Yearly Archives: 2016

Wynne Godley On The EU

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In the previous post, I highlighted Nicholas Kaldor’s view on the EU. I want to quote Wynne Godley’s views as well. Wynne Godley was highly influenced by Nicholas Kaldor so it is not surprising his views were similar.

In an article Wynne Godley Asks If Britain Will Have To Withdraw From Europe, written for London Review Of Books, written in October 1979, Godley writes:

The implications for Britain of EEC membership are rapidly becoming so perversely disadvantageous that either a major change in existing arrangements must be made or we shall have, somehow, to withdraw.

I strongly support the idea of Britain’s membership of the Common Market for political and cultural reasons. I would also support co-ordinated economic policies which were mutually advantageous to all the member countries. But this is not what we have got at the moment.

…

So we are all to be losers. The taxpayer through the Budget contribution, the consumer through higher food prices, the farmer through costs rising more than selling prices, and the manufacturer through rapidly rising import penetration.

…

… And if we may also take into account the dynamic effects, our balance of payments would be better by several thousand million pounds than it is at present. This would by itself have had a favourable effect on real national income and output, but, more important, it would have enabled the Government to pursue a less restrictive fiscal and monetary policy. According to preliminary estimates, the real national income could have been at least 10 per cent higher than at present and the rate of price inflation several points lower than if we had never joined the EEC.

The UK Should Leave The EU

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It’s the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum tomorrow. In my opinion, the UK should leave the EU.

When discussing the Euro Area, it is emphasized frequently that Euro Area governments do not have the power to make expenditures by making drafts at the central bank as argued by Wynne Godley in 1992:

It needs to be emphasised at the start that the establishment of a single currency in the EC would indeed bring to an end the sovereignty of its component nations and their power to take independent action on major issues. As Mr Tim Congdon has argued very cogently, the power to issue its own money, to make drafts on its own central bank, is the main thing which defines national independence. If a country gives up or loses this power, it acquires the status of a local authority or colony. Local authorities and regions obviously cannot devalue. But they also lose the power to finance deficits through money creation while other methods of raising finance are subject to central regulation. Nor can they change interest rates.

The Euro Area was formed because Europeans wanted to come together and create a union which is big and powerful enough to be not affected by financial markets. The original intent was right but soon the whole idea came to be influenced by neoliberalism. The thing which was hugely missing (“the incredible lacuna” in Wynne Godley’s words in the above cited article) was the absence of central government of the Euro Area itself, which will have the power to collect taxes from Euro Area economic units and make expenditures. After some years of boom, the Euro Area found itself in crisis and could not deal with it well because there was no central government and fiscal policy to the rescue. The European Central Bank tried to save the monetary union but isn’t as powerful enough as a central government. More importantly, the Euro Area was brought into existence with the idea of free trade. Not only was power taken away from relatively economically weaker nations such as Greece but free trade was imposed by bringing their producers compete in the common market. In summary, there were two reasons why some Euro Area nations suffered.

  1. The monetary arrangement
  2. The common market.

Typically the former is emphasized more than the latter. Perhaps the reason is simple. It is easier to explain the former than the latter. In my experience, the latter is more difficult for people to understand and appreciate. Very few have emphasized it. Few exceptions are: Nicholas Kaldor, Wynne Godley.

Because economic growth is “balance of payments constrained”, free trade is devastating. The Euro Area could have had free trade if it had a central government which keeps imbalances in check because of fiscal transfers and regional policies.

Which brings us to the European Union itself and Britain’s membership. Although the UK government neither didn’t surrendered its sovereignty to make drafts at the central bank nor irrevocably fix the exchange rate in 1999, the nations’ producers still compete in the common market. It is better off leaving the European Union and have powers to impose tariffs on imports. Free trade is destructive to trade and one needs a lot of protection – at least the power of the optionality to impose such things any time a nation needs.

It was surpising to see less heterodox noise on this.

