Robert Barbera, a regular contributor to the Levy Institute’s Minsky conferences, has a great post at Johns Hopkins’ Center for Financial Economics on the cycle of amnesia and remembrance that seems to plague mainstream economic theorists. Here’s a key passage:

Perhaps the most indictable offense that mainstream economists committed, from 1988 through 2008, was to retrace, step by step, Keynes’s path of discovery from 1924 through 1936. Wholesale deregulation of finance and categorical confidence in a reductionist role for central banks came into being as the conventional wisdom embraced the 1924 view that free markets and stable prices alone gave us the best chance for economic stability. To add insult to injury, the conventional wisdom before the crisis was embedded in models called “new Keynesian” which were gutted of the insights of Keynes. This conventional wisdom gave license to a succession of asset market boom/bust cycles that defied the inflation/deflation model but were, nonetheless, ignored by central bankers and regulators alike. Quite predictably, in the aftermath of the grand asset market boom/bust cycle of 2008-2009, we are jettisoning Keynes, circa 1924, for the Keynes of 1936.

It’s worth reading the whole thing: “Exit Keynes, the Friedmanite, Enter Minsky’s Keynes.”

In a new One-Pager, Nicola Matthews sums up some of the findings from her analysis of the activities of the Federal Reserve’s special lending facilities set up during the last financial crisis. She contends that the Fed departed from a classical understanding of what central banks should do in liquidity crises but focuses in particular on the lending rates.

“[E]xamination of the data shows that most of the Fed’s emergency facilities lent at rates that were, on average, at or below (sometimes well below) market rates, with the big banks the primary beneficiaries,” she writes. Matthews notes that the top eight individual borrowers paid a combined weighted mean interest rate of 1.49 percent. The lowest rates went to Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs in December 2008, at 0.01 percent (on $50 million and $200 million, respectively).

These emergency facilities were also engaged in lending for sustained periods of time: excluding ST OMO and the support given to Bear Stearns and AIG, the average length of the lending facilities was 22 months. Matthews notes that these extended durations suggest that many of the banks receiving support may have been insolvent, rather than merely illiquid.

“So what?” you might ask. This was an extraordinary crisis, and it demanded an extraordinary response. Matthews argues that while Fed intervention was needed, the particular approach it took to its lender-of-last-resort function — “without penalty rates, without good collateral, or for sustained periods of time” — has perpetuated dangerous dynamics within the financial system: “Lending at or below market rates, allowing banks to negotiate these rates through auctions, and rescuing insolvent banks has not only validated unstable banking instruments and practices but also possibly set the stage for an even greater crisis.”

Read it here (pdf). This One-Pager draws from a working paper (pdf) that contains a detailed breakdown of the rates, durations, and recipients of each emergency facility’s loans.

(cross-posted from ineteconomics.org)

This week workers in fast food restaurants across the country gathered to protest the minimum wage in the United States, which currently is a paltry $7.25, and to fight for a better standard of living. The battle for a living wage for the nation’s poorest workers is set against the backdrop of mass unemployment and the highest level of economic inequality in the U.S. in almost a century.

The first minimum wage laws in the U.S. were the result of a state-by-state effort in the Progressive era to secure a floor to a decent life to employed women and youth. The first of these was enacted in Massachusetts in 1912 and eventually led to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which instituted a minimum wage at the federal level.

The objective was fairness, economics opportunity, stability, and social cohesion. The problem was the unequal power between labor and capital—a rationale that even early neoclassical economists embraced on the grounds that it constrained labor’s bargaining power and reduced morale, productivity, and wellbeing.

The solution was to set the “rules of the game” so that working women could support their families and young workers would not fall prey to discriminatory practices of their employers. In the absence of such rules, economists thought, the market mechanism wouldn’t work. Firms simply could not be counted on to self-regulate or reinforce these rules. The minimum wage movement required legislation.

The Supreme Court initially resisted and ruled that the state laws were unconstitutional, but states and organized labor prevailed, and by the time the New Deal rolled around, the Supreme Court had changed its mind. It had begun to work with a much broader definition of “the public interest” and supported various state legislations to protect the “welfare of its citizens.” It was understood that the wellbeing of workers served an important public purpose.

