Tolkprojektet

"Byggnads säger upp en av sina fyra tolkar. Resultatet kommer bli att färre utländska byggnadsarbetare kommer att omfattas av kollektivavtal.

– Det blir kaos. Svenska byggföretag kommer bli utkonkurrerade av utländska företag som betalar låga löner och struntar i att betala skatt och inte bryr sig om arbetsmiljön, säger tolken Gints Kaplers, som är uppsagd från årsskiftet.

Han är från Lettland och tolkar lettiska, ryska och engelska till svenska. Han kom själv till Sverige som snickare anställd på Bygglett 2005. Företaget lurade honom på lön – timpenningen låg på 60 kronor. Då vände han sig till Byggnads, gick med i facket och fick hjälp att få ett annat byggjobb. Ett halvår senare anställde Byggnads honom som tolk.

Gints Kaplers jobbar åt fyra avdelningar i Byggnads – Örebro, Värmland, Linköping och Norrköping. Han är en av fyra tolkar som Byggnads anställt. De andra finns i Stockholm, Göteborg och Malmö. Fram till nyår betalar förbundet tolkarnas lön och därefter får avdelningarna stå för hälften av deras lön.

– Vi har inte ekonomi att ha honom kvar. Någonstans måste man göra sina prioriteringar. Hans arbete får fördelas på de anställda ombudsmän vi har, men vi kan bara hanka oss fram på engelska, säger Richard Vestermark, kassör i Byggnads avdelning i Örebro.

Han säger dock att Byggnads inte kommer att klara att leta reda på de små byggföretagen, som Gints Kaplers gjort, och teckna avtal med dem. Gints Kaplers säger själv att han sett till att 30 utländska byggföretag skrivit under Byggnads kollektivavtal det senaste året."

Göran Jacobsson, "Byggnads säger upp tolk", LO-Tidningen 13 december

Irlands bolagsskatt

Ed Crooks, "Low Irish tax rate vital to US business", FT 26 november s 2 - lobbying på gång mot Frankrike och Tysklands vilja att Irland ska höja sin låga (12,5 procent) bolagsskatt. Intel, Pfizer och Microsoft lobbar. USA stått för >50 procent av inkommande FDI till Irland senaste fem åren. Christian Ketels, Harvard/Handelshögksolan, tillfrågad forskare

Ungefär så nyanserad analys behöver man för att anses vara "politisk förnyare"

"Jag tror att man glömmer bort det lite grann, att samhället ser inte ut så idag."

Grotesco avsnitt 4, "Kaffe"

IF Metall och Randstads modell

"Den svenska modellens förhandlingskultur av breda samarbeten för att minska konflikter måste leva vidare.

Den traditionen har varit vägledande när IF Metall Göteborg och Randstad funnit en väg att kombinera önskemålen och träffat den första lokala tillämpningen av kollektivavtalet i Göteborg som reglerar dessa förhållanden. Genom denna samverkan sätter parterna en ”best practice” där den fackliga organisationen och bemanningsföretaget Randstad delar en gemensam värdegrund.
/.../
IF Metall Göteborg och Randstad AB har tillsammans kommit överens i ett unikt lokalt samverkansavtal med utgångspunkt från gällande riksavtal inom bemanningsbranschen.

Några exempel på förstärkningar:

• De anställdas självklara rätt till anställningstrygghet och en juste behandling på jobbet. Förbättrade anställningsvillkor och löpande dialog mellan parterna. Hänsyn tas till den enskildes önskemål och privata angelägenheter vid utbokning till kund.
• Partsamverkan inom Randstad. I avtalet regleras introduktion för nyanställda och informationsmöten för anställda där både fack och arbetsgivare deltar.
• Arbetsgivarens behov av flexibilitet och ökade möjligheter att snabbt möta förändringar i efterfrågan och konjunktur. Ska ske genom löpande kartläggning av kompetens för att säkra trygga anställningar och längre uppdrag för Randstad på inhyrande företag.
• Bemanningsföretagets behov av att kunna planera verksamheten och nå en långsiktig lönsamhet.
• Samhällets behov av att få fler i arbete och särskilt stödja utsatta gruppers inträde på arbetsmarknaden.

Det är en väg som innebär att vi visar att flexibilitet för ett företag inte behöver innebära ett hot mot individens trygghet."

Lennart Alverå (IF Metall Göteborg) och Johan Söderström (Randstad), "Vi har framtidens anställningsavtal", Göteborgs-Posten 11 oktober

Höga vinster utan motsvarande investeringar/sysselsättningseffekt?

"The nation’s workers may be struggling, but American companies just had their best quarter ever.

American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago, at least in nominal or noninflation-adjusted terms. /.../
Corporate profits have been doing extremely well for a while. Since their cyclical low in the fourth quarter of 2008, profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history.
Still, most economists say the current growth rate is far too slow to recover the considerable ground lost during the recession.

'The economy is not growing fast enough to reduce significantly the unemployment rate or to prevent a slide into deflation,' Paul Dales, a United States economist for Capital Economics, wrote in a note to clients. 'This is unlikely to change in 2011 or 2012.'"

Catherine Rampell, "Corporate Profits Were the Highest on Record Last Quarter", NYT 23 november

Economist, "Gimme a 'V'", 4 december - profiterna ökar snabbare än sysselsättningen i USA; V-form kontra L-form

John Authers, "Why hoarding comes naturally in the Age of Anxiety", FT 27-28 november, s 7 - om att företagen har så mycket pengar men inte investerar dem. Osäkerhet. (Dock utan referenser till Keynes/Shiller etc.)

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Jfr juli 2010, "Företags profiter och sparande"

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UPPDATERING 5 mars 2011

"The labor market may be improving, but U.S. workers have yet to share much in the productivity and profits they’ve helped generate during the recovery.

From mid-2009 through the end of 2010, output per hour at U.S. nonfarm businesses rose 5.2% as companies found ways to squeeze more from their existing workers. But the lion’s share of that gain went to shareholders in the form of record profits, rather than to workers in the form of raises. Hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, rose only 0.3%, according to the Labor Department. In other words, companies shared only 6% of productivity gains with their workers. That compares to 58% since records began in 1947. /.../"

Mark Whitehouse, "Number of the Week: Workers Not Benefiting From Productivity Gains", WSJ Real Time Economics-bloggen, 5 mars

UPPDATERING 19 mars

"U.S. companies’ cash hoard keeps getting bigger, a trend both good and troubling.

After hitting new highs in five of the last six quarters, nonfinancial corporations’ cash and other liquid assets reached $1.9 trillion at the end of 2010, according to the Federal Reserve. That’s 7% of all their assets, the highest level since 1963."

Mark Whitehouse, "Number of the Week: Companies’ Cash Hoard Grows", WSJ Real Time Economics-bloggen, 12 mars

UPPDATERING 22 mars
FT hade i fredags en artikel om hur också företag i Storbritannien har sett vinsterna komma tillbaka, men utan att öka investeringarna "proportionerligt". FT rapporterar att företag använder extrapengarna till att köpa tillbaka aktier snarare än att göra nya investeringar. Colin Ellis från British Venture Capital Association säger till FT att "companies' choosing buy-backs over investment suggested they were not confident about the future, and also that they were not short of spare capacity."
Alison Smith, "Companies face difficult calls on returning cash", FT 18 mars
Norma Cohen, "Focus falls on cash piles", FT 18 mars

UPPDATERING 27 mars
Rebecca Wilder på bloggen Angry Bear argumenterar för att den bestående höga arbetslösheten i USA inte beror på en höjd jämviktsarbetslöshet, utan på en "corporate savings glut".
Rebecca Wilder, "It's not structural unemployment, it's the corporate savings glut", angrybear 27 mars

Chris Dillow plockar fram de amerikanska marxisterna Paul Baran och Paul Sweezys gamla bok Monopolkapitalet. Detta citat från den boken passar bra på den nuvarande situationen, konstaterar Dillow:

"[det monopolkapitalistiska systemet] tends to generate ever more surplus, yet it fails to provide the consumption and investment outlets required for the absorption of a rising surplus and hence for the smooth working of the system. Since surplus which cannot be absorbed will not be produced, it follows that the normal state of the monopoly capitalist economy is stagnation (p 108)."

Stumbling & Mumbling, "Monopoly Capital redux", 11 mars

UPPDATERING 1 juli
Stephen Greenhouse på NYT:s Economix-blogg refererar en ny studie av nationalekonomerna Andrew Sum, Ishwar Khatiwada, Joseph McLaughlin och Sheila Palma om fördelningen av de ökade inkomsterna sedan recessionen vände i USA andra kvartalet 2009 (fram till fjärde kvartalet 2010). 88 procent av de ökade inkomsterna har gått till vinstandelen.
Steven Greenhouse, "The Wageless, Profitable Recovery", Economix 30 juni

Uppdatering 19 augusti
FT:s James Mackintoshs ger en intressant förklaring till den märkliga vinst-jobb-divergensen i USA idag:

"Corporate profits are the difference between revenue and cost.
Costs are mostly labour, so job cuts in a recession - about 7m in the US in the recession of 2008-09, more than previous downturns - widen margins. The usual offset to that is that fewer jobs inherently means lower spending, cutting revenues faster than costs can be cut.
This time around, the US government has gone to extraordinary lenghts to keep spending up. On top of standard counter-cyclical spending, such as food stamps, came extended unemployment benefits, tax cuts, stimulus projects, and the extension of healthcare. The budget deficit is running at levels never seen outside wartime.
Companies managed, in other words, to dump a big chunk of their labour costs on to the government without incurring as much damage as usual to revenues.
Of course, more is going on than a simple transfer from government to shareholders. Tobias Levkovich at Citigroup estimates this effect accounts for about 10 to 15 per cent of corporate profits. Emerging markets have remained strong, and borrowing costs have plunged, as the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to nearly zero.
Taken together, this helps explain why corporate profits remained robust in the first half of the year, even as the US economy struggled."

James Mackintosh, "A cautious view of corporate rebound", FT fm 15 augusti

Uppdatering 21 september 2011
Ekonomen David McLean hävdar att företags cash hoarding har ökat de senaste 30-40 åren eftersom företagens R&D-utlägg har ökat och deras inkomsters volatilitet har ökat. McLean hävdar att därför är det rationellt för företagen att ha mer likvida medel i reserv.
David McLean, "Corporations hoard cash as precautionary measure", MIT Sloan Experts

FT Alphaville-bloggen diskuterar huruvida de stora vinsterna kommer göra en stor inbromsning snart.