Nicholas Kaldor wrote a lot on this in the 1970s before the United Kingdom European Communities membership referendum in 1975. In his Collected Economics Essays, Volume 7, Nicky wrote (Introduction, page xxvi, October 1977) :

The final section of this volume, Part III, reproduces papers written in the course of the “Great Debate” on the question of British Membership of the Common Market in 1970 and 1971, and includes as a postscript a lecture on Free Trade written in 1977. As this debate came to an end when Britain entered the market, a decision which was later confirmed in popular referendum with a 2:1 majority, the reproduction of these papers may strike as otiose and serving little purpose other than somewhat ignoble one of self-vindication in the eyes of future historians. However, if the long-run effects of our membership turn out to be as disastrous as I feared they would be in 1971—and nothing that has happened has caused me to change my views—I think it is of the utmost importance that the true arguments against membership should be accessible to successive generations of students, the more so since the political debate continues to be dominated by issues (such as our effects of membership on the cost of food, on our agriculture, or the net budgetary cost of membership) which I regard as secondary and which could be brushed aside if the long-run effects on Britain’s manufacturing industry and on our capacity to provide employment were favourable.

…

[page xxviii] … the last essay of this volume, “The Nemesis of Free Trade”, which recounts the arguments in the great debate on Free Trade and Protection conducted at the beginning of this century between Herbert Asquith and Joseph Chamberlain. The points made on both sides seem to have lost none of their freshness or relevance in the intervening years. What has changed is our freedom to act. In 1905 we were free to decide whether to continue with the policy of free imports or to protect our industries. In 1977 the choice is no longer open to us, except at a political cost of withdrawing from the Common Market, an act which few people would contemplate seriously so soon after accession.

But after so many years, here is the chance to undo all this and withdraw from the EU. The UK should leave the EU.

We Don’t Need No Helicopters … Hey! Economists! Leave Fiscal Policy Alone

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A lot has been written on helicopter money recently. Most of them bad with a few exceptions such as one by JKH.

In my opinion, the main reason economists come up with stories such as “helicopter money” etc. is that it is difficult in standard economic theory to introduce money.

Few quotes from Mervyn King’s book The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy:

But my experience at the Bank also revealed the inadequacies of the ‘models’ – whether verbal descriptions or mathematical equations  – used by economists to explain swings in total spending and production. In particular such models say nothing about the importance of money and banks and the panoply of financial markets that feature prominently in newspapers and on our television screens. Is there a fundamental weakness in the intellectual economic framework underpinning contemporary thinking? [p 7]

For over two centuries, economists have struggled to provide a rigorous theoretical basis for the role of money, and have largely failed. It is a striking fact that as as economics has become more and more sophisticated, it has had less and less to say about money… As the emininent Cambridge economist, and late Professor Frank Hahn, wrote: ‘the most serious challenge that the existence of money poses to the theorist is this: the best developed model of the economy cannot find room for it’.

Why is modern economics unable to explain why money exists? It is the result of a particular view of competitive markets. Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ …

… Money has no place in an economy with the grand auction. [pp 78-80]

But the ex-Bank of England governor perhaps never worked with stock flow consistent models. The advantage of these models is that what money is and how it is created is central to the question of how economies work. The framework used in stock flow consistent models is not new exactly. What’s new in stock-flow consistent models is the behavioural analysis on top of the existing framework the system of national accounts and flow of funds. As Morris Copeland, who formulated the flow of funds accounts of the U.S. economy said:

The subject of money, credit and moneyflows is a highly technical one, but it is also one that has a wide popular appeal. For centuries it has attracted quacks as well as serious students, and there has too often been difficulty in distinguishing a widely held popular belief from a completely formulated and tested scientific hypothesis.

I have said that the subject of money and moneyflows lends itself to a social accounting approach. Let me go one step farther. I am convinced that only with such an approach will economists be able to rid this subject of the quackery and misconceptions that have hitherto been prevalent in it.

