(The following is the translation of an interview that appeared in Sunday’s Eleftherotypia. C. J. Polychroniou talks to Jörg Bibow about the latter’s proposal for a Euro Treasury and how it represents a viable solution to the eurozone crisis — a crisis that is very much ongoing, Bibow explains.)

CJP: A number of economists, including yourself, maintain that the eurozone crisis remains unresolved, yet the financial markets are calm. Is this a case of seeing the glass half empty rather than half full?

JB: Sure, if you are a believer in the efficient market theory you might conclude that things are just fine. Well, I don’t. Does anyone remember that the markets were also in a state of bliss in the years leading up to the crises in the US and Europe? As serious economists such as Keynes and Minsky well understood, financial markets are subject to conventional behavior and prone to instability. The current convention appears to be that Mr. Draghi’s famous “whatever it takes” promise is insurance enough that really bad stuff is not going to happen. Fine, but how powerful is Mr. Draghi, really? At some point the markets might wake up and wonder what it would actually take to fix the situation and how Mr. Draghi might possibly deliver on that. Complacency can turn into another full-blown scare in no time. And the reason to be scared is the fact that the euro is still not on any sound footing. Serious regime flaws are still in place. The eurozone economy may have stopped shrinking, largely owing to growth in the rest of the world, but that alone does not fill up the glass. Unemployment is stuck at mind-bogglingly high levels. Indebtedness continues rising. Prospects for any real recovery are grim. Ultimately, what will convince countries to stay with the euro as the euro comes to symbolize impoverishment rather than prosperity?

CJP: Many critics of the current eurozone architecture maintain that a transfer union is the only way to address imbalances and keep the euro alive. What you have proposed, however, is a “Euro Treasury” scheme which is designed not to be a transfer union. First, what’s wrong with having a transfer union?

JB: A transfer union features more or less automatic support from currently richer and stronger members to partners that are currently poorer and weaker. An element of transfer union was part of the EU and euro project from the beginning, the EU structural and cohesion funds. The US monetary union includes a far more extensive transfer union than that to be sure. Unfortunately, the euro crisis has greatly increased resistance against moving in that direction. Moreover, the troika rescue programs are erroneously interpreted as transfers – when in fact they were bailouts of creditor countries’ banks and meant more debts rather than any gifts for euro crisis countries, allegedly the beneficiaries. I see nothing wrong with a US-style transfer union for Europe in the long run. My “Euro Treasury” plan simply acknowledges that that is not a short-run option. Therefore, my Euro Treasury would pool fiscal resources and issue common euro bonds. But the benefits would be equally spread, with no transfers from rich to poor.

CJP: Exactly, how would the Euro Treasury work? continue reading…

Unions and Economic Performance in Developing Countries: Case Studies from Latin America

Fernando Rios-Avila

The Rational Expectations Hypothesis: An Assessment from Popper’s Philosophy

Iván H. Ayala and Alfonso Palacio-Vera

Integrating Time in Public Policy: Empirical Description of Gender-specific Outcomes and Budgeting

 Lekha S. Chakraborty

Financial Crisis Resolution and Federal Reserve Governance: Economic Thought and Political Realities

Bernard Shull

Options for China in a Dollar Standard World: A Sovereign Currency Approach

L. Randall Wray and Xinhua Liu

Feasible Estimation of Linear Models with N-fixed Effects

Fernando Rios-Avila

A Stock-flow Approach to a General Theory of Pricing

 Philip Pilkington

One thing Jan Kregel’s new policy note makes clear is that congressional debates about raising the debt ceiling were a great deal more enlightening in the 1940s and ’50s. Here is Rep. Wright Patman (D-TX) in 1943 defending his proposal to fund what were expected to be huge wartime expenditures by bypassing the private financial system and placing government debt directly with the Federal Reserve Banks at zero interest rates:

the Government of the United States, under the Constitution, has the power, and it is the duty of the Government, to create all money. The Treasury Department issues both money and bonds. Under the present system it sells the bonds to a bank that creates the money, and then if the bank needs the actual money, the actual printed greenbacks to pay the depositors, the Treasury will furnish that money to the banks to pay the depositors. In that way, the Government farms out the use of its own credit absolutely free.