"The combination of company cost-cutting and policy-driven demand, both of which have been keeping margins and profits high, will soon come to an end. We’ve written about all this before and think it makes sense.

Nomura analysts have a somewhat different notion /.../"

Cardiff Garcia, "Margin squeeze.... rally?", FT Alphaville 20 september

Och Chris "Stumbling and mumbling" Dillow ser stor investerar-pessimism i det faktum att företagen hoardar pengar men inte investerar dem - jfr hans blogginlägg från 11 mars om Monopolkapitalet som jag länkat till ovan.

"firms aren’t reinvesting their retained earnings, but are just hoarding cash. Official figures show that, in the year to March, non-financial firms operating in the UK retained £169.5bn of profits after paying taxes and dividends. But only £108bn – less than two-thirds – was invested in capital equipment and new premises. A large chunk of the rest - £31.7bn – was stuck into cash.

One reason for this is that smaller companies especially are not confident that credit will be available if they need it, so they feel the need to hold lots of liquid working capital.

But there's another reason why firms aren't investing. It's the same reason why stock markets aren't anticipating future growth – they don't believe that there are good profit opportunities."

Chris Dillow, "Marxist Markets", Investors' Chronicle 14 september

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Uppdatering 6 oktober
Robert Parker, en rådgivare till Credit Suisse, skriver i FT om företagens högar med cash och huruvida de kommer sätta sprätt på dem. Han börjar med att konstatera att "investor sentiment is more negative than at any time over the past 30 years", och att frågan är vilka reformer och händelser som kan vända stämningen och få folk att investera igen. Han diskuterar en mängd reformer framför allt om eurozonskrisen, som en ny haircut på Grekland, större EFSF osv.
Parker skriver ur ett investerarperspektiv och formulerar sig bland annat så här:

"the key to markets over the next few months is whether elevated cash levels are reduced; monitoring investor cash positions therefore remains critical but gauges such as the Vix volatility index and corporate and financial bond spreads may also be good forward indicator"

Parker, "What will persuade investors to dump cash piles?", FT 5 oktober

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Uppdatering 10 oktober
Thomas Franzén, ordförande för regeringens Finanskriskommitté och tidigare bl a ordförande för Riksgälden, har en väldigt intressant debattartikel i SvD idag på detta tema:

"Att världen återkommande drabbas av finansiella kriser hänger starkt samman med företagens avkastningkrav.

De flesta företagen har satt upp mål på 15–20 procent. Dessa mål styr vilka investeringar som genomförs. Med bonussystem drivs företagsledningar att uppnå avkastningsmålet, samtidigt som inflationen sjunkit de senaste decennierna, vilket ökat de reala kraven. Om företagen ser till att ha så litet eget kapital som möjligt och bara väljer de mest högavkastande investeringarna kan de öka avkastningen. De kan då öka sina utdelningar och återköpa aktier. Aktieägarna får då pengar som de kan investera på nytt.

Men avkastningsmålen utgår från att företagen inte ska be börsen om mer kapital. Detta innebär att efterfrågan på aktier stiger samtidigt som utbudet på aktier inte ökar. Följden blir att aktierna stiger i värde. Bubblan börjar.

Processen stannar inte där. Ägarna – ofta fonder – försöker finna andra marknader med en avkastning i nivå med företagens finansiella mål. För att nå en sådan avkastning måste risktagandet öka. Asienkrisen på 1990-talet och it-kraschen vid millennieskiftet byggdes upp av dessa investerar- beteenden. Subprimelån, lån till låntagare med låg kreditvärdighet, är det senaste uttrycket. /.../

fortfarande strävar företag efter att komma tillbaka till gamla höga avkastningsmål, vilket håller tillbaka tillväxt och sysselsättning. Jag är övertygad om att kraven måste komma ner på nivåer som ligger närmare ekonomins tillväxt och den långsiktiga räntenivån innan vi får en marknad i samklang med god långsiktig industriell tillväxt."

Thomas Franzén, "Företagens krav har skapat krisen", SvD brännpunkt 10 oktober 2011

se också Franzéns artikel "Bolagens vinstmål är en orsak till finanskriser" (pdf), Ekonomisk Debatt nr 4 2009

jfr: Kevin Daly och Ben Broadbent, "The Savings Glut, the Return on Capital and the Rise in Risk Aversion" (pdf), Goldman Sachs Global Economics, Commodities and Strategy Research, 27 maj 2009

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Uppdatering 4 januari 2012

"Bin Jiang and Tim Koller of McKinsey estimate that European and US companies hold about $2tn of surplus cash, defined as the amount outstanding over and above operating cash, which is deemed to be two per cent of revenue. The question is how these cash balances will be deployed. /.../

I suspect, too, that the English-speaking countries may be moving to a new, low-investment paradigm and not merely because, as in the case of the UK, they have a service sector bias. The practice of rewarding executives increasingly with equity is imposing a far greater focus on short-term measures of performance. Academic evidence in the US has, for example, shown that a high proportion of chief financial officers admits to a willingness to sacrifice economic value to meet short-term earnings targets. The current record profit margins and exceptionally high unemployment reflect that ruthless focus.

The capital market culture of these countries also has a strong emphasis on merger and acquisition activity which, from a managerial perspective, substitutes the thrill of the chase for the hard slog of managing operating businesses and investing in fixed capital. Business becomes transactional at the expense of relationships and performance is seen in narrowly financial terms. Far too many of the deals fail in economic terms, partly because stock options and rewards for failure give managers a huge incentive to bet the ranch.

That brings us to the most likely outlet for all that corporate cash. Much of it will go into share buy-backs, which are relatively painless for managers since, unlike dividends, they entail no continuing commitment to pay. Part of this activity will be arbitrage because corporate bond yields for many companies are now below the yields on equity."

John Plender, "Don't expect economic boost from cash-rich companies", FT 3 januari

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Uppdatering 7 januari
Jason Voss tittar på statistiken för företagens högar med pengar, och hävdar att diskussionen om för stort företagssparande i USA förvridits av att man bara jämfört tillbaka till 2008, ett år med ovanligt lågt sparande:

"The usual discussion of the corporate cash mountain compares growth on a year-over-year basis. According to the Federal Reserve’s Flow of Funds Guide published in mid-September, at the end of the second quarter of 2011, U.S. nonfinancial corporations held liquid assets of $2,047.1 billion, up 24.37% over the prior year. At a time of negative real interest rates, this rate of cash accumulation certainly does seem alarming.

But is it really? The answer, it turns out, is probably not. In fact, most of the alarm about excess cash accumulation seems to be a simple artifact of how the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Federal Reserve report their data: Both organizations publish numbers in press releases going back only to 2008. To analyze a longer sweep of history, analysts and commentators would need to dig deep into both organizations’ websites, and it seems that few do. Instead, they have anchored to year-end 2008 data as the basis of comparison — a period when cash balances were artificially low. At the time, with short-term credit markets seizing up and U.S. corporations suffering through the worst economic quarter since the Great Depression, many businesses dramatically drew down cash balances in an effort to maintain their operations."

Jason Voss, "Is the Mountain of Corporate Cash an Illusion?", del 1, del 2, CFA Institute Enterprising Investor blog, november 2011

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Uppdatering 8 januari 2012
Adam Ozimek, "Why do corporations hold so much cash?", Modeled Behavior 7 januari

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Uppdatering 31 januari 2012
John Authers har en lång och intressant artikel om US-amerikanska företags högar med cash i FT:

"Call it the $1,700bn problem. Companies in the US are flush with cash and are paying out a smaller proportion of their earnings as dividends than ever before. Much the same can be said for western Europe. Governments and households on both sides of the Atlantic are meanwhile strapped for cash. This cannot persist much longer. /.../

At present, cash accounts for more than 6 per cent of the assets on the balance sheets of US non-financial companies. That is the highest in at least six decades, and represents the fruit of record high profit margins. Companies cut costs through redundancies during the post-Lehman economic swoon, while negligible interest rates reduced their borrowing costs. As a result, US corporate profits are higher, as a share of gross domestic product, than at any time since 1950.

But as uncertainty persists, groups are reluctant to repay that cash to shareholders by buying back stock or – particularly – paying dividends. The pay-out ratio (the proportion of earnings that go in dividends) for the S&P 500 index is at its lowest since 1900.

Why? For years, investors have not pushed the issue. Academic theory says they should not care whether cash is paid out or left on the balance sheet. Either way, it belongs to them. “There was a time in the 90s when dividend was a four-letter word,” says Jim Cullen, a Boston fund manager. “They were for old ladies.”

James Henderson, a fund manager for Lowland Investment Company, a UK investment trust, puts it another way. “Companies held back on dividends to make themselves look more like growth stocks,” he says. Then came what he depicts as “a return to the roots of equity investing, which was that you put your money into a venture and then you harvested your return – and that return didn’t depend on whether the price of the asset had gone up recently”. /.../

Managing “for cash” makes sense if the economy grows slowly, as it is hard for revenues to grow. But while this might keep investors happy, governments would feel differently. Politicians want companies to grow, to create jobs and to generate the tax revenues needed to plug their deficits.

“We are seeing a symbiotic relationship between government ‘borrowing’ and corporate ‘saving’ the likes of which has rarely been seen before,” says Ian Harnett of Absolute Strategy.

Governments could yet respond by raising corporate taxes, tweaking them to encourage spending, or increasing dividend taxes. But it will be hard to cut public deficits without some aid from corporate cash, which investors want paid to them. Neither option – a heavily taxed corporate sector or one that pays out cash rather than reinvesting it – is conducive to capitalism at its most vibrant."

John Authers, "Hordes of hoarders", FT 29 januari

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Uppdatering 6 februari 2012
John Cochrane:

"There is a lot of puzzling why people and companies are sitting on so much cash. Well, at zero interest rates, the opportunity cost of holding cash is zero, so it's a wonder they don't hold more. This measure of velocity is tracking interest rates with exactly the historical pattern."

Cochrane, "A brief parable of over-differencing", 26 januari

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Uppdatering 9 februari

"Much has been written about how the developed world must tackle its structural budget deficits. But the link that remains to be properly recognised is that the counterparts to those ‘unsustainable’ public-sector budget deficits are equally ‘unsustainable’ corporate-sector surpluses.