– Morris Copeland, Social Accounting For Moneyflows in Flow-of-Funds Analysis: A Handbook for Practitioners (1996) [article originally published in 1949]

So what do we mean by helicopter money and it is really needed or useful? For that we need to go into a bit into some behavioural equations in stock-flow consistent models. One way is to use a somewhat simplified notation from Tobin’s nobel prize lecture Money and Finance in the Macroeconomic Process. In Tobin’s analysis, the government’s fiscal deficit is financed by high-powered money and government bonds:

G – T = ΔH + ΔB

ΔH = γH·(G – T)

ΔB = γB·(G – T)

 γH + γB = 1

0 ≤  γH, γB  ≤ 1

So the deficit is financed by “high-powered money” (H) and government bonds (B) in proportion γH and γB

Now it is important to go into a bit of technicalities. Prior to 2008, central banks implemented monetary policy by a corridor system. After 2008, when the financial system needed to be rescued and later when central banks started the large scale asset purchase program (“QE”), central banks shifted to a floor system.

Although economics textbooks keep claiming that the central bank “controls the money supply”, in reality they are just setting interest rates.

In the corridor system, there are three important rates:

  1. The deposit rate: The rate at which central banks pay interest on banks’ deposits (reserves) with them,
  2. The target rate: The rate which the central bank is targeting, and is typically the rate at which banks borrow from each other, overnight, at the end of the day.
  3. The lending rate: The rate at which the central bank will lend to banks overnight.

There are many complications but the above is for simplicity. Typically the target rate is mid-way between the lower (deposit rate) and the higher (lending rate).

In the floor system, the government and the central bank cannot set the overnight at the target rate if the central bank doesn’t supply as much reserves as demanded by banks. Else the interest rate will fall to the deposit rate or rise to the lending rate. In a system with a “reserve-requirement”, banks will need an amount of reserves deposited at the central bank equal to a fraction of deposits of non-banks at banks.

So,

H = ρ·M

where M is deposits of non-banks at banks and ρ is the reserve requirement. In stock-flow consistent models, M is endogenous and cannot be set by the central bank. Hence H is also endogenous.

In the floor system, the target rate is the rate at which the central bank pays interest on deposits. Hence the name “floor”. There are some additional complications for the Eurosystem, but let’s not go into that and work in this simplification.

In the floor system, the central bank and the government can decide the proportions in which deficit is financed between high powered money  and government bonds. However since deposits are endogenous the relation between high powered money and deposits no longer holds.

In short,

In a corridor system, γH and γB are endogenous, M is endogenous and H = ρ·M. In a floor system, γH and γB can be made exogenous, M is endogenous and H ≠ ρ·M. M is not controlled by the central bank or the government in either cases and is determined by asset allocation decisions of the non-bank sector.

Of course, the government deficit G – T itself is endogenous and we should treat the government expenditure G and the tax-rates θ as exogenous not the deficit itself.

So we can give some meaning to “helicopter money”. It’s when the central bank is implementing monetary policy by a floor system and γH and γB are exogenous.

But this doesn’t end there. there are people such as Ben Bernanke who have even proposed that the central bank credit government’s account with some amount and let it spend. So this introduces a new variable and let’s call it Gcb.

So we have a corridor system with variables G and θ versus a floor system with variables G’, G’cb, θ,  γ’H and γ’B

The question then is how is the latter more superior. Surely the output or GDP of an economy is different in the two cases. However people constantly arguing the case for “helicopter money” are in the illusion that the latter case is somewhat superior. Why for example isn’t the vanilla case of a corridor system with higher government expenditure worse than “helicopter money”.

Also it effectively reduces to a fiscal expansion combined with a large scale asset purchase program of the central bank (“QE”). I described QE’s effect here. Roughly it works by a wealth effect on output with some effect on investment via asset allocation.

To summarize, the effect on output by these crazy ways can be achieved by a higher fiscal expansion. There’s hardly a need to bring in helicopters. Some defenders say that it is faster but that just sounds like an excuse to not educate policymakers.

Output At Home And Abroad

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It’s fairly common for economists to confuse accounting identities and behavioural relationships.

Question: What is the best way to find it?

Answer: The behaviour of output (at home and abroad) is not discussed in their analysis.

