… For those that want to understand how Keynes is relevant for the 21st century I would recommend reading the original books – now in public domain – or modern books from Post-Keynesian/Modern Monetary Theory authors.econoblog 101
Can America recover ideal rates of growth through interest-rate policies? This important analysis suggests that most economists misunderstand the issue. Updating Keynes, the analysis suggests that fiscal stimulus, labor union bargaining power, and more progressive income taxes are needed to support growth. (The article includes some algebra, which some readers may choose to skip.)
The main points of this paper are that loanable-funds macroeconomic models with their “natural” interest rate do not fit with modern institutions and data. Before getting into the numbers, it makes sense to describe the models and how to think about macroeconomics in the first place....Unfortunately, the article cited is behind a paywall. This is a useful short summary however.
Below, I run through six possible meanings of crowding out, and then ask if any of them gives us a reason, even in principle, to worry about over-expansionary policy today. (Another possibility, suggested by Jared Bernstein, is that while we don’t need to worry about supply constraints for the economy as a whole, tax cuts could crowd out useful spending due to some unspecified financial constraint on the federal government. I don’t address that here.) Needless to say, doubts about the economic case for crowding-out are in no way an argument for the specific deficit-boosting policies favored by the new administration.This is definitely a should-read for people interested in MMT and policy.
So now we have six forms of crowding out:
1. Government competes with business for fixed saving.
2. Government competes with business for scarce liquidity.
3. Increased spending would lead to higher inflation.
4. Increased spending would cause the central bank to raise interest rates.
5. Overfull employment would lead to overfast wage increases.
6. Increased spending would lead to a higher trade deficit.
The next question is: Is there any reason, even in principle, to worry about any of these outcomes in the US today? We can decisively set aside the first, which is logically incoherent, and confidently set aside the second, which doesn’t fit a credit-money economy in which government liabilities are the most liquid asset. But the other four certainly could, in principle, reflect real limits on expansionary policy. The question is: In the US in 2017, are higher inflation, higher interest rates, higher wages or a weaker balance of payments position problems we need to worry about? Are they even problems at all?
Clearly, if the private firms are reluctant to invest and if rising government deficits are required to sustain economic growth, the shift between public and private resource usage will also alter – that is, larger public sector and smaller private sector.
That is a consequence of these underlying trends that the Federal Reserve Bank research paper has identified.
It may be though, that the perception of a lack of profitable investment opportunities in the non-financial corporation sector is a reflection of the fiscal austerity, which has stifled economic growth and left millions of people unemployed without incomes.
A reversal of this fiscal mindset can easily reduce unemployment and allow the economies to breathe again. In that sort of growth environment, one would expect profitable private investment opportunities to arise more easily.Models are tools. If a wrong tool is being used, the likelihood of a botched job increases markedly in proportion to how unsuitable the tool being employed is and crucial it is to doing the job correctly. The loanable funds model is way wrong.
Problems in the banking sector played a critical role in triggering and prolonging the Great Recession. Unfortunately, standard macroeconomic models were initially not ready to provide much support in thinking about the role of banks. This has now changed, with many new papers that study the interaction of banks with the macroeconomy. However, as emphasized by Adrian, Colla and Shin (2013), there are many unresolved issues. In our new paper “Banks Are Not Intermediaries of Loanable Funds – And Why This Matters” (Jakab and Kumhof (2015)), we argue that many of them can be traced to the fact that virtually all of the newly developed models are based on the intermediation of loanable funds (ILF) theory of banking.
In the simple ILF model, bank loans represent the intermediation of real savings, or loanable funds, between non-bank savers and non-bank borrowers. Lending starts with banks collecting deposits of real resources from one agent, and ends with the lending of those resources to another agent. In the real world, however, banks never intermediate real loanable funds, an activity that, correctly understood, can only amount to barter.
Rather, the key function of banks is the provision of financing, meaning the creation of new monetary purchasing power through loans, for a single agent that is both borrower and depositor. Specifically, whenever a bank makes a new loan to a non-bank customer X, it creates a new loan entry in the name of customer X on the asset side of its balance sheet, and it simultaneously creates a new and equal-sized deposit entry, also in the name of customer X, on the liability side of its balance sheet. The bank therefore creates its own funding, deposits, through lending. It does so through a pure bookkeeping transaction that involves no real resources, and that acquires its economic significance through the fact that bank deposits are any modern economy’s generally accepted medium of exchange.
This understanding of the function of banks, which we will refer to as the financing and money creation (FMC) model, has been repeatedly described in publications of the world’s leading central banks—see McLeay, Radia and Thomas (2014a,b) for an excellent summary. What has been challenging is the incorporation of these insights into macroeconomic models....