The conventional wisdom believes that the current sovereign debt crisis is the result of governments having been too profligate. But it is not that governments have been spending ‘too much’ that is the problem; it is that corporates have been spending ‘too little’. Moreover, because this corporate saving is the main counterpart to the government’s borrowing, until companies start to spend again, the burden of fiscal adjustment will have to fall on cutbacks in public services and higher personal taxation. It is time to shift the debate away from talking about the fiscal position, and focus instead on whether it is a shift in corporate behaviour that is responsible for the fiscal mess in the developed world. /.../

Investment-to-gross domestic product ratios in the developed world are now close to the lowest levels seen in 60 years. Corporates appear to have decided to run themselves for cash, and not for growth. /.../

In the Reagan-Thatcher era, politicians cut taxes so that companies would come to their country, invest, create jobs … so that those politicians could, in turn, be re-elected. It does not work like that anymore; globalisation has seen to that. The reality is that public services used by the ‘99 per cent’ are taking the strain, while attractive corporate tax regimes are protected. Just as the trade-union barons of the 70s failed to see the writing on the wall, so the global captains of industry may suffer a similar fate unless they put their cash to work in the countries in which they are domiciled. "

David Bowers, joint managing director of Absolute Strategy Research, "Watch out as sovereigns eye company cash piles", FT 8 feb

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Uppdatering 29 mars 2012

Cardiff Garcia på FT Alphaville konstaterar att företag i USA faktiskt spenderar mer på utdelningar och att köpa tillbaka aktier, än vad de drar in i vinst. Diagram:


"Whatever happens, that is still an awful lot of liquidity in search of investable ideas."

Cardiff Garcia, "US corporate cash stat of the day", FT Alphaville 27 mars
Garvia, "A US corporate cash update", FT Alphaville 14 mars

Och Chris Dillow har fortsatt sin fördjupning i relationen mellan vinster och investeringar. Dillow:

"The key question is: what is the link between capitalist investment (and hence economic growth) and profit margins?

In the 50s and 60s, the link was positive. Social-democratic efforts to main full employment tended to squeeze profit margins. But this promoted investment because low profit margins were accompanied by high (expected) aggregate demand and high profit rates; this is what Marglin and Bhaduri called a stagnationist regime.

But in the 70s, this broke down. The profit squeeze no longer promoted aggregate demand, so profit rates fell and investment and growth slowed.

The solution - which Thatcherism and neoliberalism stumbled upon in the 80s - was union-busting, welfare-eroding government. In creating mass unemployment, profit margins were restored and with them investment and growth. We had, in Marglin and Bharduri’s words, an exhilarationist regime.

Which brings us to our current plight. The exhilarationist regime might have broken down, just as the stagnationist one did in the 70s. Neoliberalism no longer promotes investment. /.../
what lies beyond exhilarationism? The right’s answer is: nothing. It assumes that tax breaks and diminishing the welfare state will re-ignite investment. The statist left’s answer is that we‘re seeing a return to stagnationism, in which case fiscal expansion and wage-led growth will work. But what if they’re both wrong?"

"Stagnationism, exhilarationism and beyond", 25 mars

"the difficulty of monetizing new innovations means that the profit motive is no longer sufficient to promote investment. This would be consistent with (though not proof of!) Marx’s prediction that capitalism would eventually retard economic growth:

'At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production…From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.'"

"Capitalists on strike", 28 mars

Uppdatering 17 juli 2012
David Cay Johnston, "Idle corporate cash piles up", reuters 16 juli

Uppdatering 11 februari 2013
Paul Krugman, "Corporate Hoarding and the Slow Recovery", 8 februari
Noah Smith, "The corporate cash puzzle", 10 februari

Uppdatering 30 juli 2013
Denna diskussion har nu nått Sverige! I förra veckan rapporterade Ekot att svenska börsbolag har 150-200 miljarder på hög.

"Under krisen har bolagen gnetat och sparat och kapat kostnader. Men inte ökat i volym. Alltså har de inte behövt investera i produktionen och nyanställa.
Man skulle kunna tro att bolagen i den här situationen vill växa genom att köpa upp andra. Men det händer inte heller, säger Jerker Söderström. [aktiestrateg på Swedbank]
– Det här riktigt klockrena förvärven finns egentligen inte där ute.
Alltså, nu måste snart aktieutdelningarna öka.
– Det blir svårt att förklara varför man ska så ineffektiva balansräkningar. När det inte finns förvärvskandidater finns det egentligen inget annat alternativ.
Många chefer är helt enkelt brända av finanskrisen, säger Richard Wahlund, som är professor i företagsekonomi och expert på ekonomisk psykologi.
– Absolut, det är ju individer som sitter i styrelser och ledningar de agerar i stor utsträckning som vilken människa som helst.
Pengarna finns men inte framtidstron. För eller senare vänder det förstås. Men inte än."

Ekot, "Börsbolagen vadar i pengar", 25 juli

Nordström Skans om Skedingers bok om anställningsskydd

Hur stor roll spelar egentligen anställningsregleringar/anställningsskydd, typ LAS, för sysselsättning och arbetslöshet? Per Skedinger är antagligen den mest aktive ekonomen i den debatten i Sverige. Oskar Nordström Skans, arbetsmarknadsekonom vid Uppsala universitet, recenserar Skedingers bok Effekter av anställningsskyddet – vad säger forskningen? (SNS förlag, 2008), i Ekonomisk Debatt:

"Genomgången visar tydligt på hur få precisa resultat som levererats inom detta område. De teoretiska utsagorna är sällan entydiga och de empiriska studierna brottas med betydande metodproblem: dels låter sig inte anställningsskyddet utan vidare kvantifieras, dels är det relativt ovanligt med den typ av väldefinierade och genomgripande reformer som hade underlättat det empiriska arbetet. /.../

Mätproblemen gör att det är svårt att på ett riktigt bra sätt ens besvara den relativt rättframma frågan om i vilken utsträckning LAS avviker från andra länders regelverk. Trots de underliggande problemen ger antagligen OECDs index i nuläget den bästa möjliga internationella jämförelsen. Sverige hamnar enligt detta index i den övre delen av en internationell ranking utan att för den delen vara extrem (plats 19 av 28). Till skillnad från i en del sydeuropeiska länder kan svenska företag t ex själva bestämma när de har övertalig arbetskraft utan att först behöva övertyga någon utomstående bedömare. Redan här innehåller alltså Skedingers bok ett viktigt klargörande – det svenska regelverket är inte, som ofta hävdas från arbetsgivarsidan, extremt strikt vid en internationell jämförelse. Detta är naturligtvis väl känt bland arbetsmarknadsekonomer, men kanske inte bland den bredare samhällsintresserade allmänhet som boken (också) vänder sig till. /.../

Vilka effekter har då anställningsskyddet? Ja, om man ska tro de länderjämförande
studier som använder OECDs index, eller olika varianter därav (vilkas styrkor och svagheter diskuteras på ett föredömligt sätt i boken), så är troligen effekterna på aggregerad arbetslöshet, sysselsättning och löner små. Givet hur godtyckligt konstruerat varje index måste bli, och hur svårt det är att separera effekterna av anställningsskydd från andra skillnader mellan länder, så kan det tyckas oklart om detta resultat beror på mätfel eller på att effekterna faktiskt är små. Något som ändå får betraktas som en styrka är att man i allmänhet ändå lyckas finna stöd
för de mest entydiga teoretiska förutsägelserna, nämligen att anställningsskyddet försvårar för ungdomar att ta sig in på arbetsmarkanden och att ett striktare anställningsskydd minskar dynamiken på arbetsmarknaden. /.../

Genomgående kännetecknas dock boken av en kritisk men balanserad och välavvägd diskussion av forskningsläget. Den enda egentliga avvikelsen är i det första av de två (!) avslutande sammanfattande kapitlen där Skedinger skriver att 'Flera pusselbitar saknas således ännu, men min helhetsbedömning är ändå att de senaste årens forskning stärkt argumenten för en reformering av den svenska lagstiftningen …' (s 111). Jag tycker inte att boken ger en speciellt god grund för denna bedömning. Om målsättningen är att vägleda beslutsfattare saknas enligt min läsning inte bara ett par pusselbitar – snarare saknas nästan hela pusslet och det enda vi har är ett par udda bitar som vi inte ens är säkra på om de passar ihop.
Skedingers noggranna sammanställning visar, som jag ser det, på att forskningen ger väldigt lite ledning vad gäller hur ett någorlunda forskningsbaserat anställningsskydd bör utformas. Den allmänna bilden av att ett mindre strikt regelverk kan vara skadligt i vissa dimensioner är helt enkelt alldeles för oprecis för att vägleda politiska beslut."

Nordström Skans, "Klargörande om anställningsskyddets effekter" (pdf), Ekonomisk Debatt nr 6 2008

Den aggressiva tautologin: högersosseexempel 1

Thomas Östros har ett riktigt dåligt stycke i sin artikel på DN Debatt 12 november:

"Det ska löna sig att arbeta.
Arbete och utbildning måste gå före passivt beroende av ersättningar och bidrag. I dag återfinns allt fler i arbetsmarknadsprogram med begränsat innehåll. Erfarenheten är tydlig: passivt beroende av ersättningar är förödande. Men drivkrafterna för arbete måste också vara tydliga. Försäkringssystemen får aldrig bidra till passivitet och långvarig arbetslöshet. Alla som kan göra en arbetsinsats ska ges möjlighet till det. Fokus ska vara på matchning och kompetens.

Ehhhh är anledningen till att "allt fler [återfinns] i arbetsmarknadsprogram med begränsat innehåll" att skillnaderna i inkomstnivå beroende på om man har jobb eller är arbetslös är för små??? Det är ett så klockrent exempel på en aggressiv tautologi: man säger något självklart, att det ska löna sig att arbeta, och förtiger fullständigt hur det ligger till i verkligheten (det lönar sig redan att arbete), och med kombinationen av den tautologiska populismen och bortseendet från fakta, så kommer man "logiskt" fram till en politisk slutsats som egentligen är kontroversiell och konfliktfylld. Till råga på allt är det en aggressiv tautologi som tjänar till att stärka den borgerliga "hegemonin" (eller vad man vill kalla det, problemformuleringsprivilegiet, osv) på det ekonomisk-politiska och sysselsättningspolitiska området, istället för att - som en socialdemokratisk ekonomisk-politisk talesman borde göra - ifrågasätta just det borgerliga tänkandet.

