Konsumentism och producentism i legala system

De som läst en del i debatterna om den globala ekonomiska krisen, och innan dess om de globala ekonomiska imbalanserna i handel, valutareserver, etc, har antagligen stött på en del diskussion om USA:s höga konsumtion och import, och den låga konsumtionen i Kina, Tyskland med flera "exportländer".

På bloggen German Joys hittar jag ett mycket intressant inlägg om detta, som bygger på en artikel av en akademisk jurist, James Whitman.

In 2007, the comparative law scholar James Whitman wrote a fine article comparing the United States and Western Europe not on traditional social-welfare/laissez-faire grounds, but rather on the axis of consumerism and producerism. The U.S., he argued, can best be described as a consumerist legal culture, in which the law tends to favor protection of individual consumers (the demand side), rather than producers. Thus, American legal policy tends to favor policies which deliver lower-cost goods, even if they may result in consolidation and uniformity (i.e., Wal-Mart moves in and drives a bunch of local, family-run stores out of business, but delivers unbeatable low prices and convenient to the surrounding region).

European policy, says Whitman, is characterized by "producerism":

Despite all the global pressures to embrace economic consumerism, when continental Europeans gaze upon the modern marketplace, they remain much more likely than Americans to perceive rights and interests on the supply side, rather than on the demand side. Thus when it comes to basic labor law, they remain much more ready than Americans to think of workers’ rights as fundamental. When it comes to competition law, they remain more likely than Americans to focus on the rights of competitors to market-share, rather than on the rights of consumers to benefit from competitive prices. When it comes to the law of retail, they remain more likely to find ways to protect small shopkeepers against large retail outfits. I will offer numerous other examples too. In particular, I will argue that old guild and artisanal traditions are far more vigorous in Europe than they are in the United States. Indeed, the strength of their artisanal traditions has much to do with the successes of continental economies, which are specializing in high-end, luxury, and precision goods. The net result is a continental Europe where artisanal traditions remain strong, where small shopkeepers benefit from important legal protections, and where workers’ rights are far more important than gender or race rights. Europe, I will conclude, is not turning into the United States.

Whitman also suggests things like store-hours regulations, limits on advertising and sales, and extensive and strict regulation of the trades (which means your average neighborhood butcher has had years of carefully-supervised training, and is likely to really know a lot about meat) are also aspects of "producerism."

Whitmans artikel finns här.
German Joys-inlägget som jag citerar finns här.

Utvidgning av minimilönlag i Tyskland

De ökade inkomstskillnaderna (jfr "Tysk löneutveckling", april 2008, och "Inkomstfördelning 1980-2000" från juli 2008) har de senaste åren i Tyskland varit en stor och kontroversiell politisk fråga. (Se "Working poor i Europa" från 29 juli 2008).

Både vad gäller löneutveckling och ökade löneskillnader, och vad gäller socialförsäkringarna och välfärdssystemet. Det diskuteras bland annat om frisörer i Thüringen som bara tjänar 3,5 euro i timmen, och byggnadsarbetare och andra arbetare som också de har löner som inte går att leva på. "Working poor" alltså, något som européer snarare associerat med USA än med vårt så kallade "sociala Europa".

Fack, vänstern och vänstersossar kampanjar därför i Tyskland för lagstiftade minimilöner som ska lyfta lönerna för de som nu är "working poor". Man diskuterar sektorsvis där nivån på minimilönen alltså ska variera beroende på sektor.

Tageszeitung rapporterar nu om att laglig minimilön införts i sex sektorer till: vård, säkerhet, gruvor, tvätterier, sophantering och fortbildning.

Barbara Dribbusch, "Mehr Geld für Pfleger und Wächter", Tageszeitung 22 januari

En historisk brytpunkt?

IHT rapporterar från elitmötet i Davos och menar att vad vi ser idag kan vara ännu en stor omsvängning i västerlandets hela samhällsekonomiska modell, som 1930-talet då utvecklingen gick in i en ny fas av välfärdsstat och keynesianism, och 1970-talet då man efter oljekrisen bröt med denna fas och gick in i nyliberalismens epok, symboliserad tydligast av Reagan och Thatcher.

Katrin Bennhold, "Is Europe's welfare system a model for the 21st century?", International Herald Tribune 27 januari 2009

Jag undrar: vad säger Mark Blyth? Blyth är statsvetare/politisk ekonom och skrev Great Transformations (Cambridge UP, 2002), en lysande bok om just 1930- och 1970-talets stora omsvängningar i USA och Sverige, där han betonar de diskursiva processernas betydelse. Han är således mycket kompetent att spekulera i om IHT har rätt, om vi verkligen står i en ny sådan historisk brytpunkt, där vi går in i en ny fas i moderniteten.

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jfr klipp från 3 okt 2008:
Världssystemteoretikern och neomarxisten Immanuel Wallerstein hör (inte så förvånande) till dem som menar att vi idag ser slutet på den nyliberala fasen:

The political balance is swinging back. Neoliberal globalization will be written about ten years from now as a cyclical swing in the history of the capitalist world-economy. The real question is not whether this phase is over but whether the swing back will be able, as in the past, to restore a state of relative equilibrium in the world-system. Or has too much damage been done? And are we now in for more violent chaos in the world-economy and therefore in the world-system as a whole."

Wallerstein, "2008: The Demise of Neoliberal Globalization", Yale Global 4 februari 2008

Uppdatering 6 oktober

Madeleine Bunting i The Guardian också. Hon återanknyter i en krönika idag till Polanyi.