American economists – neoclassical and institutionalists alike – all supported the movement, the legislation, and the rationale. This wonderful excursion in the history of the minimum wage movement and the history of economic thought by Robert Prasch (1999) shows that economists in the U.S. were virtually unanimous in their support. The objections largely came from the British, notably from Professor Pigou, until another British economist, John Maynard Keynes, disproved his argument. Not only were the assumptions behind the labor market mechanism unfounded in Pigou’s analysis, but the notion that the minimum wage caused unemployment was also theoretically and empirically flawed. As Keynes explained, reducing wages as a macroeconomic policy was a “method socially disastrous in the process and socially unjust in the result.”

A federally mandated minimum wage was not enough to secure fairness, economic opportunity, stability, and social cohesion. The missing piece was a policy for full employment – one that guaranteed jobs for all who wished to work. That came later with the work of John Maynard Keynes, John Pierson, William Beveridge, and others. All advanced specific policies for full employment that aimed to secure decent work at decent pay to anyone who was ready, willing, and able, regardless of whether the economy was reeling from a Great Depression or enjoying relative prosperity. The right to work was codified by the international community in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and found a special place in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

The New Deal put full employment front and center on the policy agenda. Though it did not deliver a long-term job guarantee program, it boldly and successfully experimented with direct employment policies. The war mobilization delivered true full employment, but Keynes insisted that public policy could and ought to achieve the same in peacetime.

In 1949, the minimum wage nearly doubled at a time when the economy was as close to true full employment as it has ever been, and when direct job creation was the policy of choice to deal with unemployment. Full employment and high wages ushered in the Golden Age of the American economy.

Today we have neither. Mainstream economists have successfully convinced themselves and policy makers that true full employment is impossible and that the minimum wage is the root of all evil.

Jobs for all (via a Full Employment Program through Social Entrepreneurship, a Green Jobs Corp, or a Job Guarantee) and a doubling of the minimum wage is what the economy needs today. Keynes made the case, Martin Luther King, Jr. made the case, and the international community made the case.

Sometimes the good old ideas are the best new ideas.

Follow me on Twitter at @ptcherneva

The Modern Money Network at Columbia University — heir to the “Modern Money and Public Purpose” seminar series — is starting up in September, with a pair of events that might be interesting to some of our readers:

1. Money as a Hierarchical System

Date: Thursday, September 12th, 6.15pm
Location: Room 104, Jerome Greene Hall, Columbia Law School

Moderator: Raúl Carrillo, J.D. Candidate (’15), Columbia Law School
Speaker 1: Christine Desan, Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Speaker 2: L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics, University of Missouri-Kansas City
Speaker 3: Katharina Pistor, Michael I. Sovern Professor of Law, Columbia Law School & Director, Center on Global Legal Transformation
Speaker 4: Perry Mehrling, Professor of Economics, Barnard College & Director of Education Programs, Institute for New Economic Thinking

2. Central Banking in Theory and Practice

Date: Monday, September 23th, 6.15pm
Location: Room 103, Jerome Greene Hall, Columbia Law School

Moderator: Richard Clarida, C. Lowell Harriss Professor of Economics and International Affairs, Columbia University
Speaker 1: Lord Adair Turner, Senior Fellow, Institute for New Economic Thinking and former Director, U.K. Financial Services Authority
Speaker 2: James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin
Speaker 3: Matias Vernengo, Associate Professor, Bucknell University & Senior Research Manager, Central Bank of Argentina

Livestreaming of these events will be hosted at the MMN website (seminar 1; seminar 2) — the site also links to background reading for each seminar.

The case for being alarmed about the US budget deficit — more specifically, for being worried that it’s too high, or will be too high in the next decade or two — continues to weaken, and this is so even if we limit ourselves to the deficit hawks’ own theoretical turf. These days, you don’t need to have read Abba Lerner to know that we should be moving on to more pressing matters.