I SAP:s valanalys efter valförlusten 2006 (pdf här) ritas de följande två äggen upp, som på ett tydligt sätt visar skillnaden mellan SAP:s ideala valallians - det vänstra ägget - och moderaternas valallians år 2006 - det högra ägget.

Thomas Östros lutar med sin sifferlösa retorik mot det högra ägget. Jag håller absolut med om att "det ska löna sig att arbeta" och är inte på något sätt för 100 procent ersättningsnivå i a-kassan eller socialförsäkringarna, men att föra diskussionen som om det inte redan lönade sig att arbetade, som om vi hade 100 procent ersättningsnivå, som om politiken mot folk som är arbetslösa eller sjuka är alldeles för generös och måste stramas åt - det lutar åt det högra ägget.

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också kommentar: Sara Gunnerud, "Visionslöst från Östros om den ekonomiska politiken", Rebellabloggen 12 november.
Petter Larsson, "Söker Östros jobb hos Borg?", Aftonbladet 16 november
Lena Sommestad, "När blev 1990-talets politiska paroller tidlösa värderingar?", 12 november
Jonas Olofsson, "Förnyelse eller tvångströja?", LO-tidningen 26 november

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"Finns det arbetslöshetsfällor i Sverige? /.../
Arbetslöshetsfällor finns i Sverige. Ca 4 procent av de arbetslösa, 13 000 personer, skulle vid en återgång i arbete inte få en bättre ekonomisk standard. /.../
den genomsnittliga ersättningsgraden [bland de som var arbetslösa 1997] är 85 procent"
För alla som vid analystillfället var sysselsatta var ersättningsgraden ifall de skulle bli arbetslösa 78 procent
Ds 1997:73 Lönar sig arbete?

"Rapporten visar således att alla hushåll tjänar på att ta ett heltidsarbete i stället för att erhålla ekonomiskt bistånd. Det framgick dock att de kortsiktiga incitamenten att gå från ekonomiskt bistånd till arbete för hushåll med barn inte är lika goda."
s 301ff i SOU 2007:2 Från socialbidrag till arbete

Bra valanalys 2010

"I jobbpolitiken finns också två helt olika tilltal, som jag är övertygad om spelar roll. Moderaterna pratar om värdet av att ha ett jobb, Socialdemokraterna om värdet av att ha a-kassa. Den negativa utgångspunkten kritiserades redan i 2006 års officiella SAP-valutvärdering, men det lät inte radikalt annorlunda i år. Både V och S måste dessutom någon gång anpassa kommunikationen till det faktum att majoriteten av svenska löntagare inte är utförsäkrade, arbetslösa, utstötta, nedbrutna eller sjuka. Vi har 4,6 miljoner kärnfriska och hyggligt avlönade löntagare i det här landet - hur tjänar de på vänsterpolitik? De vet förmodligen inte, eftersom vi envisas med att tilltala de 450 000 sjukskrivna eller de 350 000 arbetslösa. Moderaternas jobbpolitik görs relevant för alla. Vi pratar om de drabbade, fastän det är just vår uppgift att inte dela upp de förtryckta på det sättet. Vi kritiserar tvåtredjedelssamhället som analys - men tar retorisk strid för "tredjedelen" hela tiden. Och om vi någon gång talar om lönearbetare, slår vi knut på oss själva för att undvika att prata om männen. Stödet bland LO-medlemmar för S och V är en katastrof - det kanske inte skadar att försöka inkludera dem i en berättelse om vart man vill med samhället? Varje exempel på en lönearbetare kanske inte måste vara en undersköterska? Lågvattenmärket nåddes under industrikrisen med sina tiotusentals varsel: då pratade vänsterpartister om att krisen framför allt skulle drabba kvinnor, eftersom varslen på sikt skulle underminera offentliga sektorn!"

Jonas Wikström, "Vänstern och 4,6 miljoner", 15 oktober

Bra S-valanalys 2: "'taktik utan strategi' är en bra beskrivning av Socialdemokraterna de senaste fyra åren." Katrine Kielos, Aftonbladet 20 september

Martin Wolf om globala imbalanser-politik

FT 13 oktober s 11: Martin Wolf, "Why America is going to win the global currency battle" - intressant samhällsingenjörsperspektiv på valutakurserna; utifrån IMF-mötet som dominerades av USD- och yuan-diskusioner talar MW om ett slags allmänintresse om hur valutakurserna bör röra sig

Martin Wolf, "Current account targets are a way back to the future", FT 3 nov s 11
Geithner föreslog på G20-mötet att 4 % av BNP skulle vara definition av för stort över/underskott i ett lands current account, och att pakt behövdes för att både surplus- och deficit-länder ska anpassa sig. Geithers förslag utan sanktioner inbyggda. Tysklands finansminister Brüderle avfärdade förslaget som "planekonomi".

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IMF Balance of Payments Textbook (1996)

Transportarbetaren om avtalsrörelsen 2010

"LO:s ordförande Wanja Lundby-Wedin fick utstå hård kritik när hon besökte Transports lönepolitiska konferens. /.../
Lundby-Wedin, LO:s ordförande sedan tio år, fick berätta om sin syn på bland annat IF Metalls krisavtal samt Socialdemokraternas dåliga valresultat. När åhörarna sedan ställde frågor uttryckte flera av dem besvikelse över det samordningsarbete inom LO som skedde innan avtalsrörelsen tog sin början.
Då enades alla medlemsförbund om att kräva 2,6 procent i löneökning det första året. Men i avtalsrörelsens början skedde något som aldrig hänt förr - tjänstemannaförbunden Unionen och Sveriges Ingenjörer tecknade avtal först. Vanligtvis brukar det vara den exportberoende industrin som sätter standarden. IF Metall tecknade efter det ett kollektivavtal där löneökningen hamnade på blott 0,9 procent. Detta har gjort det svårt för de förbund som kommit efter att få ut mer.
- Vi la ner enormt mycket resurser på samordningen och alla stod bakom en uppgörelse där vi tog ekonomiskt ansvar. Men sedan kom IF Metalls avtalsråd och sänkte allt. Nu möts vi i varje förhandling av det så kallade märket på 0,9 procent. Detta i ett läge då Sverige har stark tillväxt. Varför ska bara vårt folk hålla tillbaka? sa Transports ordförande Lars Lindgren."

Pär Karlsson, "LO-basen fick det hett om öronen", Transportarbetaren nr 11 2010

- på annat ställe i tidningen uppges årets snittliga löneökningar (nominella) för arbetare i Sverige ligga på 0,9 procent och inflationen januari - september på 1,4 procent.

Och i samma tidning:

"IF Metalls agerande fick hård kritik i övriga LO och debatten kom att handla om ifall metallarna nu satt ett 'märke' - ett tak - för övriga förbund eller inte.
Oavsett vilket kan Lars Lindgren konstatera att i vart fall arbetsgivarna, och även det statliga Medlingsinstitutet, betraktar de 0,9 procenten som en norm för hela arbetsmarknaden.
- När vi träffar arbetsgivarna möts vi av en total ovilja att förhandla. Vi sätter ut datum, men när arbetsgivarna väl kommer är de inte förberedda och säger i princip nej till allt vi lägger fram.
- Det är inte seriöst. Jag uppfattar det som en strategi, fastlagd av Svenskt Näringsliv, som går ut på att medlarna ska kallas in så fort som möjligt. /.../
Transportbasen anser att Medlingsinstitutet misstolkar sitt uppdrag. Han är övertygad om att Svenskt Näringsliv utformat en strategi som bygger på stenhård toppstyrning. Först skrotade man ensidigt alla centrala löneförhandlingar med LO, nu försöker man minska förbundens inflytande."

Jan Lindkvist, "'Arbetsgivarna behöver en käftsmäll vart femte år'", Transportarbetaren nr 11 2010

NYT om ökade inkomstskillnader i USA

Op ed-kolumnisten Bob Herbert skriver i New York Times om den ökade inkomstojämlikheten i USA sedan 1970-talet utifrån en ny bok av Paul "new politics of the welfare state" Pierson och Jacob Hacker, Winner-Take-All Politics:

"The authors, political scientists Jacob Hacker of Yale and Paul Pierson of the University of California, Berkeley, argue persuasively that the economic struggles of the middle and working classes in the U.S. since the late-1970s were not primarily the result of globalization and technological changes but rather a long series of policy changes in government that overwhelmingly favored the very rich.

Those changes were the result of increasingly sophisticated, well-financed and well-organized efforts by the corporate and financial sectors to tilt government policies in their favor, and thus in favor of the very wealthy. From tax laws to deregulation to corporate governance to safety net issues, government action was deliberately shaped to allow those who were already very wealthy to amass an ever increasing share of the nation’s economic benefits. /.../

The answer becomes clearer when one recognizes, as the book stresses, that politics is largely about organized combat. It’s a form of warfare. 'It’s a contest,' said Professor Pierson, 'between those who are organized, who can really monitor what government is doing in a very complicated world and bring pressure effectively to bear on politicians. Voters in that kind of system are at a disadvantage when there aren’t reliable, organized groups representing them that have clout and can effectively communicate to them what is going on.'

The book describes an 'organizational revolution' that took place over the past three decades in which big business mobilized on an enormous scale to become much more active in Washington, cultivating politicians in both parties and fighting fiercely to achieve shared political goals. This occurred at the same time that organized labor, the most effective force fighting on behalf of the middle class and other working Americans, was caught in a devastating spiral of decline. "

Bob Herbert, "Fast Track to Inequality", NYT 1 november 2010

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uppdatering:
mer NYT om Hacker & Pierson - Frank Rich, "Who Will Stand up to the Super-Rich?", NYT 13 november

recension på Crooked Timber av Henry Farrell, med intressant diskussion i kommentarsfältet.

Kommentatorn Bill Murray (inte skådisen, gissar jag) kommenterar på Brad DeLongs blogg (11 nov) ett skattesänkningsförslag i USA som ytterligare kommer att sänka skatten för höginkomsttagare:

"By broadening the tax base and lowering rates while simultaneously cutting programs that benefit the middle and working class, we can realize our long term dream of turning the US into a banana republic or Louis the XVI era France. Those lucky duckies at the lower end of the income spectrum need to support the aristocracy not be supported."