"We are now witnessing the collapse of this absurd economic orthodoxy that has dominated politics for nearly 30 years. Its triumphalist arrogance, its insistence on orthodoxy, has been comparable to Soviet communism in its scale. For two decades, we've been told "Tina" - "There is no alternative". Economists talk of trust, belief, faith; we now understand that all along neoliberal capitalism was a form of mythology. That's why the triumphalism was necessary - you could not afford to have anyone challenge the system or we might all realise we were gawping at the emperor's nakedness. "

Bunting, "Faith. Belief. Trust. This economic orthodoxy was built on superstition", Guardian 6 oktober

Och Stefan Jonsson i DN, 30 september: "Tro, kärlek och pengar".

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Uppdatering december 2011
Jag har skrivit en lång text om detta på Libertas-bloggen, utifrån Colin Crouchs nya bok The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. "Nyliberalismen vid vägs ände?"

Kan man lita på nationalekonomer?

Nationalekonomen vid Princeton Uwe Reinhardt skriver om nationalekonomer och ideologi på New York Times ekonomiblogg. Det handlar om neoklassisk nationalekonomis misslyckande att förstå den verkliga ekonomin, orsakad av neoklassicismens världsfrånvända, marknadsliberala religiöst-dogmatiska tendens.

"This analytic structure, formally called 'neoclassical economics,' depends crucially on certain unquestioned axioms and basic assumptions about the behavior of markets and the human decisions that drive them. After years of arduous study to master the paradigm, these axioms and assumptions simply become part of a professional credo. Indeed, a good part of the scholarly work of modern economists reminds one of the medieval scholastics who followed St. Anselm’s dictum 'credo ut intellegam': 'I believe, in order that I may understand.'
An inference drawn from the profession’s credo is that private markets invariably are self-correcting and are driven by rational human beings whose careful decisions serve to allocate scarce resources efficiently — that is, these decisions maximize a nebulous thing economists call 'social welfare.'"

Uwe Reinhardt, "An economist's mea culpa", NYT blogg Economix, 9 januari 2009
Uwe Reinhardt, "Can economists be trusted?", NYT blogg Economix, 16 januari 2009


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jfr denna intervju med Steven Marglin:

"While reading your new book, my attention was immediately caught by your description of teaching students. In the 1960s, you found that they were good with the formal economics, the techniques, and the arithmetic, but when you asked them to elicit how the economics applied to the world, they didn’t get it.
The incident took place in India. These were students who were well trained in mathematical statistics. India had been in the forefront of that field for a long time. I was a young mathematical economist, and I had had complaints when I taught the graduate theory course at Harvard that I was too mathematical. My Indian students were very good at math, and I did not need to hold back. At some point in this highly mathematically treatment, something moved me to inquire into their economic understanding behind the math. I had opened a can of worms. It quickly became clear that all they knew was the math. They had no idea what it meant.

Why is this anecdote so important to you? Does it suggest something about students of economics in general or about mainstream
economics today in particular?
It suggests something about both. We are very sophisticated mathematically in the United States now, but we have lost understanding of the economic content. What has happened to economics over the past forty years is a substitution of technique for understanding.

Do you find this true of even well-established economists?
The whole profession has gone excessively in that direction. Do not misunderstand. I started as a mathematical economist, and I believe in the importance of mathematics and formal models. But the balance has gotten way out of whack, and we now have excessive technique, which is marginalizing our understanding of what we are doing."

Stephen Marglin, professor i nationalekonomi vid Harvard, intervjuad i Challenge mars-april 2008

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jfr Brad DeLong läxar upp ekonomer:

"If you asked a modern economic historian like me why the world is currently in the grips of a financial crisis and a deep economic downturn, I would tell you that this is the latest episode in a long history of similar bubbles, crashes, crises, and recessions that date back at least to the canal-building bubble of the early 1820’s, the 1825-1826 failure of Pole, Thornton & Co, and the subsequent first industrial recession in Britain. We have seen this process at work in many other historical episodes as well – in 1870, 1890, 1929, and 2000.

For some reason, asset prices get way out of whack and rise to unsustainable levels. Sometimes the culprit is lousy internal controls in financial firms that over-reward subordinates for taking risk. Sometimes the cause is government guarantees. And sometimes it is simply a long run of good fortune, which leaves the market dominated by unrealistic optimists.

Then the crash comes. And when it does, risk tolerance collapses: everybody knows that there are immense unrealized losses in financial assets and nobody is sure that they know where they are. The crash is followed by a flight to safety, which is followed by a steep fall in the velocity of money as investors hoard cash. And that fall in monetary velocity brings on a recession.

I will not say that this is the pattern of all recessions; it isn’t. But I will say that this is the pattern of this recession, and that we have been here before.

But if you ask the same question of a modern macroeconomist – for example, the extremely bright Narayana Kocherlakota of the University of Minnesota – you will find that he says that he does not know, and that macroeconomic models attribute economic downturns to various causes. Most, he points out, 'rely on some form of large quarterly movements in the technological frontier. Some have collective shocks to the marginal utility of leisure. Other models have large quarterly shocks to the depreciation rate in the capital stock (in order to generate high asset price volatilities)...'

That is, downturns are either the result of a great forgetting of technological and organizational knowledge, a great vacation as workers suddenly develop a taste for extra leisure, or a great rusting as the speed at which oxygen corrodes accelerates, reducing the value of large things made out of metal.

But modern macroeconomists will also say that all these models strike them as implausible stories that are not to be taken seriously. Indeed, according to Kocherlakota, nobody really believes them.:'Macroeconomists use them only as convenient short-cuts to generate the requisite levels of volatility' in their mathematical models.