Now that the deficit is shrinking fast, the standard fallback is to shift the focus to the long term. The go-to story for long-term deficit anxiety has to do with the prospect of healthcare costs rising much faster than the rate of economic growth (in the medium term, it’s more about predictions of how high the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates).

The problem is that this healthcare story is badly out of date. The last several years have seen a significant slowdown in cost growth in the medical sector. Initially, it could be suggested that the recession was playing the main role here (so cost growth would simply snap back to previous trends when the economy recovered). However, more and more evidence is coming in to suggest that it’s primarily changes in practices and behavior unrelated to the recession that are “bending of the cost curve” (hence the trend may be more likely to persist). From the abstract of a new Congressional Budget Office working paper (pdf) that looks at Medicare spending in particular:

Growth in spending per beneficiary in the fee-for-service portion of Medicare has slowed substantially in recent years. The slowdown has been widespread, extending across all of the major service categories, groups of beneficiaries that receive very different amounts of medical care, and all major regions. We estimate that slower growth in payment rates and changes in observable factors affecting beneficiaries’ demand for services explain little of the slowdown in spending growth for elderly beneficiaries between the 2000–2005 and 2007–2010 periods. Specifically, available evidence does not support a finding that demand for health care by Medicare beneficiaries was measurably diminished by the financial turmoil and recession. Instead, much of the slowdown in spending growth appears to have been caused by other factors affecting beneficiaries’ demand for care and by changes in providers’ behavior.

I was recently asked by an interviewer who’s going to replace Chairman Bernanke. I declined to predict because I don’t do horseraces. You’d have to be inside the beltway to understand which way President Obama is leaning. There’s not much doubt that Wall Street is pulling for one of its own, Larry Summers, and Wall Street usually gets what it wants.

Let me turn to what we should want in a central banker, rather than trying to pick the winner of the contest. To understand the qualities desired, we need to know what central bankers should be able to do. There is a lot of misconception over the role played by the Fed in our economy.

The power of the central bank is substantially less than usually imagined, or at least what influence it has is not in the areas usually identified. It has little direct impact on inflation, unemployment, economic growth, or exchange rates. It does set the overnight interest rate, but there is no plausible theory nor evidence that this matters very much. The “interest rate channel” is weak — normally the Fed is raising rates in a boom, when everyone is enthusiastically borrowing and spending, so higher rates do not diminish optimism. In a slump, when the Fed normally lowers rates, it is too late — pessimism has already taken hold.

The way that raising rates actually can work is by causing insolvency of those already heavily indebted — by pushing payments on floating rate debt above what can be afforded. There is no smooth relation between borrowing and interest rates that can be exploited by policymakers. Rather, they can cause a financial crisis if they are willing to do a “Volcker”: push rates so high that defaults snowball through the economy.

Over the past three decades, where the Chairman’s influence has been significant has been in the area of regulation and supervision of the financial sector. Unfortunately, three successive Chairmen have failed to pursue the public interest preferring instead to promote Wall Street’s interest. This has been disastrous. continue reading…

This figure shows how government spending as a percentage of GDP has evolved since 2000Q1. The numbers reflect the recent 5-year revision of the National Income and Product Accounts (the so-called “NIPA revisions”) and preliminary Q2 numbers, which are due for an update about a week from now.

The figure shows that government consumption (at the top of the figure in blue) and gross investment (farther down, at about 4 percent of GDP in an aqua, or light blue, color) have been on a downward trend when expressed as percentages of GDP. Current transfer payments are depicted in red. They remain higher as a percentage of GDP than before the financial crisis; nonetheless, they are relatively flat. Government interest payments, in green, were well under control, in part because rates remained very low as of the end of Q2. The fixed-investment series is gross in the sense that it does not adjust for depreciation. Adding together all of these figures, total gross expenditures were 37.9 percent of GDP in Q2, less than a tenth of a percentage point (.1%) higher than in Q1. For a longer-term comparison, try a total of 42.3 percent in 2009Q2. Gross (and net) government spending has been falling for a long time. The sequester, whose effects are beginning to be reflected in official data, continues this trend.