To summarize, banks are not intermediaries of real loanable funds, they do not collect new deposits from non-bank savers. Instead they provide financing, they create new deposits for their borrowers. This involves the expansion or contraction of gross bookkeeping positions on bank balance sheets, rather than the channelling of real resources through banks. Replacing intermediation of loanable funds models with financing and money creation models is therefore necessary simply in order to correctly represent the role of banks in the macroeconomy. But it also addresses several of the empirical problems of existing banking models.Bank of England | Bank Underground
Problems in the banking sector played a seriously damaging role in the Great Recession. In fact, they continue to. This column argues that macroeconomic models were unable to explain the interaction between banks and the macro economy. The problem lies with thinking that banks create loans out of existing resources. Instead, they create new money in the form of loans. Macroeconomists need to reflect this in their models.VoxEU
As no one interested in macroeconomics has failed to notice, Ben Bernanke is having a debate with Larry Summers on what’s behind the slow recovery of growth rates since the financial crisis of 2007.
To Bernanke it’s basically a question of a savings glut.
To Summers it’s basically a question of a secular decline in the level of investment.Lars P. Syll’s Blog
To me the debate is actually a non-starter, since they both rely on a loanable funds theory and a Wicksellian notion of a “natural” rate of interest — ideas that have been known to be dead wrong for at least 80 years …
Since monetary theory is complicated stuff, I would like to see the debate on endogenous renewed. It is a, perhaps the, decisive issue for the Western world in the 21st century.econoblog 101
"The fundamental difference between Keynes and Wicksell and in general the supporters of the LFT [Loanable Funds Theory] lies in the specification of the consequences of the presence of bank money.…
In contrast, Keynes states that the spread of a fiat money such as bank money changes the structure of the economic system. He underscores this point by introducing the distinction between a real exchange economy and a monetary economy.…
Keynes notes that the classical economists formulated an explanation of how the real-exchange economy works, convinced that this explanation could be easily applied to a monetary economy. He believed that this conviction was unfounded …" — Giancarlo Bertocco
Setting those problems aside, I have my own disagreements with the ONKM perspective on this question. But this post is not about my own views.
This post is about Lars Syll's views. I would like to ask Lars if he agrees or disagrees with the ONKM view, as I have presented it/translated it above. Because a lot of stuff really does get lost in translation sometimes.
[My guess is that both Paul Krugman and Greg Mankiw would roughly agree with the above, but I could be wrong.]
The Rethinking Economics conference in New York took place over the weekend. Anyway, Paul Krugman was on a panel with James Galbraith and Willem Buiter. The panel was interesting in and of itself. But what really caught my eye was when Krugman was confronted by an audience member on his support of NAIRU, the loanable funds theory and the theory of the natural rate of interest.
The audience member who asked this question was Rohan Grey, a friend of mine who runs the Modern Money Network who helped co-organise the event. You can see the question and the response in this video clip.Go Rohan!
I don’t really want to get into the question of NAIRU too much as this would take us too far off track. But the other two questions provoked an interesting response from Krugman. First of all, he simply asserted that the loanable funds was true. Then he went on to assert that the natural rate of interest was true. “Clearly,” he said, “there is always some rate of interest that would produce more or less full employment”.Krugman is an neoclassical monetarist and a Samuelson "Keynesian."
Krugman’s monetary theory is almost entirely wrong. He flip-flops on the loanable funds question and he is simply wrong on the question of a natural rate of interest. He also holds to an incorrect view of what a liquidity trap is that he picked up from John Hicks. While it is extraordinarily unlikely that he will give up on these ideas — he has dug in far too much now to concede these points and he seems unwilling to even openly debate them — I only hope that his errors will help to ensure that others do not make the same mistakes.So much for the economic champion of the "left."
I sincerely hope that in the coming months we will see a wider discussion of endogenous money as a description for how banks work. It will then become clear that repayment of loans destroys money in the form of deposits, and that this is what is holding the European periphery, nay, the whole euro zone back. If we as European consumers have less deposits in our bank accounts, how are we supposed to buy more stuff? If we don’t, then unemployment will stay above 10% in the euro zone and the slump continues. This is an unhealthy situation brought about by ‘the free market’, and if economic policy does not intervene then the weak economy will continue.What this means for European politics should be clear to everybody (article by Reuters):
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen would reach the final round of a presidential election if voters were to vote now, winning more votes than any mainstream party in the first round, a poll showed on Thursday.
The survey by pollster IFOP showed Le Pen winning 26 percent of all votes in round one of the two-round election, versus 17 percent for either President Francois Hollande or his more popular prime minister, Manuel Valls.
The end of Europe as we know it is what it could mean.The next presidential election is in 2017.