It’s not always the case that it’s true but a good way to find – check whether the economist is talking of the effect of changes in stocks or flows on output.

It’s also of course important to discern what someone is literally saying and what that person is trying to say. Economists aren’t the best communicators. For example, consider the sentence: “(fiscal) deficits increase growth and surplus reduces it”. This is far from accurate because the fiscal deficit is an output of a model (and everyone has a model implicitly), not an input. It’s better to state whether the fiscal policy under discussion is expansionary or contractionary. So let’s say that private expenditure rises relative to income for whatever reason, such as expectations of the future. This leads to a rise in output and hence taxes and the fiscal deficit will reduce and we have a rise in output coincident with a fall in fiscal deficit. But neither fiscal deficit or surplus caused that growth. At the same time, one should also try to check what the narrator is trying to say. So if someone says “deficit spending is needed”, he or she is actually trying to say, “an expansionary fiscal policy is needed”.

It doesn’t harm to be accurate or try to be accurate.

One of the worst mistake of this kind being discussed is using the identity (in the case of a closed economy):

G − T = S − I

where G, T, S and I are government expenditure, taxes, private saving and private investment respectively.

A careless look at this would led one to conclude that “deficits reduce investment”. What the economist who claims this is saying is that an fiscal expansion (rising government expenditure and/or reduced tax rates) decreases investment. The error in this is that, saving is thought to be constant. However, using a Keynesian stock-flow consistent model, it is not difficult to see that a fiscal expansion has an expansionary effect on output which will raise private investment and also private saving (assuming saving propensities are constant).

More generally, the equation is:

G − T + CAB = S − I

in the general case of the open economy. In the above CAB is the current account of the balance of payments. Also balance of payments accounting tells us that current account balance is equal to the net lending to the rest of the world. In the old balance of payments terminology, this is equal to the negative of the capital account balance.

So we have:

CAB + KAB = 0

Or

NL = CAB

in the modern balance of payments terminology, where NL is the net lending of resident economic units to the rest of the world.

This has led to various theories about how what causes trade imbalances. A careless conclusion which can be drawn by looking at the last equation is that an increase in private saving or a reduction in the government expenditure reduces the trade balance. Although in this case it’s true, this happens via a reduction of output.

Another strange hypothesis is to say that it’s net borrowing (the opposite of net lending) from the rest of the world which causes current account deficits. Some authors such as Michael Pettis have taken this to extreme.

Wynne Godley was one economist who made heavy use of the accounting identity.

G − T + CAB = S − I

In his view, the causal relationship linking the balances is via output at home and abroad. 

In his 1995 article, A Critical Imbalance in U.S. Trade he says:

… an accounting identity, though useful as a basis for consistent thinking about the problem can tell us nothing about why anything happens. In my view, while it is true by the laws of logic that the current balance of payments always equals the public deficit less the private financial surplus, the only causal relationship linking the balances (given trade propensities) operates through changes in the level of output at home and abroad. Thus a spontaneous increase in household saving or a spontaneous reduction in the budget deficit (say, as a result of cuts in public expenditure) would bring about an improvement in the external deficit only because either would induce a fall in total demand and output, with lower imports as a consequence.

In this post, I want to highlight how capital flows can impact trade balances using my experience with experimenting with stock flow consistent models. Before that, it’s important to note a few things which are often forgotten.

An import by a resident economic unit is a decision to purchase a good or a service produced by a non-resident producer. Similarly exports of a nation is indicative of the relative competitiveness of producers at home in international markets. It cannot be said to be caused solely by capital flows. But it’s not so simple. Imports for example depend on incomes of resident economic units and capital flows can have an impact on imports because they can affect output and income.

But it’s vacuous to say that current account imbalances are caused solely by capital flows as many economic commentators claim implicitly or explicitly.

It’s easy to commit the mistake and think that imports depend solely on prices of goods and services.  The world is not so simple. If every good or service is exactly the same, then it’s all about prices. However, producers produce thousands of different goods and services. So both price and non-price factors matter in determining imports. Even for similar goods, such as cars, consumers tend to prefer foreign produced cars over domestically produced ones even if the former is much more expensive simply because consumers are not just looking at the price but also quality, durability, looks and design and so on.

