new credit to replace it.

    Steve Keen has suggested this in his "A Modern Debt Jubilee" at http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/manifesto/ (scroll down).

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  2. Yet more trickery from Rogoff the liar. What his article does is to conflate the loud voices opposing austerity with “Keynsians”. The truth of course is that those loud voices tend to be the economically unsophisticated: ordinary people, trade unions, etc. In contrast, no clued up Keynsian seriously thinks that simple Keynsian policies will cure the EZ’s problems.

    Try another one, Rogoff.

    Or maybe Rogoff is stupid rather than dishonest. Perhaps he’s so dumb that he thinks clued up Keynsians really think that simple Keynsian type stimulus will cure the Eurozone’s problems. Perhaps he’s so stupid that he thinks he’s making an original point in revealing that simple Keynsian type stimulus won’t cure the EZ’s problems.

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  3. This has got to be another "proposal" from his boss: Pete Peterson. Best to ignore it.

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  4. This is not a problem with which Keynes was familiar, much less one that he sought to address. Unbelievably moronic, even for the moron Rogoff. If someone says Keynes never treated or heard of X, you can be sure it was a lifelong obsession he wrote bestsellers on. Seen even Dean Baker IIRC write such ignorant nonsense.

    Architect of Bretton Woods and the bancor plan, author of Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill not familiar with problems of fixed-exchange rate regimes privileging finance over industry? The problems caused by excess savings, of trade surpluses, the USA then, Germany now?

    Rogoff's plans - let's create a dandy debt-deflation. And spur inflation too!, which Keynes rightly deplored and designed the most careful and best tools to fight (with the exception of an explicit Job Guarantee) is another dandy Rogoff way to rob people. I'm surprised he didn't mention spreading plagues - and maybe calling it the Pasteur solution.

    And no, Ralph, simple Keynesian policies - Spending for public purposes, targetted at the unemployed, Keynes's Keynesianism - to wit, the JG would solve the EZ's problems overnight.

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