Även: Robert Egger, "5 myths about hunger in America", Washington Post 21 november

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UPPDATERING 3 mars 2011
David Leonhardt har intervjuat Hacker och Pierson om boken för NYT Economix. Intervjun handlar inte minst om specifieringar av de kausala länkarna mellan politik och ojämlikhet.
David Leonhardt, "Inequality and Political Power", NYT Economix 3 mars

UPPDATERING 17 mars 2011
Will Wilkinson, "Breathtaking and transformative", Economist Democracy in America-bloggen 20 sep 2010
Kevin Drum, "Here's what's the matter with Kansas", 10 september 2010
Scott Winship, "Hacker mania" - mycket intressant kritik av Piketty & Saez dataset på toppercentilens andel av inkomsterna i USA
M.S., "On the inequality myth", Economist Democracy in America-bloggen 20 sep 2010
Will Wilkinson, "Is rising inequality in America exaggerated?", Economist Democracy in America-bloggen 20 sep 2010
Scott Winship, "What would it mean for theories of U.S. income inequality growth if the U.S experience has been similar to that everywhere else?", 10 mars 2010

UPPDATERING maj 2011
Jag har skrivit en recension av Winner-Take-All Politics tillsammans med Larry Bartels Unequal Democracy, som också den handlar om USA:s politisk-ekonomiska omvandling mot mer ojämlikhet både i den ekonomiska och politiska sfären. Winner-Take-All Politics är bra, men inte lika bra som Bartels bok. Recensionen ligger här.

UPPDATERING 1 juli 2011
Alan Beattie kör i FT en artikel på de vid detta laget mycket välkända siffrorna om toppinkomster 1911 till idag av Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez och deras medarbetare. Ekonomen Robert Lawrence intervjuas och säger a) att juryn fortfarande är ute om förklaringen, och b) att den ökande vinstandelen innebär att ojämlikheten knappast kommer minska när vi är ute ur krisen.
Beattie, "Top dogs take bigger slice of spoils", FT 29 juni

Uppdatering 15 september 2011
Fattigdomen som andel av befolkningen i USA är på väg uppåt och på historiska nivåer, konstaterar FT i veckan. Alice O'Connor vid UC Santa Barbara säger till FT:

"We are entering territory which looks like the period before we even started fighting a ‘War on Poverty’ in the 1960s. It’s quite stunning. This is a terrible statement about the depths of the Great Recession but, even more, about the recovery, which has clearly left the poorest out completely."

Andelen fattiga i befolkningen enligt nationell definition var år 2010 15,1 procent och enligt en beräkning från tankesmedjan Brookings Institution kommer den fortsätta stiga och år 2014 nå 16 procent.
Matt Kennard och Shannon Bond, "US poverty reaches record levels", FT 13 september

Uppdatering 23 okt 2011

"My new book, The Price of Civilization, describes why America needs a "mixed economy," one where a more effective federal government regulates business and invests alongside the business sector. In his review of my book, Congressman Paul Ryan, an avowed libertarian, describes my book as anti-American in its values. Ryan is wrong: my book describes how we can restore politics to the true mainstream of American values, rescuing democracy from the clutches of corporate power that Ryan champions in deeds if not in words."

Jeffrey Sachs, "Paul Ryan, American Values, and Corporatocracy", Huffington Post 3 oktober

Lex, "US taxes: crass warfare", FT 6 okt

jfr från oktober 2009:
Matthew J. Slaughter, tung mainstreamekonom och professor på Dartmouth, skriver i FT om att den ekonomiska ojämlikheten i USA måste minskas.
Slaughter, "Time to tackle America’s widening inequality", FT 6 oktober 2009

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Uppdatering 13 november 2011
George Packer, som annars skriver för The New Yorker, utgår från Hacker och Pierson i en essä om USA:s ökade ekonomiska ojämlikhet i senaste numret av Foreign Affairs.
Packer, "The Broken Contract: Inequality and American Decline", Foreign Affairs november-december 2011
Packers essä kommenteras av FT Alphavilles John McDermott här (10 november).

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Uppdatering 7 januari 2012

"Despite rightwing hatred for him, US corporate profitability is at an all-time high under Mr Obama. Capital has never beaten labour to the same extent. Stocks, as measured by the S&P 500, are up 50 per cent since he took office. Using MSCI indices, US stocks have beaten the rest of the world by 14 per cent; the S&P has beaten the FTSE-Eurofirst 300 by 22 per cent; the dollar has risen 2 per cent against the euro. Judged by results, he has been hugely pro-market." (min fetning)

John Authers, "Obama's chances look good on current trends", FT 6 januari

Uppdatering 3 juni 2012
"The US is going to the polls in a zero-sum economy where the wealthiest take almost all of whatever paltry growth is being generated. The election is set to break all records, with a group of 30 or so billionaires spending more on the polls than the rest of America combined."
Edward Luce, "Americas unlikely class-war candidates", FT 3 juni

Uppdatering 16 juli 2012
Ryan Avent på The Economist skriver om två böcker om USA:s utveckling: Edward Luces Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent och Chris Hayes Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. Avent köper inte Luces pessimism.
Avent, "Myths large and small", Economist 26 maj och "The institutional void", Free Exhange-bloggen 12 juli.

Avhandling om privatiseringar i sjukvården

ABSTRACT

"This dissertation deals with the following question: In the past decades some of the countries most dedicated to the universal public welfare state have privatised many of their welfare service provisions. Why is this so? The dissertation takes a close look at privatisation policies in health care in Denmark, Sweden and England in order to figure out how and why the private health care sector has expanded rapidly in recent years. Health care services in Denmark, Sweden and England provide good examples of welfare state service privatisation because these three countries have spent decades building up universal public health care systems tnhat offer free and equal access to all citizens – and these programmes are very popular.
In this dissertation I find that the most common explanations for welfare state reform fail to explain these changes: Privatisation policies are not the result of partisan politics, instead they are supported by Social Democratic / Labour parties and in some cases the unions as well. Privatisation is not the result of pressures for fiscal retrenchment; in fact, public health care funding has increased in all three countries over the past decade. Neither is privatisation the straight forward result of new right wing ideas. Certainly, new ideas play a role in this change, but it is difficult to sustain the argument that ideas alone have been the cause of privatisation in these three health care systems. Finally, it has been debated whether privatisation is the result of pressure from EU legislation. This explanation does not hold either for the basic reason of timing. The policies leading to privatisation in Denmark, England and Sweden were all implemented before the European debate over health care services started.
Instead, I suggest that privatisation in health care in Denmark, Sweden and England
can best be understood as the product of policy makers puzzling over important policy problems (Heclo, 1972). I call this an adaptive process. In this analysis I show that privatisation is the result of several interconnected attempts to adapt health care systems to a changing context. By taking a long historical view of the changes in health care systems, it becomes evident that the changes towards privatisation do not occur overnight or as a result of a ‘punctuated equilibrium’. Rather, the increasing privatisation in health care is the accumulated effect of several small step policy changes, which, over time, result in rising levels of privatisation.
Some scholars have suggested that neo-liberal policies, such as privatisation of
service provision, will ultimately lead to the end of the welfare state. In this study, I come to a different conclusion. Rather than undermine the welfare state, privatisation in health care may help the welfare state survive. Privatisation can be seen as a way of adapting welfare state services to a changing political context."

Jeppe Olesen, "Welfare State Adaptation Privatisation of Health Care in Denmark, England and Sweden", avhandling, European University Institute, 2010 (abstract pdf)

Den aggressiva tautologin

Barthes

"Tautologin är alltid aggressiv."
Roland Barthes, Mytologier (1957)

Så här i valanalys- och S-kris-tider kommer jag osökt att tänka på ett gammalt uttalande av Roland Barthes.

Flash crash-artiklar

handelsmönster från Nanex

Kudos till Ordfront Magasin som i förra numret har en lång artikel av ekonomisk-historikern Daniel Berg om "the flash crash" och datoriseringen av börshandeln.

Daniel Berg, "Blixtkraschens tidsålder", Ordfront Magasin nr 5 2010. Berg inleder:

"Klockan är 14:45 på Wall Street den 6 maj 2010. Plötsligt faller New York- och Nasdaqbörserna med över nio procent på några minuter. Det ojämförligt största och snabbaste börsfallet någonsin i historien. 500 miljarder dollar går förlorade – mer än Sveriges samlade BNP. Men investerarna och mäklarna på Wall Street hinner inte kasta sig ut genom fönstren. Några minuter senare vänder kurvorna uppåt igen och större delen av jättefallet återhämtas.
Ingen vet ännu vad som orsakade »The Flash Crash«, blixtkraschen, trots en statlig amerikansk utredning. Men en sak vet vi: ingen människa hann blanda sig i. Kraschen skapades av de datorer som idag dominerar världens börshandel."

Nu har också Fokus uppmärksammat samma händelse:

Linda Eriksson, "Handeln som gungar vaggan", Fokus 19 oktober 2010. Eriksson:

"Börsen har genomgått en teknisk revolution i det tysta. Handel utförd av datorprogram styrda av avancerade algoritmer har ökat i rasande takt. I USA handlar det i dag om 50–60 procent av marknaden, i Sverige nästan 40 procent. Den dagliga genomsnittliga aktieomsättningen på New York-börsen ökade med 181 procent mellan 2005 och 2009, medan den tid som krävs för att handla sjönk till 650 mikrosekunder. Banker, fonder och andra finansiella institutioner tävlar mot varandra med sina respektive system. Börsens kohandlande på ett fysiskt marknadsgolv har ersatts av system som har gjort det möjligt att handla med ljusets hastighet. Och i »The Flash Crashs« bakvatten var det främst till dem misstankarna gick.

Fenomenet kallas för algohandel eller automatisk handel. Ytterligare ett steg är den högfrekventa handeln där tidsaspekten är viktig – otroligt många ordrar läggs på väldigt kort tid. Gemensamt är att människan bestämmer tid, pris och volym. Sedan tar algoritmen över och utför köp och försäljningar. Till grund för »beslutet« om en affär ligger insamling av data bland annat kring den mänskliga aktiviteten på börsen, affärsnyheter och bilddata. Till exempel skriver affärssajter numera sina nyhetsflashar med en på förhand bestämd struktur för att algoritmerna ska kunna läsa av dem.

En av de grundläggande anledningarna till »börsrobotarnas« framfart är den ökade hastigheten. Ofta handlar det om att hitta och utnyttja felprissättningar och tillfälliga avvikelser – så kallad arbitrage. När en obalans i marknaden uppstår måste man lägga bäst bud, sedan handlar det om att vara snabbast på att lägga budet. Ofta ligger vinsten endast på några ören, men det kompenseras av volymen – tusentals ordrar läggs eller dras tillbaka varje sekund. I dag är man nere på nanosekunder."