So both price competitiveness and non-price competitiveness are important. The way these things are modelled in literature is by using price and income elasticities. Imports depend on price via terms involving price and price elasticities and on income via terms involving income and income elasticities.

Where can we then look for causal connection of impact of capital flows on trade balance?

Before this it is important to keep in mind that gross capital flows can be compensated gross flows in the other direction. So to look for a causal connection in the accounting identity:

NL = CAB (or “CAB + KAB = 0″)

is silly to begin with.

So here are some ways in which capital flows can cause have an impact on trade balances.

  1. Capital flows cause exchange rates to move. With floating exchange rates, the exchange rate is the price which clears the supply and demand for assets of currencies. Note, in a correct model of exchange rates, supply and demand for all assets should be included not just “money” or “currency”. Exchange rate movement impact prices of goods and services. Since imports and exports depend on prices of goods and services (among other things), capital flows impact trade balance. It’s of course important to keep in mind producers’ own pricing behaviour: If the Japanese Yen appreciates by 30% against the US dollar, it’s not necessary that Japanese producers will raise prices of their goods in the U.S. market by 30%. They might raise the price only by 10%. But this is a digression, the important point being that capital flows cause changes in prices of imports and exports and hence the trade balance.
  2. Long term interest rates are both due to expectations of short term interest rates and portfolio preference for assets such as government bonds with long maturities. Long term Interest rates have an effect on aggregate demand which has an effect on output and income and hence imports.
  3. Capital flows can cause asset price booms, such as a stock market boom and via the wealth effect, cause changes in output and income and hence imports.
  4. There’s a further complication. Suppose there’s a large capital inflow into equities. This can cause switch of resident holders of equities (issued by resident economic units) into newly produced houses. This has an effect on aggregate demand and output and hence income and imports. This mechanism is slightly different from the wealth effect in point 3. It’s more a flow effect. Also in my opinion, it’s not easy to model this because one has to keep in mind gross capital outflows in balance of payments as well.
  5. Purchase of new houses by non-residents: Depending on regulations in the land, foreigners can directly purchase houses – such as a vacation house in Greece or to speculate on house prices such as in London. There can even be foreign investment funds which can speculate by buying houses and commercial property. This has the effect on aggregate demand and output and income and hence imports.
  6. Securitization allows banks to package loans on their balance sheet and sell it to investors. This allows banks to reduce risks and because of this they can make more loans which they may not have made without securitization. More lending means higher aggregate demand and output and income and affects imports.
  7. Direct investment: Direct investment is a more complicated example. Direct investment can raise output by various means, such as causing rising business domestically, employing people. They not only have an effect on the trade balance because of their international nature but also because their profits affect balance of payments. Also one has to be careful: sometimes direct investment is confused with the I in the identity: G − T + CAB = S − I. Needless to say, this is confusing the different meanings of “investment”.
  8. Large capital outflows can cause a large depreciation of the currency and impact a nation’s fiscal policy. If there are large gross outflows, a government may be forced to deflate domestic demand and output to reduce imports. The flip-side is that large capital flows can keep a bubble from busting for long.

On Twitter, T Srinivas mentioned to me that desire to accumulate reserves may cause nations to depress demand and hence lead to lower exports for other nations, citing the example of events following the Asian Crisis in the late 90s. This is partly included in 8. Although I don’t disagree, my points are more about flows caused due to changes in investor preferences themselves.

Of course it touches an important point. Low domestic demand and output in “surplus” nations leads to a positive net lending to the rest of the world. It’s more accurate to say that the current account deficit of “deficit” nations is because of low domestic demand and output than because of capital inflows to those “deficit” nations. So it’s not “saving glut” but demand shortage, beggar-my-neighbour policies.

In conclusion it is counterproductive to use the accounting identity

NL = CAB

(or the same identity in the slightly misleading language CAB + KAB = 0) to claim a causation from capital flows to current account balance.