To Patman, “farming” out the government’s credit in this way was just a direct — and unnecessary — subsidy to private banks: “I am opposed to the United States Government, which possesses the sovereign and exclusive privilege of creating money, paying private bankers for the use of its own money. These private bankers do not hire their own money to the Government; they hire only the Government’s money to the Government, and collect an interest charge annually.” “If money is to be created outright,” he argued, “it should be created by the Government and no interest paid on it.”

As Kregel points out, one of the challenges for Patman’s proposal is that a zero rate on government debt seems to require giving up control over interest rates as a tool of monetary policy. However, Kregel notes that a proposal appearing in a 1946 Federal Reserve annual report (and repeated a number of times until the 1951 Fed-Treasury Accord) offers a solution: with the aid of supplementary required reserves, it would be possible to maintain a zero rate on government bonds while allowing the policy rate to rise. (As Marriner Eccles realized, the use of such policies would also require that fiscal policy play a role in controlling inflation — very much in the vein of Abba Lerner’s functional finance, Kregel observes.)

One of the takeaways from this discussion — beyond the remarkable deterioration of the quality of congressional debate — is that the supposed problem of financing the debt should be getting a lot less attention than it does in today’s deficit and debt ceiling debates. The real question, Kregel stresses, is “whether the size of the deficit to be financed is compatible with the stable expansion of the economy.”

Read Kregel’s policy note: “Wright Patman’s Proposal to Fund Government Debt at Zero Interest Rates: Lessons for the Current Debate on the US Debt Limit“

23rd Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference

Stabilizing Financial Systems for Growth and Full Employment

The National Press Club
Washington, D.C.
April 9–10, 2014

Organized by the Levy Economics Institute with support from the Ford Foundation.

In a context of global uncertainty, with growth and employment well below normal levels, the 2014 Minsky Conference will address both financial reform and prosperity, drawing from Minsky’s work on financial instability and his proposal for achieving full employment. Panels will focus on the design of a new, more robust, and stable financial architecture; fiscal austerity and the sustainability of the US and European economic recovery; central bank independence and financial reform; the larger implications of the eurozone debt crisis for the global economic system; the impact of the return to more traditional US monetary policy on emerging markets and developing economies; improving governance of the social safety net; the institutional shape of the future financial system; strategies for promoting an inclusive economy and more equitable income distribution; and regulatory challenges for emerging-market economies.

Registration is now open.

Participants include:

Anat Admati
Professor of Finance and Economics, Stanford University

Robert Barbera
Co-director, Center for Financial Economics, The Johns Hopkins University

Richard Berner
Director, Office of Financial Research, US Department of the Treasury

Sherrod Brown
US Senator (D-OH)

Willem H. Buiter*
Global Chief Economist, Citi

Vítor Constâncio
Vice President, European Central Bank

William C. Dudley*
President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Charles L. Evans
President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Heiner Flassbeck
Director, Division on Globalization and Development Strategies, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)

Jason Furman
Chairman, Council of Economic Advisers, Executive Office of the President

continue reading…

From the preface to a new policy brief by Amit Bhaduri:

In our era of global finance, the theory of aggregate demand management is alive and unwell. In this policy brief, Bhaduri describes what he regards as a prevalent contemporary approach to demand management. Detached from its Keynesian roots, this “vulgar” version of demand management theory is being used to justify policies that stand in stark contrast to those prescribed by the original Keynesian model. Rising asset prices and private-debt-fueled consumption play the starring roles, while fiscal policy retreats into the background. …

While some might insist that the age of global finance leaves little room for the idea of demand management, Bhaduri contends that the theory survives, but that it does so in a form that is nearly unrecognizable from the original. This contemporary model of demand management receives its inspiration from the presuppositions of neoclassical economics, and its policy emphasis is often the very opposite of the old Keynesian model. … To support demand, the “vulgar,” or “Great Moderation,” model hinges on the interplay between expectations of ever-rising asset prices and a consumption boom driven by private debt.

Bhaduri cautions, however, that a model centered on private credit creation is prone to instability. More and more financial investment is needed to produce greater returns and boost asset prices, continually shifting the composition of investment from the real to the financial and creating the conditions for a delinking of finance from output and employment. When the paths of the financial and real sectors of the economy diverge, when incomes stagnate while debt and asset prices continue to rise, this creates the conditions for a financial crisis.

Read the brief here.