I december förra året länkade jag till en SvD-artikel om just datoriserad börshandel.

Tett om regleringar och slutsatser av "flash crash"
"Would it be possible to impose a speed limit on high-frequency trading?" Flash Crash den 6 maj inget unikum utan ett tecken på ett större fenomen. Olika förslag om hur man kan gynna mer långsiktiga investeringar på de extremt kortsiktiga investeringarnas/spekulationernas bekostnad. Se också Andrew Haldane, "Patience and finance" (pdf), Bank of England paper 9 september
Gillian Tett, "Real issue in high-frequency trading has been dodged", FT 10 sept 2010 s 24

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UPPDATERING 19 februari 2011
Efter "the flash crash" tillsattes en offentlig utredning med åtta akademiker och reglerare som utredare. Nu har deras rapport kommit. De föreslår bl a att high frequency traders, som står för 70 procent av marknadsvolymen, ska betala högre avgifter för snabb handel. De föreslår också regleringar av bankers användande av skiften av handel mellan bankers kunder. Förslagen är överlämnade till Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) och Commodity Futures Trading Commission för beslut. SEC införde också direkt efter flash crash nya regleringar på prov, inklusive "circuit breakers" som tillfälligt ska stoppa handel i individuella aktier i vissa lägen. Utredningen föreslår att dessa regler ska permanentas.
Telis Demos, "Flash crash report proposes extra 'provocative' reforms", FT 19-20 februari 2011
Telis Demos, "Quick View: Blown away by the flash crash report", FT 21 februari

UPPDATERING 18 mars 2011
FT rapporterade i förra veckan att det skett våldsamma, snabba prisfluktuationer på varor som kakao och råsocker i början av mars, vilket lett till att folk skyller på high-frequency trading companies för den ökade volatiliteten - just som i fallet med the flash crash.
Gregory Meyer, "High-speed commodities traders under crash scrutiny", FT 10 mars 2011

Uppdatering 10 oktober 2011
Donald MacKenzie, "How to Make Money in Microseconds", LRB 19 maj 2011

The Wall Street - vita huset-nexus: exemplet Summers

"Consider: As a rising economist at Harvard and at the World Bank, Summers argued for privatization and deregulation in many domains, including finance. Later, as deputy secretary of the treasury and then treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, he implemented those policies. Summers oversaw passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed Glass-Steagall, permitted the previously illegal merger that created Citigroup, and allowed further consolidation in the financial sector. He also successfully fought attempts by Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the Clinton administration, to regulate the financial derivatives that would cause so much damage in the housing bubble and the 2008 economic crisis. He then oversaw passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which banned all regulation of derivatives, including exempting them from state antigambling laws.

After Summers left the Clinton administration, his candidacy for president of Harvard was championed by his mentor Robert Rubin, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, who was his boss and predecessor as treasury secretary. Rubin, after leaving the Treasury Department—where he championed the law that made Citigroup's creation legal—became both vice chairman of Citigroup and a powerful member of Harvard's governing board.

Over the past decade, Summers continued to advocate financial deregulation, both as president of Harvard and as a University Professor after being forced out of the presidency. During this time, Summers became wealthy through consulting and speaking engagements with financial firms. Between 2001 and his entry into the Obama administration, he made more than $20-million from the financial-services industry. (His 2009 federal financial-disclosure form listed his net worth as $17-million to $39-million.)

Summers remained close to Rubin and to Alan Greenspan, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve. When other economists began warning of abuses and systemic risk in the financial system deriving from the environment that Summers, Greenspan, and Rubin had created, Summers mocked and dismissed those warnings. In 2005, at the annual Jackson Hole, Wyo., conference of the world's leading central bankers, the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Raghuram Rajan, presented a brilliant paper that constituted the first prominent warning of the coming crisis. Rajan pointed out that the structure of financial-sector compensation, in combination with complex financial products, gave bankers huge cash incentives to take risks with other people's money, while imposing no penalties for any subsequent losses. Rajan warned that this bonus culture rewarded bankers for actions that could destroy their own institutions, or even the entire system, and that this could generate a 'full-blown financial crisis' and a 'catastrophic meltdown.'

When Rajan finished speaking, Summers rose up from the audience and attacked him, calling him a 'Luddite,' dismissing his concerns, and warning that increased regulation would reduce the productivity of the financial sector. (Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, and Alan Greenspan were also in the audience.)"

Charles Ferguson, "Larry Summers and the Subversion of Economics", Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 oktober

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Mer ekonomdebatt - med Brad DeLong, Justin Fox med flera - om Summers som exempel på ekonomer, deras kopplingar och incitament: Felix Salmon, "Summers's incentives", 2 november.

DeLong kritiserar begreppet "intellectually captured" som beskrivning av Summers: "Neoliberal Economists Agonistes", 12 november.

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Raghuram Rajan intervjuas 2 nov av FT om hans policyförslag för att fixa ekonomin, och han förespråkar bland annat generösare arbetslöshets- och socialförsäkringar, och att "end the 'cognitive capture' of US government by the private financial sector, by recruiting talent from outside of Wall Street and Washington."
Andrew Hill, "The optimistic doomsayer", FT 2 november

UPPDATERING 18 mars 2011
FT konstaterar i förrgår sarkastiskt att vi fått ett nytt exempel på den "revolving door"-koppling mellan Washingtons reglerare och de branscher som reglerarna ska reglera, som Obama i retoriken motsatte sig innan han blev vald. Nu är det David Stevens som avgått från Federal Housing Administration och nu ska börja jobba som chef för lobbyistgruppen Mortgage Bankers Association.
Suzanne Kapner och Stephanie Kirchgaessner, "MBA recruits Obama official", FT 16 mars

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Uppdatering 30 november 2011
Bloomberg Markets Magazine publicerar nu hux flux resultatet av en intervju med en hedgefond-trader som berättar om ett möte mellan dåvarande finansminister Hank Paulson och tolv traders, varav fem hade arbetat för Goldman Sachs som Paulson varit VD för, 28 juli 2008, där Paulson enligt den intervjuade delade med sig av icke-offentlig information om vad regeringen skulle göra med Fannie Mae och Freddie Mac. Alltså i praktiken öppnade för en form av insider trading. Fannie och Freddies aktier föll till under $1 styck från nivåer på $14,13 för Fannie och $8,73 för Freddie den 28 juli, när staten tog över dem den 6 september. Bloomberg hävdar dock att det inte går att utreda huruvida de privilegierade handlarna som fick informationen av Paulson agerade utifrån den. En Chicagobaserad finansanalytiker säger i alla fall till Bloomberg: "What is this but crony capitalism? Most people have had their fill of it."
Richard Teitelbaum, "How Paulson Gave Hedge Funds Advance Word", Bloomberg 29 november 2011

Reuters-bloggaren Felix Salmon plockar upp Bloombergstoryn och drar stora växlar på den:

"I think [Paulson] was downright pathological in giving inside information to his old Wall Street buddies. And the crazy thing is that we have no idea how many of these meetings there were, or how long they went on for — the only way that we ever find out about them is when reporters like Sorkin or Bloomberg’s Richard Teitelbaum manage to find a source who was in the meeting and is willing to talk about what happened.

Given that it’s taken two years since the release of Sorkin’s book for the Eton Park meeting to be made public, it’s fair to assume that there were other meetings, too — possibly many others. Paulson was giving inside tips to Wall Street in general, and to Goldman types in particular: exactly the kind of behavior that 'Government Sachs' conspiracy theorists have been speculating about for years. Turns out, they were right."

Felix Salmon, "Hank Paulson's inside jobs", 29 november

Blocks "hidden developmental state" och Boeing

Är USA:s stat en ekonomiskt konsekvent laissez faire-stat, är ekonomin en av "fria marknader"? Nej, föga förvånande är den inte det. Hur kan man då konceptualisera USA:s typ av stat-ekonomi-relation? Ekonomisk-sociologen Fred Block talar om en "hidden developmental state in the United States": att USA-staten i stor skala styr och främjar den teknologiska utvecklingen och därmed hela den ekonomiska utvecklingen i landet. I Economist för några veckor sedan tog de upp att USA fällts av WTO för illegala (och dolda, ej uttalade) subsidier till flygplanstillverkaren Boeing -

"Airbus, Europe’s aircraft-making champion, has long had its nose in the subsidy trough. This week the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ruled that Boeing, its American rival, is also a guzzler of illegal handouts. More precisely, the WTO gave an interim verdict on a claim by the European Union and Airbus that Boeing received subsidies, mainly channelled through the Department of Defence and NASA, that violate global trading rules.

Not long ago, it was Airbus that was strapped to a seat in cattle class and being pelted with airline food. On June 30th the WTO ruled on an American complaint that Airbus received billions of euros in illegal subsidies that allowed it to snatch half the market for big passenger jets. It found that some government support to Airbus, in the form of repayable “launch aid”, was illegal. Boeing’s chairman, Jim McNerney, hailed “a landmark decision and a sweeping legal victory”.

This time Airbus is jubilant. A European source said “we could not have hoped for more.” The trade referee found that much of the $22 billion benefit Boeing enjoyed from tax breaks and defence and research contracts was also an illegal subsidy. Airbus has long complained that, whereas it repays the launch aid with interest, Boeing never has to pay back a cent. "

Economist, "Another nose in the trough", 18 september

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Jfr 2 december 08, "Marknadsekonomin som kontinuum"

NEK-efter-krisen-inlägget

John Kay om NEK

"The past two years have not enhanced the reputation of economists. Mostly they failed to point out fundamental weaknesses of financial markets and did not foresee the crisis, and now they disagree on appropriate policies and on the likely future course of events. Although more economic research has been done in the past 25 years than ever before, the economists whose names are most frequently referenced today, such as Hyman Minsky and John Maynard Keynes, are from earlier generations.

Since the 1970s economists have been engaged in a grand project. The project’s objective is that macroeconomics should have microeconomic foundations. In everyday language, that means that what we say about big policy issues – growth and inflation, boom and bust – should be grounded in the study of individual behaviour. Put like that, the project sounds obviously desirable, even essential. I confess I was long seduced by it.

Most economists would claim that the project has been a success. But the criteria are the self-referential criteria of modern academic life. The greatest compliment you can now pay an economic argument is to say it is rigorous. Today’s macroeconomic models are certainly that.

