Tag Archives: stephen kinsella

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Unsustainable Processes Of The EU

Stephen Kinsella on his new web app:

Wynne Godley’s Seven Unsustainable Processes (1999) examined the medium-term prospects for the US economy. It shows that in the United States, growth in that period was associated with seven unsustainable processes related to fiscal policy, foreign trade and payments, and private saving, spending, and borrowing. Given unchanged US fiscal policy and growth in the rest of the world, in order to maintain growth, the excessive indebtedness implied by these processes would be so large as to create major problems for the US economy and the world economy in the future. Godley was right. This web application aims to replicate Godley’s analysis for all of the countries in the EU, to see whether or not these unsustainable processes can be seen. It goes beyond Godley in forecasting each important ratio. The accompanying paper gives full details of the ratios and their construction.

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New Bank Of England Paper On The Financial Balances Model For The United Kingdom

Stephen Kinsella is out with a new paper with co-authors Stephen Burgess, Oliver Burrows, Antoine Godin, and Stephen Millard published by the Bank of England.

From the paper:

Our paper makes two contributions to the literature. First, we develop, estimate, and calibrate the model itself from first principles as well as describing the stock-flow consistent database we construct to validate the model; as far as we know, we are the first to develop such a sophisticated SFC model of the UK economy in recent years.4 And second, we impose several scenarios on the model to test its usefulness as a medium-term scenario analysis tool. The approach we propose to use links decisions about real variables to credit creation in the financial sector and decisions about asset allocation among investors. It was developed in the 1980s and 1990s by James Tobin on the one hand, and Wynne Godley and co-authors on the other, and is known as the ‘stock-flow consistent’ (SFC) approach. The approach is best described in Godley and Lavoie (2012) and Caverzasi and Godin (2015) and underpins the models of Barwell and Burrows (2011), Greiff et al. (2011), and Caiani et al. (2014a,b). Dos Santos (2006) describes how SFC models incorporate detailed accounting constraints typically found in systems of national accounts. SFC models allow us to build a framework for the model where every flow comes from somewhere in the economy and goes somewhere, and sectoral savings/borrowings and capital gains/losses add or subtract from stocks of wealth/debt, following Copeland (1949). Accounting constraints allow us to identify relationships between sectoral transactions in the short and long run. The addition of accounting constraints is crucial, as one aspect of the economy we would like to model is the way it might react differently when policies such as fiscal consolidations are imposed slowly or quickly

4 Such models were popular in the past; for example Davis (1987a, 1987b) developed a rudimentary stock flow consistent model of the UK economy.

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