An example is this paragraph from Michael Pettis:

… This is one of the most fundamental errors that arise from a failure to understand the balance of payments mechanisms. As I explained four years ago in an article for Foreign Policy, “it may be correct to say that the role of the dollar allows Americans to consume beyond their means, but it is just as correct, and probably more so, to say that foreign accumulations of dollars force Americans to consume beyond their means.” As counter-intuitive as it may seem at first, the US does not need foreign capital because the US savings rate is low. The US savings rate is low because it must counterbalance foreign capital inflows, and this is true out of arithmetical necessity, as I showed in a May, 2014 blog entry (link broken: archive.is link).

It’s an extreme viewpoint. During the crisis, there was a large foreign demand for US public debt but this didn’t cause a rise in U.S. imports. Similarly, a central bank intervening in the foreign exchange market and buying U.S. dollars from U.S. resident economic units doesn’t cause U.S. imports to rise in the few seconds. (Accounting identities also hold for time periods of seconds!) It’s balanced by gross U.S. capital outflows.

Capital flows can impact trade balances but it has really nothing to do with this identity. The causal link is still output and home and abroad (and some due to price changes of goods and services due to exchange rate movements).

On The Blogs

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Two things caught my attention in the last two days.

First is the claim by Roger Farmer:

The Keynesian economics of the General Theory is static.

That’s the strangest critique of the GT I have ever seen. How is the GT static? John Maynard Keynes highlighted how a fall in the propensity to consume reduces output. His mechanism was quite dynamic. He was arguing that a fall in the propensity to consume will reduce consumption and hence firms’ sales and hence production and hence employment and hence consumption and so on. Keynes did not explicitly write down a mathematical model like as done for example in the book Monetary Economics by Wynne Godley and Marc Lavoie. But his arguments were quite dynamic in nature. So was his argument about how investment creates saving. And also the Keynesian multiplier. “Stock-flow consistent” models are quite close to Keynes’ spirit.

The second is this paragraph from Michael Pettis:

… This is one of the most fundamental errors that arise from a failure to understand the balance of payments mechanisms. As I explained four years ago in an article for Foreign Policy, “it may be correct to say that the role of the dollar allows Americans to consume beyond their means, but it is just as correct, and probably more so, to say that foreign accumulations of dollars force Americans to consume beyond their means.” As counter-intuitive as it may seem at first, the US does not need foreign capital because the US savings rate is low. The US savings rate is low because it must counterbalance foreign capital inflows, and this is true out of arithmetical necessity, as I showed in a May, 2014 blog entry (link broken: archive.is link).

Oh boy! That’s confusing accounting identities with behaviour. A simple way to show how inaccurate this is by using standard Keynesian analysis. Assume US households reduce the propensity to consume. This leads to a fall in output and income and hence a fall in imports and an increase in the current account balance of payments (assuming exports are exogenous to the model). This can be seen more precisely in a stock-flow consistent model.

Pettis’ arguments are in response to Stephen Roach’s recent article on US balance of payments and I discussed that recently here.  Both Roach and Pettis are incorrect.

Balance of payments is important and in my opinion, the most important thing in Economics. Michael Pettis gets the attention because he realizes the importance of balance of payments in the economic dynamics of the world. However looked more closely, many of his arguments appear vacuous.

Kalecki And Keynes, Part 2

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Continuing from the previous post, Kalecki And Keynes …

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was published in January, 1936.

Meanwhile, … , Michal Kalecki had found the same solution.

His book, Essays in the Theory of Business Cycles, published in Polish in 1933, clearly states the principle of effective demand in mathematical form. At the same time he was already exploring the implications of the analysis for the problem of a country’s balance of trade, along the same lines that I followed in drawing riders from the General Theory in essays published in 1937.

The version of his theory set out in prose (published in ‘Polska Gospodarcza’ No. 43, X, 1935) could very well be used today as an introduction to the theory of employment.