The Commission’s latest “Quarterly Report on the Euro Area” makes an interesting read; at least to those who simply can’t get enough of the “structural reform” gospel that has been running high in the Commission’s corridors for the past 30 years or so. So be warned: For any more enlightened minds the report is mainly of interest for what it does not talk about.

One might perhaps start by congratulating the Commission for noticing that the euro area is falling behind internationally. In case you had not known, the euro area’s GDP is still about 3 percent below its pre-crisis peak level, domestic demand about 5 percent. Few other policymakers on this planet have such a stellar record to show for themselves. And the Commission is surely part of that gang.

The Commission does not wish to talk about the crisis too much though. It is more concerned with long-run trends that started some time before the crisis. In particular, the Commission points out that after catching up quite successfully with the US in terms of productivity levels and living standards from the mid-1960s up until the mid-1990s, something seems to have happened in the mid-1990s that enabled the US to persistently outperform the euro area ever since. What happened around that time that allowed the US to achieve respectable growth but prevented the euro area from fulfilling its promise? Well, it comes as little surprise that the Commission is quick to blame the euro area’s sluggish productivity performance on nothing but a supposed lack of growth-boosting “structural reforms.” Europe talked about its “Lisbon Agenda,” but never got round to implementing it, the Commission observes regretfully.

Needless to say, the Commission is even more convinced that now is the time to really go for it. continue reading…

Could it be that Mario Draghi is alone among the key euro authorities in recognizing that the euro crisis may not be quite over yet? Given that Mr. Draghi is also widely credited as the euro’s foremost savior, this seems more than just a little odd.

Recall that, almost magically, Mr. Draghi managed to pull the euro currency union back from that yawning abyss of acute breakup scares prevailing until the summer of 2012 – and with nothing but words: the simple promise “to do whatever it takes” to keep the euro whole.

As the markets have stayed calm ever since, the euro body politic has indulged in complacency. All the more so since the release of the first non-negative quarter-on-quarter GDP growth number for the spring of last year that saw the euro authorities engage in self-congratulatory shoulder-slapping, bravely declaring that the war on the euro crisis was won as their sound policies were finally starting to bear fruit.

European Commission president José Manuel Barroso just added another refrain to the chorus, predicting that 2014 would bring definite change for the better to the euro community. Interestingly, as delusion and denial seems to fully absorb other euro authorities, the ECB’s president alone is taking a more clear-headed view on the actual state of affairs and prospects for the euro currency union. I dare to venture that this may be because he is also all too aware of the fact that his monetary powers are actually quite limited.

It may be time for a sober stocktaking of where the eurozone stands regarding the successful resolution of its internal crisis. Is the economy truly on the mend? Has the euro policy regime been put on a sound and sustainable footing? continue reading…

Roughly a year after President Johnson used the occasion of his first State of the Union address to declare war on poverty, Hyman Minsky presented a paper on the subject at a conference in Berkeley. Here’s what he wrote:

The war against poverty is a conservative rebuttal to an ancient challenge of the radicals, that capitalism necessarily generates “poverty in the midst of plenty.” This war intends to eliminate poverty by changing people, rather than the economy. Thus the emphasis, even in the Job Corps, is upon training or indoctrination to work rather than on the job and the task to be performed. However, this approach, standing by itself, cannot end poverty. All it can do is give the present poor a better chance at the jobs that exist: it can spread poverty more fairly. A necessary ingredient of any war against poverty is a program of job creation; and it has never been shown that a thorough program of job creation, taking people as they are, will not, by itself, eliminate a large part of the poverty that exists.

The war against poverty cannot be taken seriously as long as the Administration and the Congress tolerate a 5 percent unemployment rate and frame monetary and fiscal policy with a target of eventually achieving a 4 percent unemployment rate. Only if there are more jobs than available workers over a broad spectrum of occupations and locations can we hope to make a dent on poverty by way of income from employment. To achieve and sustain tight labor markets in the United States requires bolder, more imaginative, and more consistent use of expansionary monetary and fiscal policy to create jobs than we have witnessed to date. …

The single most important step toward ending poverty in America would be the achieving and sustaining of tight full employment. Tight full employment exists when over a broad cross-section of occupations, industries, and locations, employers, at going wages and salaries, would prefer to employ more workers than they in fact do. Tight full employment is vital for an anti-poverty campaign. It not only will eliminate that poverty which is solely due to unemployment, but, by setting off market processes which tend to raise low wages faster than high wages, it will in time greatly diminish the poverty due to low incomes from jobs.