This leads me to ask two questions:

First, is it really true that nobody believes these stories? Ed Prescott of Arizona State University really does believe that large-scale recessions are caused by economy-wide episodes of forgetting the technological and organizational knowledge that underpin total factor productivity. One exception is the Great Depression, which Prescott says was caused by real wages far exceeding equilibrium values, owing to President Herbert Hoover’s extraordinary pro-labor, pro-union policies.

Likewise, Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago really does appear to believe that large falls in the employment-to-population ratio are best seen as 'great vacations' – and as the side-effect of destructive government policies like those in place today, which lead workers to quit their jobs so they can get higher government subsidies to refinance their mortgages. (I know; I find it incredible, too.)

Second, regardless of whether modern macroeconomists attribute our current difficulties to causes that are “patently unrealistic” or simply confess ignorance, why do they have such a different view than we economic historians do? Regardless of whether they have rejected our interpretations and understandings or simply have built or failed to build their own in ignorance of what we have done, why have they not used our work?"

Brad DeLong, professor i nationalekonomi vid UC Berkeley, "The Anti-History Boys", 28 september 2009

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jfr Julie Nelson:

”’Economic man’ is autonomous, self-interested, and rational; the fact that humans are vulnerable (especially when young, sick, or elderly) and are social and emotional beings is deliberately overlooked. The cultural connotations of these dualisms reflect longstanding associations of masculinity with high-status attributes of mind, culture, and detachment, and of femininity with low-status attributes of body, primitive or animal life, and embeddedness.”

Julie Nelson, “Economic writing on the pressing problems of the day” (2009)

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jfr Joseph Stiglitz:

"When I began the study of economics some forty-one years ago, I was struck by the incongruity between the models that I was taught and the world that I had seen growing up in Gary, Indiana. Founded in 1906 by U.S. Steel, and named after its chairman of the board, Gary has declined to but a shadow of its former self. But even in its heyday, it was marred by poverty, periods of high unemployment, and massive racial discrimination. Yet the economic theories we were taught paid little attention to poverty, said that all markets cleared - including the labor market, so that unemployment must be nothing more than a phantasm - and claimed that the profit motive ensured that there could not be economic discrimination (Becker 1971). As a graduate student, I was determined to try to create models with assumptions - and conclusions - closer to those that accorded with the world I saw, with all its imperfections."

Joseph Stiglitz, "Information and the Change in the Paradigm in Economics", i Richard Arnott, Bruce Greenwald, Ravi Kanbur & Barry Nalebuff (eds) Economics for an Imperfect World: Essays in Honor of Joseph E. Stiglitz, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003

"the so-called 'Washington Consensus' policies, which have predominated in the policy advice of the international financial instituions of the past quarter century, have been based on market fundamentalist policies which ignored the information-theoretic concerns; this explains, at least partly, their widespread failures." (s 570)

from the "Competetive Paradigm" to the "Information Paradigm" (s 579-)

"The deficiencies of the neoclassical paradigm - the failed predictions, the phenomena left unexplained - made it inevitable that it would be challenged. One might ask, though, how can we explain the persistence of this paradigm for so long? Despite its deficiencies, the competitive paradigm did provide insights into many economic phenomena." (s 617)

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jfr Greg Mankiw:

"A lot of the problem is that as well as the noted New Keynesian economist Greg Mankiw, the Harvard economics department also employs a dreadful Republican Party hack, also called Greg Mankiw. It must be terribly embarrassing when Greg Mankiw writes things that are obvious errors and pointed out as such in Greg Mankiw’s textbook, and they get blamed on Greg Mankiw. There’s a sitcom in it."

signaturen dsquared kommenterar på Crooked Timber-bloggen, 19 april 2010

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jfr DeLong om nationalekonomin och liberalismen:
14 januari 2009, "Modern liberalism and libertarianism: an economists' view"

Delong förklarar kortfattat och pedagogiskt varför marknadsliberalismen helt enkelt har fel i sin beskrivning av världen, som inte fungerar så som nyliberal teori (i olika varianter - Smithiansk, österrikisk, Nozick, etc) säger att den gör.
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jfr (november 2008) Skapinker om Greenspan:
Michael Skapinker hade häromdagen en kul och syrlig kommentar till nyliberalen (han är objektivist) och förre Fedchefen Alan Greenspans förvåning över att fria marknader kunde skapa en kris så som den vi är i idag.

"Alan Greenspan's admission of "shocked disbelief" at banks' failure to protect shareholders was like someone who had always claimed the sun went around the earth saying he had just heard an extraordinary story from a fellow called Copernicus.
/.../
There are no panaceas, but governments do need to look to rules that encourage executives to think beyond this year's bonus target.
The cry of "leave it to the market" has lost any credibility. This is the second time in less than a decade that the market has shown its inability to prevent corporate excess. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me, as they say in America."

Michael Skapinker, "Every fool knows it's a job for the government", Financial Times 18 november

Delong vs Fama om konjunkturpolitik

Jag har, något häpet*, konstaterat att i den nuvarande krisen tycks nästan alla ekonomer utgå från att fiskal konjunkturpolitik fungerar, i någon form. De har olika förslag på konkreta policies (inkomstskattesänkningar, check-utskick, infrastrukturinvesteringar, momssänkningar etc) men nästan alla tycks köpa den i grund och botten keynesianska synen att det för staten är möjligt att föra en effektiv kontracyklisk fiskal politik.

Eugene Fama från University of Chicago (såklart!) är i alla fall ett undantag. Brad Delong (UC Berkeley) har på sin blogg flera debattinlägg mot Famas syn. Diskussionen kan klargöra något om nationalekonomers perspektiv på konjunkturpolitik.