He opens by attacking the orthodox theory at the most vital point – the view that unemployment could be reduced  by cutting money wage rates. And he shows (a point that Keynesians came to much later, and under his influence) that , of monopolistic influences prevent prices from falling when wage costs are lowered, the situation is still worse, because reduced purchasing power causes a fall in sales on consumption goods …

…

Michal Kalecki’s claim to priority of publication is indisputable.

– Joan Robinson, Kalecki And Keynes in Essays In Honour Of Michal Kalecki, 1964. 

Kalecki And Keynes

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Michal Kalecki swam into my ken just after the publication of the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, in 1936. The small group who had been working with Maynard Keynes during the gestation of the book understood what it was about, but amongst the public as a whole it was still a mystery. Kalecki, however, knew it all. He had taken a year’s leave from the institute where he was working in Warsaw to write the theory of employment but Keynes’ book came out, and got all the glory. Michal never made any claim for himself and I made it my business to blow his trumpet for him, but most of the profession (including Keynes) just thought that I was being kind to a lame duck. Only since the publication of his essays written in Polish from 1933 to 1935 has it been generally recognized that he had already worked out all the essentials of what became known as Keynes’ theory (Selected Essays on the Dynamics of the Capitalist Economy, Cambridge University Press, 1971). He showed that it is investment, not private saving, that brings about capital accumulation; that a government deficit, in a slump, will increase employment; that cutting wages only makes the slump worse; that the rate of interest depends upon supply and demand of the stock of money, not on the flow of saving, and that it is the forward-looking expectation of profits that induces firms to accumulate.

The question of glory did not seem to me to be important. As Michal was the first to admit, his ideas would have taken a long time to establish while with Keynes they burst upon the world as a revolution. But I was deeply impressed by the fact that two thinkers of such different background and habits of thought could arrive at the same diagnosis of the economic situation. Logic is the same for everybody; the same logical structure, if it is not fudged, can support quite different ideologies, but for most social scientists ideology leaks into the logic and corrupts it.

In the natural sciences, it is common enough for the same discovery to come almost simultaneously from two independent sources. The general development of a subject throws up a new problem and two equally original minds find the same answer, which turns out to be validated by further work. In the history of economic thought, the case of the discovery of the theory of employment by Keynes and Kalecki is unique.

– Joan Robinson in PORTRAIT: Michal Kalecki, Challenge, Vol. 20, No. 5, November/December, 1977, pp. 67-69, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40719591

Abraham Ptachya Lerner, An Inconsistent Fellow

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This quote of Abba Lerner from his article “The Burden of the National Debt,” in Lloyd A. Metzler et al.,Income, Employment and Public Policy (New York, 1948), p. 256 is frequently quoted in the Post-Keynesian blogosphere:

One of the most effective ways of clearing up this most serious of all semantic confusions is to point out that private debt differs from national debt in being external. It is owed by one person to others. That is what makes it burdensome. Because it is interpersonal the proper analogy is not to national debt but to international debt…. There is no external creditor. “We owe it to ourselves.”

This is unfortunately inconsistent with his “functional finance”. Abba Lerner clearly says that external debt can be problematic. However he probably never realized that if his advise is followed in running fiscal policy, a nation’s balance of payments will deteriorate and its international debt will increase (because current account balance adds to the net international investment position).

Public debt is not the same the negative of the net international investment position but it’s related as the external debt is directly or indirectly picked up by the public sector.

Sound finance is all junk science but Abba Lerner is not your friend to learn about money, debts, deficits and all that.

International Effects On The Distribution Of Income

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I came across this PKSG (Post-Keynesian Study Group) reading list 2016 which “provides introductory and advanced readings for those interested in post-Keynesian economics.”

(h/t Severin Reissl on Facebook)

A recommended reading is Robert Blecker’s international economics written for The Elgar Companion to Post Keynesian Economics edited by John E. King. The chapter can be previewed from Amazon.