But policymakers and the public at large are, rightly, not interested in whether models are rigorous. They are interested in whether the models are useful and illuminating – and these rigorous models do not score well here.

Indeed, at an early stage of the project Robert Lucas, one of its principal architects, who received the Nobel prize for his contributions, developed what is known as the Lucas critique. He argued that ordinary standards of statistical validity should not be applied to the project’s predictions. According to his colleague Thomas Sargent, Lucas was concerned that such tests rejected 'too many really good models'."

John Kay, "How economics lost sight of the real world", Financial Times 21 april

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Lionel Barber om ekonomijournalisters ovilja att förstå finanskapitalismens risker

"The financial media are accused of mis­sing the global financial crisis. Asleep at the wheel. Head in the clouds. No cliché has been left unturned as reporters, commentators – yes, even editors – have been castigated for failing to warn an unsuspecting public of impending disaster. Do these charges add up? To paraphrase the killer question from the Watergate hearings: what did the press know and when did it know it?

First, by way of mitigation, journalists were not the only ones to fall down on the job. Political leaders were happy to break open the champagne at the credit party; many lingered long after the fizz had gone. Regulators in the US, UK and continental Europe all failed to identify and contain the risks building within the system. Many economists, too, fell short. Only a few – such as Nouriel Roubini, now celebrated as the thinking man’s prophet of doom – identified pieces of the puzzle, even if they failed to piece them together.

Why did financial journalists not pay more attention to these warnings? First, the financial crisis started as a highly technical story that took months to go mainstream. Its origins lie in the credit markets, coverage of which in most news organisations counted as a backwater. Most reporters working in this so-called “shadow banking system” found it hard to interest their superiors who controlled space and who were more interested in broadcasting the “good news” story of rising property prices and economic growth.

A second related problem with the credit derivatives story was that it took place in an over-the-counter market with little disclosure and very little day-to-day news. Inevitably, the temptation was – and still is – to run with the stories that are much less opaque such as public company earnings. Yet the big innovations and the big money came in the credit markets.

The second criticism is that the media were too interested in building up a good news story. The comedian Jon Stewart’s on-air demolition of the booster-turned-doomster Jim Cramer shows there is a case to answer. Mr Stewart went so far as to suggest that CNBC, which hosts Mr Cramer’s Mad Money show, overlooked market shenanigans as it was too close to its core community: Wall Street traders and investment bankers. Danny Schechter, writing in the British Journalism Review, is equally critical alleging that newspapers had no interest in pursuing scandals in mortgage lending for fear of alienating property advertisers.

Journalists routinely face tensions between relying on their sources and burning them with critical coverage. Think of the White House press corps, the British “lobby” press that covers parliament or sports journalists assigned to a team. The incentive to “go along” to “get along” is always present, in competition with a journalist’s instinct to speak truth to power.

In the final resort, there can be little debate that the financial media could have done a better job. In this spirit of self-criticism, I identify four weaknesses in the coverage.

First, financial journalists failed to grasp the significance of the failure to regulate over-the-counter derivatives that formed the bulk of counterparty risk in the explosion of credit following the dotcom bubble. Alan Greenspan was opposed to such regulation, but how many commentators took the former Fed chairman to task and warned of the risks? For the most part, journalists were too enamoured with the prevailing tide of deregulation.

Second, journalists, with a few notable exceptions, failed to understand the risks posed by the implicit state guarantees enjoyed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance giants. Here, we should tip our hats to the now much-maligned Mr Greenspan. He raised alarms early about the risks. Of course, it was hard for journalists to attack the ideal of broader home ownership in America, but that is no excuse.

Third, journalists failed to grasp the significance of the growth in off-balance sheet financing by the banks, its relationship with the pro-cyclical Basle II rules on capital ratios, and the overall concept of leverage. How many news organisations reported on the crucial Securities and Exchange Commission decision in 2004 to loosen its regulations on leverage? The explosive growth of structured investment vehicles at the height of the credit boom was also woefully under-reported.

Fourth, financial journalists were too slow to grasp that a crash in the banking system would have a profoundly damaging impact on the real economy. The same applies to regulators and economists. For too long, too many experts treated the financial sector and the wider economy as parallel universes. This was fundamentally wrong."

Lionel Barber, "A flawed first draft of history", Financial Times 21 april

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Economist om hur krisen förändrar läroböcker i nationalekonomi
Det har pratats mycket i den nuvarande krisen om hur nationalekonomin måste förändras och hur den misslyckats att analysera finanskapitalismens instabilitet osv (för en parodi på kraven på förutseende, se Mats Persson här.). Även om det såklart ligger mycket i kritiken så kan jag störa mig på hur yrvaken och konjunkturbunden den är (vilket ju antyder att den kommer vara bortblåst om två år när ekonomin tuffar på "som vanligt").

(Jfr 18 augusti 2008 "Ett annat perspektiv på och från nobelpristagare i ekonomi", 12 mars 2009 "Walrasiansk och post-walrasiansk NEK enligt Bowles", 16 maj 09 "Kontinuitetens estetik i NEK", 22 maj 09 "Så skulle man kunna undervisa NEK", 20 juli 09 "Stiglitz om realism och NEK", 26 nov 09 "Callinicos: läs FT".)

(Jfr Lars Calmfors i Ekonomisk Debatt nr 3 2010, "Vi [nationalekonomer] har visserligen inte varit så kassa som många ekonomhatare - och det finns ganska många - vill ha det till. Men enligt min mening finns det ändå skäl till viss självprövning.")

I alla fall, så hade Economist för några veckor sen om hur undergraduate-undervisning i makroekonomi förändras just nu av krisen.

"the crisis has also highlighted flaws in the existing macroeconomics curriculum. Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economist and the author of a bestselling textbook, points out that students can hardly be expected to make sense of the crisis if they know virtually nothing about things like the role of financial institutions. Yet if there is a 'financial system' in most introductory texts, Mr Blinder observes, it usually focuses on the demand and supply functions for money. 'The current curriculum fails to give students even imperfect answers' to their legitimate questions about recent economic events, he says.

Changes are coming. Mr Blinder is one of the authors of another popular undergraduate textbook, which he is now revising. In the process, he is having to think long and hard about how to balance the need for more detail about things like finance with the constraints under which introductory macroeconomic courses are taught. The new edition is likely to have a prominent place for the idea of leverage and how it contributed to the crisis. That is fairly simply explained. But some additional complexity will be unavoidable.

For instance, the convenient fiction of a model of the economy with a single interest rate was defensible as long as different rates moved in concert. This, Mr Blinder says, is no longer something that students can be told 'with a straight face'. Some discussion of the role of securitisation and systemic risk is essential, even if it feels like a lot of detail for beginners to grasp. Mr Blinder, with a nod to Albert Einstein, says that economists need to remember that things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Revised textbooks will soon find their way into bookshops. Charles Jones of Stanford University has put out an update of his textbook with two new chapters designed to help students think through the crisis, and is now working on incorporating these ideas into the body of the book. A new edition of Mr Mankiw’s book should be out in about a year. And Mr Blinder’s publishers aim to have his revised text on sale by June.

Courses in many leading universities are already being amended. Mr Laibson says he has chosen to teach his course without leaning on any standard texts. Francesco Giavazzi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is now devoting about two-fifths of the semester’s classes to talking about how things are different during a crisis, and how the effects of policy differ when the economy hits boundaries like zero interest rates. Discussion of the 'liquidity trap', in which standard easing of monetary policy may cease to have any effect, had fallen out of vogue in undergraduate courses but seems to be back with a vengeance. Asset-price bubbles are also gaining more prominence.

Will these changes in the way macroeconomics is taught really stick? The rewriting of widely used texts should ensure that some of the ideas that have helped explain the crisis become part of the future curriculum. Mr Jones says it will be instructive to compare the bestselling textbook in ten years’ time with the pre-crisis version of Mr Mankiw’s book. He thinks they will differ substantially.

Economist, "Revise and resubmit", 31 mars

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NEK-bashing i Guardian

"As a profession, economics not only has nothing to say about what caused the world to come to the brink of financial collapse last autumn, but also a supreme lack of interest in it. If, for example, you scroll down the list of papers scheduled for publication by the Review of Economic Studies, one of the prestigious UK journals, there is not the slightest sense that the world of general equilibrium and real business cycle models has been turned upside down in the past two years. There is, on the other hand a paper on "Generalised non-parametric deconvolution with an application to earnings dynamics", which includes the insight that "Monte Carlo simulations show good finite-sample performance, less so if distributions are skewed or ­leptokurtic". Got that? And that's just the abstract. The full article is even more fun – if you get your kicks from fantasy economics divorced from reality."

Larry Elliot, "It's a funny old game: where is the dream team of economists to tackle the slump?", Guardian 1 juni

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"Last year the former head of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, made a quite astonishing admission. Asked if his beliefs that free markets were an "unrivalled way to organise economies" had clouded his judgement and ability to prevent the financial crisis that tipped the global economy into recession, Greenspan responded that it might have, but it was now obvious that there was a "flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works". Finding this flaw had made him "distressed".

Greenspan's confession was seen by many for precisely what it was: a crisis of faith, the faith that unrestricted free markets would always act benevolently. It revealed what a few had been arguing for some time, that the character of neoliberal economics is essentially religious."

Alan Andrews, "Praying for a revolution in economics", Guardian 11 juli

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Nationalekonomisk självkritik och krisdiskussion

"Most mainstream macroeconomic theoretical innovations since the 1970s (the New Classical rational expectations revolution associated with such names as Robert E. Lucas Jr., Edward Prescott, Thomas Sargent, Robert Barro etc, and the New Keynesian theorizing of Michael Woodford and many others) have turned out to be self-referential, inward-looking distractions at best. Research tended to be motivated by the internal logic, intellectual sunk capital and aesthetic puzzles of established research programmes rather than by a powerful desire to understand how the economy works - let alone how the economy works during times of stress and financial instability. So the economics profession was caught unprepared when the crisis struck."

Willem Buiter, "The unfortunate uselessness of most ’state of the art’ academic monetary economics", VoxEU, 6 mars 2009
- kritiken av antagandet om kompletta marknader gjorde Joseph Stiglitz utförligt och intressant i sin postsocialismbok 1994

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"Why, for example, did China's decision to accumulate foreign reserves result in a mortgage lender in Ohio taking excessive risks? If your answer does not use elements from behavioral economics, agency theory, information economics, and international economics, among others, it is likely to remain seriously incomplete.