Delong 14 januari, "Fama's fallacy, take I: Eugene Fama rederives the Treasury view"
Delong 14 januari, "Fama's fallacy take II: predecessors"
Delong 14 januari, "Fama's fallacy, take III"
Delong 14 januari, "Fama's fallacy IV: The decline of Chicago"

Även: 14 januari "Stimulus spending 'skepticism'"

Zeit rapporterar i senaste numret från American Economic Associations (AEA) årliga möte, och även där om endast en avvikande röst, en protest mot stimulanspolitik.

*Något häpet, pga nationalekonomins marknadsliberala rykte. För tidigare inlägg om detta, se 27 april 2008 "Nationalekonomin och den politiska debatten", 27 maj 2008 "Efter nyliberalismen?", 15 juli 2008 "Väntan på en ny Keynes", 28 augusti 2008 "Ett annat perspektiv på och från nobelpristagare i ekonomi", 19 september 2008 "Apropå finanskrisen och retoriken om 'fria marknader'", 4 januari 2009 "Economist om unga ekonomer".

Finanssektorreform-debatt

I helgen var jag på en konferens på temat finanskrisen. Den var dock lite för pratig för min smak, lite ineffektiv. Utifrån inte minst två mycket givande analyser/policydokument tänkte jag här redovisa tre punkter för reform av finanskapitalismen.

De två dokumenten som jag verkligen vill rekommendera att läsa är:
1) Progressive Economists' Statement on Economic Recovery and Financial Reconstruction från Political Economy Research Institute vid University of Massachussetts och Schwartz Center for Economic Policy vid New School of Social Research i New York. (Pdf:en hittas här.) Det är radikala ekonomer som tillsammans har skrivit ett dokument för konjunkturpolitik och strukturella reformer för USA:s ekonomi.
2)ekonomorganisationen voxEU:s publikation What G20 leaders must do to stabilise our economy and fix the financial system, från november 2008. (Hittas här.) Detta är en antologi redigerad av Richard Baldwin och Barry Eichengreen och innehåller korta (1-3 sidor) debattinlägg av många av dagens ledande nationalekonomer, med konkreta reformförslag. Den politiska tendensen varierar väl mellan nyliberaler och socialdemokrater. I mitt tycke är framför allt LSE-ekonomen Willem Buiters inlägg oumbärligt, han ger i en kort och pedagogisk text flera konkreta reformförslag för finanssektorn.

Mina slutsatser än så länge är att tre reformsteg behövs:

1. Omregleringar. Höj kraven på bankers kapital-till-utlåning-ratio, gör kraven kontracykliska för att dämpa den nuvarande procykliska tendensen, gör så att banker inte kan etablera sig i annat land om ingen gemensam bankreglerande institution finns för ursprungslandet och värdlandet (ett förslag från Buiters artikel), osv.
2. Använd och organisera konsumentmakt i form av pensionsfonder etc: det må vara individuellt rationellt på kort sikt att investera i hedgefonder, men på sikt ger detta kriser och ett sub-optimalt system
3. Förstatliga de stora bankerna (nationell nivå) och använd de statliga bankerna för att konkurrera med privata med progressiva mål

Givetvis med reservationer för att dessa frågor är extremt komplicerade och svåra och att jag inte är någon expert..

Det kommer också givetvis nya publikationer som bör läsas, och jag räknar med att återkomma till dem. I mars äger ett Ecofin-möte rum där ekonomisk-politisk strategi i EU ska diskuteras, och i början av april möts G20-gruppen i London. Till de mötena lär diskussionens vågor svalla höga. Och dessutom lär diskussionen fortgå kontinuerligt både fram till dess och därefter. Jag såg t ex idag att IMF kommit med ett working paper med titeln "A European Mandate for Financial Sector Supervisors in the EU" (IMF WP 09/5), av Daniel C Hardy. Jag återkommer till det.

--- Uppdatering 4 februari
Economist 29 januari, "Drugstore cowboys" - om OTC (over the counter)-handel med värdepapper, och hur problematiskt det är. Vilket också det står intressant om i voxEU-publikationen som jag länkar till ovan.

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Uppdatering november 2009
Chefen för Bank of England Mervyn King uttalade sig 20 oktober för en uppdelning av banker i å ena sidan enklare och säkrare "utilities"-banker och å andra sidan mer risktagande, spekulerande investmentbanker.

"Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, told businessmen in Edinburgh on October 20th that regulation is not enough to keep banks from becoming “too important to fail”. Moral hazard is endemic: bankers take big risks, pocketing the profits but counting on governments to pick up the pieces if things go wrong.

Instead, he said, banks should be split up. Taxpayers’ money should underpin only those that operate as economically-necessary “utilities”—broadly, running the payments system and converting deposits into productive investment. Racier operations, including proprietary trading and other sorts of “casino” banking, should be spun off to outfits prepared to live and die by their wits, with no state guarantee.

In arguing for an updated version of America’s now-defunct Glass-Steagall divisions, the governor diverges from many at home and abroad. Both Gordon Brown, the prime minister, and the chancellor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling, made clear on October 21st their opposition to this approach. Although Lord Turner, chairman of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), the City regulator, has suggested that the financial-services sector could usefully get smaller, the FSA also rejects the notion of forcing banks to split. Like the Group of 20 big countries and the Basel Committee of bank supervisors, the Treasury and the FSA want to rely mainly on heavier capital requirements to keep the system safe."

Economist, "Splitting up banks: Too big to bail out", 24 oktober 2009, s 41

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Uppdatering vår 2010

"The new regime, which could be adopted as early as 2012, has two components: a 'coverage' ratio, designed to ensure that banks have a big enough pool of high-quality, liquid assets to weather an 'acute stress scenario' lasting for one month (including such inconveniences as a sharp ratings downgrade and a wave of collateral calls); and a 'net stable funding' ratio, aimed at promoting longer-term financing of assets and thus limiting maturity mismatches. This will require a certain level of funding to be for a year or more.