Jesse Myerson created a firestorm over mainstream media with his Rolling Stone piece “Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For.” I’d like to address the very first of these reforms, the Job Guarantee (JG), as Myerson references my proposal for running the program through the non-profit sector and discussed it in several interviews on Tuesday.

Last month, I did a podcast with him about this program. Let me focus on some questions that keep popping up about the proposal, e.g., Josh Barro’s Business Insider piece.

What is the problem?

It is fundamental. It’s not just a problem of today’s deeply ailing economy. It’s permanent. There are always people willing to work, whom profit-driven firms do not wish to hire.  Even when economies are growing rapidly, there are never enough job openings for all who want to work. That number is 24.4 million people today: 10.9 million officially unemployed and 13.5 million in hidden unemployment (bls.gov).

The mark of unemployment is itself an obstacle to getting a job. The average employer equates 9 months of unemployment to 4 years of lost work experience. (Eriksson and Rooth AER, 2014). And so unemployment breeds unemployability, feeding the decades-long uptrend in long-term unemployment, while the economic, political and social costs are mounting.

Whenever I write about unemployment, I always stress the long run. The point is to solve the problem in recessions and expansions. Virtually no economist or pundit outside MMT makes this point. I predict that, while it is fashionable to entertain various solutions for the unemployed today, as soon as the economy recovers sufficiently, they will be forgotten.

It’s time to change the conversation from creating jobs for the jobless now, to creating jobs for the jobless always. The Job Guarantee provides the solution. I have explained elsewhere why neither the private sector nor the flawed bastard Keynesian pump-priming policies can get us there (here and here).

So let’s move right to the design and implementation of a JG through the non-profit sector.* continue reading…

I just returned from the big annual meeting of economists (this time in Philly), at which we had a panel on the Job Guarantee. One of the papers on our panel was by William (Sandy) Darity and Darrick Hamilton, which demonstrated how imperative it is to implement the JG to reduce hiring discrimination in the labor market. Darrick (who presented the paper) pointed out that official unemployment rates for black Americans is chronically twice as high as that for whites; by conventional views of what constitutes Great Depression levels of unemployment, black Americans are in a Great Depression and are always suffering from at least recession levels of unemployment.

Darrick pointed out that even in good times, blacks with some college education have unemployment rates higher than white high school drop-outs, and even as high as whites who’ve been incarcerated. Sandy has supported the Job Guarantee since the earliest days—he was on the first panel we ever organized on the JG (back when we were calling it Public Service Employment). While the JG will not eliminate racial discrimination in the USA, it will go a long way in helping to provide a real opportunity.

The highest unemployment rates are among the young. As Sandy says, black teen high school dropouts have a 95 percent joblessness rate. You read that right. The JG would give them an alternative path to gainful employment.

Some years ago, Marc-André Pigeon and I did a study of joblessness. We found that during the Clinton boom years (when the overall unemployment rate finally reached the lows that were last achieved in the Johnson years), of the 12 million jobs created only 700,000 of them went to workers who had not attended college. We found that even with the relatively robust labor markets of the Clinton boom, “Well over half of noninstitutionalized high school dropouts remain out of the labor force, compared with only a quarter of those who attended college. If the current expansion raises the employment rate for high school dropouts by only about 3 percentage points over a period of 6 years, by simple extrapolation, the expansion would have to continue for another 78 years before the gap could be closed.” YEP. If we could maintain an economic boom for 78 more years, we could get the unemployment rate down across all the groups. That’s how boomy our economy needs to be to generate jobs for workers at the bottom of the queue.

(It won’t happen. We’d get very high inflation and asset bubbles before we boomed for even a decade. See our other article that looks in depth at those who are officially “out of the labor force” but who could be brought in if jobs were available. We estimated there were probably around 26 million potentially employable people left behind. In other work we looked at incarceration rates and compared the probabilities of employment rates and incarceration rates among prime age males across race and level of educational attainment. The results were horrific; I’ll report on that some time.)

Here are three recent, interesting, pieces on the JG proposal, two by Sandy Darity and one by Jesse Myerson at Rolling Stone: continue reading…