The fault lies not with economics, but with economists. The problem is that economists (and those who listen to them) became over-confident in their preferred models of the moment: markets are efficient, financial innovation transfers risk to those best able to bear it, self-regulation works best, and government intervention is ineffective and harmful.

They forgot that there were many other models that led in radically different directions. Hubris creates blind spots. If anything needs fixing, it is the sociology of the profession. The textbooks at least those used in advanced courses - are fine.

Non-economists tend to think of economics as a discipline that idolizes markets and a narrow concept of (allocative) efficiency. If the only economics course you take is the typical introductory survey, or if you are a journalist asking an economist for a quick opinion on a policy issue, that is indeed what you will encounter. But take a few more economics courses, or spend some time in advanced seminar rooms, and you will get a different picture.

Labor economists focus not only on how trade unions can distort markets, but also how, under certain conditions, they can enhance productivity. Trade economists study the implications of globalization on inequality within and across countries. Finance theorists have written reams on the consequences of the failure of the "efficient markets" hypothesis. Open-economy macroeconomists examine the instabilities of international finance. Advanced training in economics requires learning about market failures in detail, and about the myriad ways in which governments can help markets work better.

Macroeconomics may be the only applied field within economics in which more training puts greater distance between the specialist and the real world, owing to its reliance on highly unrealistic models that sacrifice relevance to technical rigor. Sadly, in view of today's needs, macroeconomists have made little progress on policy since John Maynard Keynes explained how economies could get stuck in unemployment due to deficient aggregate demand. Some, like Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman, would say that the field has actually regressed."

Dani Rodrik, "Blame the economists, not the economics", Guatemala Times 11 mars

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Akademiska papers om nationalekonomi efter krisen

Ricardo Caballero (MIT), "Macroeconomics after the Crisis: Time to Deal With the Pretense-to-Knowledge-Syndrome", september 2010

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UPPDATERING

Paul Krugman, "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?", NYT Magazine 1 september
John Cochrane, "How Did Paul Krugman Get It So Wrong?"

temanummer av Journal of Economic Perspectives, #4 2010: Macroeconomics after the Crisis.

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Uppdatering 17 april 2012
Den business school-baserade statsvetaren Jonathan Schleifers nya bok The Assumptions Economists Make (Harvard UP, 2012) verkar väldigt intressant.

"Q. You are sharply critical of the scientific pretensions of the economics field. You note, for example, that economists are fond of dressing up observations as “laws.” And you note that this kind of make-believe can have dangerous consequences. You write, “Economists have misappropriated the very word ‘equilibrium’ to describe a situation that is not an equilibrium, either in plain English or in engineering…. Continuing to speak of ‘equilibrium’ allowed them to fool themselves – and others – into thinking they had shown that perfect-market economies were stable.” But I am curious to know whether you see benefits to mimicking a scientific approach, particularly as you work in a field that calls itself political science.

A. Political science is not a science like physics. Whether it deserves to be called a science at all is a question I’ll evade here. But it is a systematic way of understanding events and maybe gaining some insight into the possible future. To argue a point in political science, you start by laying out competing theories about a situation, each in its most persuasive form. Then you ask what results each theory would be expected to produce and how they compare with actual events. The theory that does the best job is the strongest. I think economics might proceed along these lines, admitting competing models to explain situations and seriously asking which seems to do the better job.

Q. Economics textbooks are frequent targets of your critique. You describe them as full of misleading simplifications and barren of cautions, caveats and context. What books would you recommend to people seeking an introduction to economics?

A. Aside from self-promotion — “Assumptions” is the book I would have liked to read when I was trying to understand economics better, or anyway as close to that book as I could manage to write — I would recommend a few books and journals that do better at avoiding the problems you mention. “Maynard’s Revenge: The Collapse of Free Market Macroeconomics,” by Lance Taylor, with whom I studied, has a strong viewpoint but explains many competing orthodox and unorthodox models. It requires high school algebra, not more math than that, but some concepts will demand careful pondering.
“A Concise Guide to Macroeconomics: What Managers, Executives, and Students Need to Know,” by David A. Moss, a professor at Harvard Business School with whom I have occasionally co-authored cases, has hardly a model in it. It’s mainly a pragmatic guide to concepts like the balance of payments, the national accounts and the money supply, leaving the question of how to fit those concepts into models up to the reader. But it’s very useful as that kind of pragmatic guide.
For a more orthodox macro textbook, I liked Rudiger Dornbusch and Stanley Fischer, “Macroeconomics.” (I read an old edition, which would be fine — the latest costs a small fortune.) Just remember, everything they present is a model, not God’s truth! Sometimes they even admit it." 

Binyamin Appelbaum, "In Economics, You Are What You Model", NYT Economix 16 april

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Uppdatering 25 januari 2013
Economist om hur DSGE-modellerna förändras, och ett alternativ till dem:

"Their first task is to put banks into the models. Today’s mainstream macro models contain a small number of “representative agents”, such as a household, a non-financial business and the government, but no banks. They were omitted because macroeconomists thought of them as a simple “veil” between savers and borrowers, rather than profit-seeking firms that make loans opportunistically and may themselves affect the economy.
This perspective has changed, to put it mildly. Hyun Song Shin of Princeton University has shown that banks’ internal risk models make them take more and more risk as asset prices rise, for instance. Yale’s John Geanakoplos has long argued that small changes in the willingness of creditors to lend against a given asset can have large effects on that asset’s price. Easy lending terms allow speculators with little cash to bid up prices far above their fundamental value. If lenders become more conservative, these marginal buyers are forced out of the market, causing prices to tumble.
Realistically representing the financial sector would help solve the other big problem with mainstream macro models: that they are inherently stable unless disturbed from the outside. /.../"
Improving DSGE models is the obvious way to take the lessons of the crisis on board. But others exist too. “Agent-based modelling” tries to depict the transactions that might occur in an actual economy. These models are populated by millions of agents that gradually alter the economy as they interact with each other. The idea was developed in the 1990s when biologists wanted to study the behaviour of ant colonies and the flocking of birds. But modelling an entire economy did not become practical until recently because of the sheer number of calculations needed.
The evolutionary structure of agent-based models allows economists to study how bubbles and crises occur over time. For example, an increase in bank lending means more spending and therefore higher returns on existing investment, which in turn encourages further lending. But too much lending can prompt the central bank to raise rates if inflation starts to accelerate. Higher borrowing costs could lead to a wave of defaults and even to a crisis if too much debt was taken on during the boom.
The EURACE project, an initiative by a consortium of European research bodies, has produced a sophisticated agent-based model of the EU’s economy that scholars have used to model everything from labour-market liberalisation to the effects of quantitative easing. In Australia Steve Keen, an economist, and Russell Standish, a computational scientist, are developing a software package that would allow anyone to create and play with models of the economy that incorporate some of these new ideas. Called “Minsky”—after Hyman Minsky, an American economist celebrated for his work on boom-and-bust financial cycles—it places the banking system at the centre of the economy.
A long road lies ahead, however. “Nobody has got something so convincing that the mainstream has to put up its hands and surrender,” says Paul Ormerod, a British economist.

Economist, "Economics after the crisis: New model army", 17 januari
M.C.K., "A brief history of macro: how we got here", Economist Free Exchange 21 januari

Simon Wren-Lewis har ett bra inlägg där han argumenterar mot idén att makroekonomin utvecklas i "revolutioner" som orsakas av yttre faktorer/ekonomiska kriser. Han menar att debatten mellan monetarister och keynesianer hade hållt på ett bra tag innan 70-talet och att metodologi och ideologi är lika viktiga faktorer som ekonomiska kriser. Han skriver om den nyklassiska revolutionen:

"In methodological terms it was a counter revolution, trying to take macroeconomics away from the econometricians, and bring it back to something microeconomists could understand. Of course it could point to policy in the 1970s as justification, but I doubt that was the driving force. I also think it is difficult to fully understand the New Classical revolution, and the development of RBC models, without adding in some ideology.

Does this have anything to tell us about how macroeconomics will respond to the Great Recession? I think it does. If you bought the ‘responding to the last crisis’ narrative, you would expect to see some sea change, akin to Keynesian economics or the New Classical revolution. I suspect you would be disappointed. While I see plenty of financial frictions being added to DSGE models, I do not see any significant body of macroeconomists wanting to ply their trade in a radically different way. " 

Simon Wren-Lewis, "Misinterpreting the history of macroeconomic thought", 24 januari 2013

The Economists artikel från 2011 om heterodoxa teoriers uppsving är intressant. Den lyfter fram tre skolor: österrikarna, MMT, och "market monetarism".

"The neo-chartalists are not the only people telling governments mired in the aftermath of the global financial crisis that they could make things better if they would shed old inhibitions. “Market monetarists” favour more audacity in the monetary realm. Tight money caused America's Great Recession, they argue, and easy money can end it. They do not think the federal government can or should rescue the economy, because they believe the Federal Reserve can.

The “Austrian” school of economics, which traces its roots to 19th-century Vienna, is more sternly pre-Freudian: more inhibition, not less, is its prescription. Its adherents believe that part of the economy's suffering is necessary, an inevitable consequence of past excesses. They do not think the Federal Reserve can rescue the economy. They seek instead to rescue the economy from the Fed. /.../

Mr Sumner's blog not only revealed his market monetarism to the world at large (“I cannot go anywhere in the world of economics…without hearing his name,” says Mr Cowen). It also drew together like-minded economists, many of them at small schools some distance from the centre of the economic universe, who did not realise there were other people thinking the same way they did. They had no institutional home, no critical mass. The blogs provided one. Lars Christensen, an economist at a Danish bank who came up with the name “market monetarism”, says it is the first economic school of thought to be born in the blogosphere, with post, counter-post and comment threads replacing the intramural exchanges of more established venues.

This invisible college of bloggers focuses first on the level of spending on American products: America's domestic output, valued at the prices people pay for it. This is what economists call “nominal” GDP (NGDP), as opposed to “real” GDP, which strips out the effects of inflation. They think the central bank should promise to keep NGDP on a steady upward path, rising at, say, 5% a year. Such growth might come about because more stuff is bought (“real” growth) or because prices are higher (inflation). Mr Sumner's disinhibition is to encourage the Fed not to care which of the two is doing more of the work. "

The Economist, "Marginal revolutionaries", 31 december 2011