It remains to be seen how closely national authorities follow the script. Some seem intent on going even further. In Switzerland, UBS and Credit Suisse face a tripling of the amount of cash and equivalents they need to hold, to 45% of deposits. Britain will require all domestic entities to have enough liquidity to stand alone, unsupported by their parent or other parts of the group. Also controversial is the composition of the proposed liquidity cushions. Some countries want to restrict these to government debt, deposits with central banks and the like. The Basel proposals allow high-grade corporate bonds too.

Banks have counter-attacked, arguing that 'trapping' liquidity in subsidiaries would reduce their room for manoeuvre in a crisis and that the buffer rules are too restrictive; some, unsurprisingly, have called for bank debt to be eligible. Under the British rules, up to 8% of banks’ assets could be tied up in cash and gilts (British government bonds) that they are forced to hold, reckons Simon Hills of the British Bankers Association, which could have 'a huge impact on business models'. That, some argue, is precisely the point of reform."

Economist, Special report on financial risk, "When the river runs dry", 13 februari, sr s 11

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"The Volcker plan—named after Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman who proposed it—calls for deposit-takers to be banned from proprietary trading in capital markets and from investing in hedge funds and private equity. The Financial Stability Board (FSB), a Basel-based body that is spearheading the international reform drive, gave it a cautious welcome, stressing that such a move would need to be combined with tougher capital standards and other measures to be effective.

The Volcker rule does not seek a full separation of commercial banking and investment banking. Nor is America pushing to shrink its behemoths dramatically; for most, the plan would merely limit further growth of non-deposit liabilities (there is already a 10% cap on national market share in deposits). Officials remain queasy about dictating size limits. Citigroup’s woes suggest a firm can become too big to manage, but JPMorgan Chase and HSBC are striking counter-examples.

For all the hue and cry about the Volcker plan, America sees it as supplementing earlier proposals, not supplanting them. The most important of these is an improved “resolution” mechanism for failing giants. Standard bankruptcy arrangements do not work well for financial firms: in the time it takes for a typical case to grind through court, the company’s value will have evaporated.

America’s resolution plan would allow regulators to seize and wind down basket-cases. The challenge will be to convince markets that these measures will not turn into life-support machines. Worse, there is no international agreement on how to handle the failure of border-straddling firms, nor is one close. That was a huge problem with Lehman Brothers, which had nearly 3,000 legal entities in dozens of countries. And the struggle to retrieve $5.5 billion that a bust Icelandic bank owes creditors in Britain and the Netherlands still continues."

samma special report, "Fingers in the dike", sr s 13

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"Today, the people see in the financial sector not the skilful hands of erstwhile masters of the universe, but the grabbing hands of greedy ingrates. It is little wonder, then, that a desperate President Obama, battered by the voters in Massachusetts, has turned upon a group even less popular than his party. He has duly added the axe of Paul Volcker, 82-year-old former chairman of the Federal Reserve, to the regulatory scalpel offered by his Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner.

Mr Volcker is proposing a version of the distinction between commercial and investment banking brought into the US by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. In announcing his new proposals last week, Mr Obama referred to a 'Volcker Rule' that 'banks will no longer be allowed to own, invest, or sponsor hedge funds, private equity funds, or proprietary trading operations for their own profit, unrelated to serving their customers'. Furthermore, added the president: 'I’m also proposing that we prevent the further consolidation of our financial system.'"

Martin Wolf, "Volcker's axe is not enough to cut banks down to size", FT 26 januari

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jfr april 2010 Robert Reich om reformförslag

"1. Require that trading of all derivatives be done on open exchanges where parties have to disclose what they’re buying and selling and have enough capital to pay up if their bets go wrong. The exception in the current bill for so-called unique derivatives opens up a loophole big enough for bankers to drive their Ferrari’s through.

2. Resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act in its entirety so commercial banks are separated from investment banks. The current bill doesn’t go nearly far enough. Commercial banks should take deposits and lend money. Investment banks should be limited to the casino we call the stock market, helping companies issue new issues and making bets. Nothing good comes of mixing the two. We learned this after the Great Crash of 1929, and then forgot it in 1999 when Congress allowed financial supermarkets to do both.

3. Cap the size of big banks at $100 billion in assets. The current bill doesn’t limit the size of banks at all. It creates a process for winding down the operations of any bank that gets into trouble. But if several big banks are threatened, as they were when the housing bubble burst, their failure would pose a risk to the whole financial system, and Congress and the Fed would surely have to bail them out. The only way to ensure no bank is too big to fail is to make sure no bank is too big, period. Nobody has been able to show any scale efficiencies over $100 billion in assets, so that should be the limit.

Wall Street doesn’t want these three major reforms because they’d cut deeply into profits, and it’s using its formidable lobbying clout with both parties to prevent these reforms from even from surfacing. It’s time for Main Street — Tea Partiers, coffee partiers, and beer drinkers — to be heard."

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=04&year=2010&base_name=a_short_citizens_guide_to_refo


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Uppd sommar 2010

"Three principles should guide reform. First, since markets are bubble-prone, regulators must accept responsibility for preventing bubbles from growing too big. Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and others have expressly refused that responsibility. If markets cannot recognise bubbles, they argued, neither can regulators. They were right and yet the authorities must accept the assignment, even knowing that they are bound to be wrong. They will, however, have the benefit of feedback from the markets so they can and must continually recalibrate to correct their mistakes.