It is almost conventional wisdom today to view Germany as the winner of the euro crisis. Reisenbichler and Morgan recently argued this case in Foreign Affairs, although cautiously adding that Germany’s supposed gains may not last. The miserable truth is, however, that the euro has yet to produce any real winner, while Germany’s apparent gains from the euro crisis in particular are largely an illusion about to unravel. Ultimately only a fundamental re-design of institutions and policies in the Euro-zone would open up the prospect of creating a union of true euro winners. Misled by ill-conceived ideas and beliefs – and against its own national interest – Germany is adamantly blocking such a move. Actual policies pursued and regime reforms undertaken since 2009 under German dictate have made Europe progressively more vulnerable, and ever more of a threat to global stability as well. As of now, the euro remains firmly on track for eventual breakup – an event which would see Germany among the biggest losers.

The view of Germany as the winner of the euro crisis points as evidence at Germany’s current low unemployment rate, balanced public budget, and low borrowing costs. The contrast with the situation elsewhere in the Euro-zone is so crass that Germany currently also enjoys an influx of skilled immigrants, providing further support to its economy and housing market. Yet the state of Germany’s economy is far from stellar and the fact that Germany’s current superior performance in relative terms has come largely at the expense of its euro partners should prompt alarm rather than awe. The euro’s life expectancy was always dependent on convergence within the currency union. Instead, persistent divergences and the corresponding buildup of intra-zone imbalances have not only created the ongoing crisis, but also the illusion that Germany – its apparent winner – must have done everything right and should now be the unchallenged model for others to follow.

But to view Germany as the euro paragon is a grave misinterpretation of events. Not only should Germany’s current performance be viewed in a broader perspective: Germany has grown at an average rate of little over one percent per year under the euro; hardly impressive. It must also be understood that Germany cannot be the model for others to follow, precisely because the workability of the German model depends on others behaving differently. It is in the essence of Germany’s export-led growth model that it presupposes willing importers. The trouble is that the German authorities remain at a terrible loss when it comes to properly understanding the country’s economic model and the sources of its success under specific historical conditions. continue reading…

L. Randall Wray and Mariana Mazzucato explain some of the motivation behind their joint project that brings together the insights of Schumpeter and Minsky (note that Schumpeter was Minsky’s dissertation adviser) to explore the relationship between finance and innovation, the changing nature of each, and how the financial system might be restructured to better support the capital development of the economy — by contrast with a system that seems to revolve around financial innovation (the focus of Minsky’s earliest work) for the sake of speculation.

Dimitri Papadimitriou in Bloomberg View yesterday:

In December 2010, the so-called troika of lenders — the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund — predicted that their measures would move Greece’s unemployment rate to just under 15 percent by 2014. A year later, it changed the forecast to almost 20 percent.

This month, the Hellenic Statistical Authority reported that unemployment rose to a record in May, with a seasonally adjusted jobless rate of 27.6 percent. The rate was 64.9 percent for people 15 to 24.

Bold declarations that belt-tightening would produce growth have been pared back, too. Since 2010, the troika has gradually dropped its forecast for 2014 gross domestic product (in money terms) by almost 40 percent. IMF staff reported last week that GDP contracted 6.4 percent in 2012 and will drop 4.2 percent this year before expanding only a little in 2014.

Yet, despite admissions that mistakes were certainly made, no consideration is being given to ending austerity measures. Nor has there been effort to devise a renewal agenda for Greece. The Marshall Plan offers a spectacularly successful model that could easily be adapted.

… Here is how an EU-funded plan for recovery could succeed. Although past bailout funds benefited banks and financial institutions, with a large portion devoted to interest payments for creditors, the new program would focus on debt forgiveness, and then turn to reconstruction projects to rebuild national infrastructure and create public projects at the local level.

Read it all here.

This is what the troika’s constantly-downgraded predictions look like, compared to the actual paths of growth and unemployment and projections based on the Levy Institute’s stock-flow model for Greece (from “The Greek Economic Crisis and the Experience of Austerity“):