One interesting aspect is the distribution of income between profits and wages. Blecker says:

Post Keynesian in the Kaleckian tradition emphasize the feedback effects of international competition onto domestic profit mark-up rates and hence on the distribution of income between profits and wages. When a currency appreciates (or domestic costs rise relative to foreign), oligopolistic firms squeeze price-cost margins in order to ‘price-to-market’, which in turn leads to a fall in the profit share with possible negative repercussions for investment and growth (although this may be offset by boost to domestic consumption arising from higher real wages and labour income). When a currency depreciates (or domestic costs fall relative to foreign), the opposite happens as domestic oligopolies are able to raise their price-cost margins without losing market share, income is distributed from wages to profits, and the potential repercussions for investment and growth and consumption are all reversed. Outcomes in which a redistribution of income towards wages is expansionary are known as ‘wage-led’ regimes, while outcomes in which a redistribution towards profits is expansionary are ‘profit-led’. Mainstream economists have recognized the flexibility of profit margins in response to exchange-rate fluctuations – what they call ‘partial pass-through’ – but they have not analysed the feedback effect onto income distribution, aggregate demand and economic growth.

Stephen Roach, Accounting Identities And Behavioural Relationships

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A well known economic identity states:

Snational = Inational + CAB

where Snational and Inational are national saving and national investment and CAB is the current account balance of international payments. In calculating national saving and investment, one adds saving and investment, respectively, of all resident sectors of the economy.

However, an accounting identity shouldn’t be confused with behavioural relationships.

Steven Roach is a good economist and it’s sad to see him confusing this. In a recent article for Project Syndicate titled America’s Trade Deficit Begins at Home, he uses this identity to conclude that if America wants to reduce her trade deficit, the solution is more saving.

Roach says:

What the candidates won’t tell the American people is that the trade deficit and the pressures it places on hard-pressed middle-class workers stem from problems made at home. In fact, the real reason the US has such a massive multilateral trade deficit is that Americans don’t save.

Total US saving – the sum total of the saving of families, businesses, and the government sector – amounted to just 2.6% of national income in the fourth quarter of 2015. That is a 0.6-percentage-point drop from a year earlier and less than half the 6.3% average that prevailed during the final three decades of the twentieth century.

Any basic economics course stresses the ironclad accounting identity that saving must equal investment at each and every point in time. Without saving, investing in the future is all but impossible.

A little thought on behavioural relationships tell a different story. The main causality connecting accounting identities is behaviour of demand and output at home and abroad. While it is true that by accounting identity, the U.S. current account balance will improve by more saving (such as households saving more, firms retaining higher earnings and government (both at the federal and state level) attempting to increase its saving tighten fiscal policy, it happens via a contraction of output.

Wynne Godley was one who stressed this before the crisis. In his paper The United States And Her Creditors: Can The Symbiosis Last? written with Dimitri Papadimitrou, Claudio Dos Santos and Gennaro Zezza, this is made clear:

A well-known accounting identity says that the current account balance is equal, by definition, to the gap between national saving and investment. (The current account balance is exports minus imports, plus net flows of certain types of cross-border income.) All too often, the conclusion is drawn that a current account deficit can be cured by raising national saving—and therefore that the government should cut its budget deficit. This conclusion is illegitimate, because any improvement in the current account balance would only come about if the fiscal restriction caused a recession. But in any case, the balance between saving and investment in the economy as a whole is not a satisfactory operational concept because it aggregates two sectors (government and private) that are separately motivated and behave in entirely different ways. We prefer to use the accounting identity (tautology) that divides the economy into three sectors rather than two—the current account balance, the general government’s budget deficit, and the private sector’s surplus of disposable income over expenditure (net saving)—as a tool to bring coherence to the discussion of strategic issues. It is hardly necessary to add that little or nothing can be learned from these financial balances measured ex post until we know a great deal more about what else has happened in the economy—in particular, how the level of output has changed

[boldening: mine]

This was pre-crisis from a few who were avowed Keynesians all their life! It’s unfortunate to see Steve Roach make an error even after so many years into the global economic and financial crisis. One should study Keynes seriously. While I am sure Roach appreciates the paradox of thrift, he forgets applying it to the analysis of United States of America’s trade deficits.