Second, to control asset bubbles it is not enough to control the money supply; we must also control the availability of credit. This cannot be done with monetary tools alone – we must also use credit controls such as margin requirements and minimum capital requirements. Currently these tend to be fixed irrespective of the market’s mood. Part of the authorities’ job is to counteract these moods. Margin and minimum capital requirements should be adjusted to suit market conditions. Regulators should vary the loan-to-value ratio on commercial and residential mortgages for risk-weighting purposes to forestall real estate bubbles.

Third, we must reconceptualise the meaning of market risk. The efficient market hypothesis postulates that markets tend towards equilibrium and deviations occur in a random fashion; moreover, markets are supposed to function without any discontinuity in the sequence of prices. Under these conditions market risks can be equated with the risks affecting individual market participants. As long as they manage their risks properly, regulators ought to be happy.

But the efficient market hypothesis is unrealistic. Markets are subject to imbalances that individual participants may ignore if they think they can liquidate their positions. Regulators cannot ignore these imbalances. If too many participants are on the same side, positions cannot be liquidated without causing a discontinuity or, worse, a collapse. In that case the authorities may have to come to the rescue. That means that there is systemic risk in the market in addition to the risks most market participants perceived prior to the crisis.

The securitisation of mortgages added a new dimension of systemic risk. Financial engineers claimed they were reducing risks through geographic diversification: in fact they were increasing them by creating an agency problem. The agents were more interested in maximising fee income than in protecting the interests of bondholders. That is the verity that was ignored by regulators and market participants alike.

To avert a repetition, the agents must have “skin in the game” but the 5 per cent proposed by the administration is more symbolic than substantive. I would consider 10 per cent as the minimum requirement. To allow for possible discontinuities in markets securities held by banks should carry a higher risk rating than they do under the Basel Accords. Banks should pay for the implicit guarantee they enjoy by using less leverage and accepting restrictions on how they invest depositors’ money; they should not be allowed to speculate for their own account with other people’s money.

It is probably impractical to separate investment banking from commercial banking as the US did with the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. But there has to be an internal firewall that separates proprietary trading from commercial banking. Proprietary trading ought to be financed out of a bank’s own capital. If a bank is too big to fail, regulators must go even further to protect its capital from undue risk. They must regulate the compensation packages of proprietary traders so that risks and rewards are properly aligned. This may push proprietary trading out of banks into hedge funds. That is where it properly belongs. Hedge funds and other large investors must also be closely monitored to ensure that they do not build up dangerous imbalances.

Finally, I have strong views on the regulation of derivatives. The prevailing opinion is that they ought to be traded on regulated exchanges. That is not enough. The issuance and trading of derivatives ought to be as strictly regulated as stocks. Regulators ought to insist that derivatives be homogenous, standardised and transparent.
/.../"

George Soros, "The three steps to financial reform", Financial Times 16 juni

En fransk intellektuell: Esther Duflo

Jag brukar klaga på att den mer intellektuella samhällsdebatten - typ kultursidor, etc, är dominerad av humanister och humaniora på den empiriska forskningens och samhällsvetenskapens bekostnad. Att en stor "intellektuell" förutsätts vara en filosof eller litteraturvetare snarare än en statsvetare eller ekonom, att det liksom ses som "djupare" med filosofi än med samhällsvetenskap.

Frankfurter Allgemeines feuilleton idag har en glädjande artikel från detta perspektiv, en artikel om att MIT-utvecklingsekonomen Esther Duflo är den yngsta (36 år) kvinna som nånsin undervisat på Collége de France. Artikeln börjar

"Så ser väl ingen fransk intellektuell ut: blyg, alls inget skelande, utan cigarett, som en grundskolelärarinna som på fritiden bestiger berg."

Vidare konstateras att inte heller handlar Duflos forskning om sånt som är lätt att få uppmärksamhet om man som "intellektuell" talar om: sex, epokbrott (den poängen är bra! Tänk Hardt och Negri, Castells och andra grovt överskattade intellektuella av idag..), orättvisor. Däremot forskar hon om effektiviteten i utvecklingsprojekt i u-länder - skolbyggen, dammprojekt och liknande.

Duflo forskar, säger Kaube implicit lite syrligt, om "saker som verkligen finns".

Jürgen Kaube, "Eine Wissenschaft gegen die Armut", FAZ 15 januari
Esther Duflos sida på MIT
Dani Rodrik har skrivit om/hyllat Duflo bl a under de rätt talande rubrikerna "A new paradigm in development economics?", och "Is there useful work in economics?"

Mmmm den internationella marknadskapitalismen

Financial Times har de senaste dagarna rapporterat om en intressant affär: den amerikanske affärsmannen Philippe Heilberg, tidigare bankir på Wall Street, har köpt rättigheter till en stor mängd land - 400 000 hektar - i södra Sudan av en krigsherre som varit aktiv på båda sidor i inbördeskriget i landet. Hur ofta är det egentligen som en affärsman som just gjort en stor affär säger om sin kollega, "jag är säker på att han har dödat många men jag är säker på att han var tvungen till det"? Det säger Heilberg till FT.

Ytterligare märkligt är att rättigheterna till jorden inte är säkra. Där har varit krig, det kan bli konflikter igen, och rättigheterna till jorden är därmed disputerade. På så sätt gamblar Heilberg på att han ska kunna behålla jorden även om det blir konflikt.

Vidare så är infrastrukturen i regionen mycket dålig. Det finns inga asfalterade transportvägar till Heilbergs land. FT skriver att

"there are few regions in Africa as remote and undeveloped as southern Sudan. Unity state, where Philippe Heilberg says he has secured a huge tract of arable land, is inaccessible even by south Sudan's standards.

Aside from AK-47s, it was deprived of most of the trappings of the modern world. Even a road network that has been under construction since 2005, when a peace agreement ended the long civil war between the predominately Muslim north and the Christian and animist south of the country, has yet to reach it. But Unity state does border the White Nile and its flat, arable land could, with billions of dollars of investment in irrigation and roads, be transformed into a world-class bread basket."

Ledaren i FT 12 januari konstaterar sarkastiskt att affären "has a decidedly 19th-century flavour to it".

Javier Bias och William Wallis, "US investor buys Sudanese warlord's land", FT 9 januari
Financial Times ledare, "Rhodes redux", 12 januari
Javier Bias och William Wallis, "Buyer sees profit in warlord's land", FT 10 januari

Indisk byggnadsarbetare i Dubai

"In 2007, Shalu, a 33-year-old Indian, paid 50,000 rupees, or about $1,025, to an agency that shipped him to a construction job in Dubai on what was to be a three-year contract. He was laid off in December after just one year. His company told him and about 250 other workers that the work had dried up."
"A lavish trade and tourism hub, Dubai is a prime destination for unskilled workers, many of whom spend hours on dusty construction sites, live in cramped desert labor camps and earn about 1,500 dirhams, or $408, a month. The pay offers a better standard of living for families back home or a chance to put away savings."

Amran Abocar, "As downturn settles on Dubai, South Asian laborers suffer", International Herald Tribune 13 januari

Den marxistiske ekonomen Samir Amin definierar "the precarious popular classes":

"workers weakened by their low capacity for negotiation (as a result of their low skill levels, their status as non-citizens, or their race or gender) as well as non-wage-earners (the formally unemployed and the poor with jobs in the informal sector."

Amin, "Foreword: Rebuilding the Unity of the 'Labour Front'", i Andreas Bieler, Ingemar Lindberg och Devan Pillay (red) Labour and the Challenges of Globalisation: What Prospects for Transnational Solidarity? (London: Pluto Press, 2008)

Obama och spelet runt arvsskatten

"Votes count, resources decide". Så beskrev statsvetaren Stein Rokkan pengars inflytande på demokratiska samhällen.

Wall Street Journal från igår ger ett intressant exempel på organiserade socio-ekonomiska intressegrupper och hur de påverkar policy, i detta fallet arvsskatten i USA som George W Bush sänkt och satt att försvinna år 2010, ett beslut som Obama ser ut att komma att ändra. WSJ beskriver intressegruppers kampanj för att avskaffa arvsskatten, och förklarar hur problem uppstått i kampanjen:

"But sharp divisions in the coalition merged between the super rich and the merely rich. Business groups have sought a measure of certainty with an estate tax that is free of graduated timelines or sunset provisions, with the largest possible tax exemption - S10 million, or S20 million per couple. The rate of taxation above that level was of little concern, since virtually every small business would be exempt from taxation.
Yet the super affluent who began the movement wanted the lowest possible rate, since even a S10 million exemption would leave the bulk of their estates subject to tax. They backed a call by Mark Bloomfield of the American Council for Capital Formation to tax all estate transfers as capital gains, at 15%, with little or no exemption."

Jonathan Weisman, "Obama plans to keep estate tax", Wall Street Journal 13 januari 2009

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uppdatering juni 2009
Jag läste lite i Versos The Poulantzas Reader från förra året idag, en samling med texter av den gamle marxistiske statsteoretikern Nicos Poulantzas (1936-1979), en av få marxistiska statsteoretiker kan man väl säga - Lenin, Gramsci, Poulantzas, Miliband, finns det någon mer? I alla fall, så framstår Poulantzas strukturalistiska-althusserinska statsteori för mig som fullständigt jävla värdelös. Det är hyperteoretiskt á la 1960-/70-tal, på det där viset när man aldrig når fram till verkligheten utan bara bygger på sitt system som mer och mer fjärmar sig från de utomdiskursiva fenomen som från början skulle förklaras. Detta i Poulantzas fall till råga på allt rättfärdigat med en gräslig althusseriansk epistemologi som förkastar användandet av empiri och förespråkar pärlespelsteoretiserande á la nationalekonomi när den är som allra sämst.

Sen läste jag ikväll en artikel på New York Times om hur storbankerna påverkar Obamas politik i sina egna intressen. Det är onekligen så att under kapitalismen spelar klassintresse en roll i politiken. Men hur? Det har, mig veterligen, ingen marxist lyckats förklara. Däremot historiska institutionalister: Atul Kohli, Vivienne Shue, Joel Migdal.

"WASHINGTON — As he often does, President Obama took the opportunity in a bill-signing ceremony last month to remind Congress 'to do what we were actually sent here to do — and that is to stand up to the special interests, and stand up for the American people.'

But Mr. Obama did not mention that the measure he was signing, the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act, was missing its centerpiece: a change in bankruptcy law he once championed that would have given judges the power to lower the amount owed on a home loan.

It had been stripped out three weeks earlier in a showdown between Senate Democrats and the nation’s banks, including many that are getting big government bailouts.

As Congressional Democrats and the White House crow about multiple victories over the financial industry, including new rules for credit card issuers, banks are quietly savoring an even bigger victory of their own."

Stephen Abaton, "Ailing, Banks Still Field Strong Lobby at Capitol", New York Times 4 juni

Plutonomi

Det är kul ibland hur analytiker av samhällsekonomin som alls inte har något kritiskt* syfte gör analyser som så lätt kan ses ur ett politiskt-kritiskt perspektiv: man behöver inte ändra någonting i beskrivningen, utan sätter bara ett politiskt plus- eller minustecken före och vips har man en radikal analys.

Ett exempel på detta är det engelska begreppet "plutonomy" som analytiker på investmentbanken Citigroup skapade år 2005 för att beskriva och analysera samhällsekonomier där en liten grupp extremt rika människor dominerar ekonomins funktionssätt. Citigroup pekar på USA, Storbritannien och Canada som exempel som plutonomier!

Låter inte det följande som något samhällskritiskt, som något en vänsterradikal skulle säga? (Och håll i minne att USA och Storbritannien enligt Citigroup är plutonomier.)

"There is no 'average' consumer in Plutonomies. There is only the rich 'and everyone else.' The rich account for a disproportionate chunk of the economy, while the non-rich account for “surprisingly small bites of the national pie. Kapur estimates that in [USA] 2005, the richest 20% may have been responsible for 60% of total spending."**

Nej det kommer inte från ETC eller Ordfront, utan det kommer från Wall Street Journals wealth report, som alltså refererar en analys från en investmentbank! Knappast några skäggiga piprökare, de där.

Begreppet plutonomi är också intressant i sig, inte bara som exempel på att den samhällsekonomiska verkligheten inte sällan är radikal/står på radikalernas sida. Mer utförligt från WSJ-bloggen, som pedagogiskt förklarar begreppet:

"It’s well known that the rich have an outsized influence on the economy. The nation’s top 1% of households own more than half the nation’s stocks, according to the Federal Reserve. They also control more than $16 trillion in wealth — more than the bottom 90%.
Yet a new body of research from Citigroup suggests that the rich have other, more-surprising impacts on the economy. Ajay Kapur, global strategist at Citigroup, and his research team came up with the term “Plutonomy” in 2005 to describe a country that is defined by massive income and wealth inequality. According to their definition, the U.S. is a Plutonomy, along with the U.K., Canada and Australia.
In a series of research notes over the past year, Kapur and his team explained that Plutonomies have three basic characteristics.
1. They are all created by “disruptive technology-driven productivity gains, creative financial innovation, capitalist friendly cooperative governments, immigrants…the rule of law and patenting inventions. Often these wealth waves involve great complexity exploited best by the rich and educated of the time.”
2. There is no “average” consumer in Plutonomies. There is only the rich “and everyone else.” The rich account for a disproportionate chunk of the economy, while the non-rich account for “surprisingly small bites of the national pie.” Kapur estimates that in 2005, the richest 20% may have been responsible for 60% of total spending.
3. Plutonomies are likely to grow in the future, fed by capitalist-friendly governments, more technology-driven productivity and globalization."

Jag halkade in på begreppet när jag läste en artikel om de oljerika länderna i Mellanöstern, och jag är intresserad av det som begrepp för att förstå olika "varianter av kapitalism".*** Det är uppenbart så att "kapitalism" är ett extremt brett begrepp som kan beskriva samhällsekonomier som i nästan alla viktiga dimensioner skiljer sig från varandra, och för ett paper om globalisering och arbetarklass vill jag börja med en taxonomi av olika varianter av kapitalism idag, för att klargöra att innebörden av och identiteten för arbetarklassen kan vara mycket olika i olika samhällsekonomier och att progressiva strategier också kan skilja sig starkt åt.

*Som i Robert Cox klassiska distinktion mellan kritisk och problemlösande vetenskap i en artikel i tidskriften Millennium, år 1981.
**Robert Frank, "Plutonomics", Wall Street Journal The Wealth Report, 8 januari 2007
***Begreppet "varianter av kapitalism" kommer från forskare inom jämförande politisk ekonomi - Roland Dore tycks ha uppfunnit det under 1990-talet för att beskriva skillnaden i Japans samhällsekonomi från USA:s, och Peter Hall och David Soskice är de som skrev boken Varieties of Capitalism, som blivit mycket inflytelserik. Men VofC-forskarna fokuserar uteslutande på rika länder, på välfärdskapitalism; i mitt tycke är det nödvändigt att globalisera begreppet så att man kan begripa även råvarudominerade ekonomier, östasiatisk neomerkantilism, osv.

Economist om ledande unga ekonomer idag

Jag har tidigare skrivit om/spekulerat i om "neoklassisk" inte är rätt begrepp för att beskriva dagens nationalekonomi, som nog snarare definieras av sin metodologi än av sin teori (till glädje för alla betraktare som inte hyser någon sympati för neoklassicismens marknadsliberala naivitet). The Economist skriver om tio ledande unga ekonomer, och konstaterar även detta i slutet av artikeln.

"Over 60 years ago Paul Samuelson laid down “the foundations of economic
analysis” in his seminal work of that name. In the introduction, he describes
his dawning realisation of the underlying unity of the subject. As he laboured
in each field—consumer behaviour, public finance, international trade, business
cycles—he encountered similar problems, which yielded to the same set of
mathematical techniques. Mr Samuelson’s book squeezed a shapeless body of
economic knowledge into a tight corset.

In the decades since, the laces
have been unpicked. It is not just that economists are nosing into new fields of
social behaviour. They have been doing that at least since Gary Becker of the
University of Chicago wrote about crime and the family in the 1960s and 1970s.
But today’s economists show no great attachment to the rational model of
behaviour that guided Mr Becker. Economic theory has become so eclectic that
ingenious researchers can usually cook up a plausible model to explain whatever
empirical results they find interesting. Economics is now defined neither by its
subject matter nor by its method.

What, then, unites these eight young
stars and the discipline they may come to dominate? Economists still share a
taste for the Greek alphabet: they like to provide formal, algebraic accounts of
the behaviour they explain. And they pride themselves on the sophistication of
their investigative methods. They are usually better at teasing confessions out
of data than their rivals in other social sciences."

The Economist, "International Bright Young Things", 30 december 2008