"All of this has changed. It is totally appropriate that widening inequality and the associated stalling of middle-class living standards should become an urgent political issue.
"What is unfortunate is that many people, in their eagerness to focus on fairness, neglect the single most important determinant of almost every aspect of economic performance: the rate of growth of total income, as reflected in the gross domestic product....
...The reality is that more growth means more employment. And with the college-graduate unemployment rate only 2.5 per cent, the newly employed are disproportionately less educated and disadvantaged.
"It can hardly be an accident that the decades of maximum growth, the 1960s and 1990s, also saw the most rapid job growth and most rapid increase in middle-class living standards.
"Growth provides the wherewithal for increased federal revenue and so encourages the protection of vital social insurance programmes such as Social Security and Medicare. It creates headroom for new initiatives such as expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit.
"Tight labour markets are the best social programme, as they force employers to hire and mentor inexperienced people in order to be adequately staffed. Some years ago, I estimated that for each 1 per cent point increase in adult male employment, the employment of young black men rose 7 per cent. More recent research confirms economic growth has an outsized benefit for younger people and minorities...
... The reality is that if American growth continues to have a 2 per cent ceiling, it is doubtful that we will achieve any of our major national objectives.
If, on the other hand, we can boost growth to 3 per cent, interest rates will normalise, middle-class wages will rise faster than inflation, debt burdens will tend to melt away and the power of the American example will be greatly enhanced...
...The question is not whether business success is desirable. The question is how it can best be achieved. At a moment when capital costs are close to zero, the stock market is at a record high and businesses are earning record profit margins, we do not need to bribe businesses to make investments that now do not seem worthwhile to them.
There is no case for reducing already low corporate taxes or removing regulations unless it can be shown that these have costs in excess of benefits.
What is needed is more demand for the product of business. This is the core of the case for policy approaches to raising public investment, increasing workers’ purchasing power and promoting competitiveness.
That such policies also contribute to fairness is not a reason to lose sight of the central objective of promoting growth.
Often in economics there are trade-offs. But not always. We can and must promote both fairness and growth.
El Cuaderno de Arena (La decadencia de Occidente). Foto Guillermo Navascués. "How can I know what I think until I read what I write?" – Henry James
lunes, 8 de agosto de 2016
Crecimiento versus distribución
Incertidumbre, riesgo, y ciclos financieros
Uncertainty tends to turn long-term investment into short-term speculation. Denial of the need to guard against uncertainty allows what Keynes called the ‘financial circulation’ to expand exponentially at the expense of the ‘industrial circulation’. This has been happening everywhere –but notably in the UK, where the financial system has become master, not servant, of production, the royal road to paper wealth.Any reform of our present system will require restricting the role of finance, and adopting a highly sceptical attitude to the claims made on behalf of financial engineering. Keynes had little specific to say about financial regulation, since the banking system was not at the centre of the storm of the early 1930s; even in the United States it was an induced casualty. So it is not from Keynes that we should seek to learn the specifics of legislation or regulation for financial markets. Nevertheless, use of his theory can show up deficiencies in current thinking on financial reform. What distinguishes Keynes’s theory from today’s mainstream thinking on financial markets is the distinction he makes between risk and uncertainty. If financial markets are merely risky, the important reform is to develop better measures of risk and better techniques of risk management, and, if necessary, enforce them on financial institutions. If on the other hand there is bound to be irreducible uncertainty in financial operations, the state has an additional role, which is to protect the economy as a whole against the consequences of uncertainty. Within the risk-management paradigm there are two main approaches to reform. The first is to allow market forces to create more and better markets for risk –new derivative products, more extensive financial intermediation –in quest of the holy grail of ever more complete markets for contingencies. According to this view, the financial system is like an early aircraft. Just because it is prone to crash, we shouldn’t abandon the attempt to make it reliably airborne. This ignores Keynes’s distinction between risk and uncertainty. We simply cannot fit all the contingencies we face into a Gaussian bell curve, so there will always be a role for state policy to reduce uncertainty arising from finance.The alternative approach is to force better risk-management measures and techniques on financial institutions through regulation. This is the standpoint of Britain’s Financial Services Authority’s The Turner Review (March 2009). This identifies an ‘inadequate focus on the analysis of systemic risk and of the sustainability of whole business models: and a failure to design regulatory tools to respond to emerging systemic risks’.The nub of the argument is that risk-management methods did not adequately reflect the new risks created by the spread of derivatives. There are fleeting moments of doubt as to whether even improved risk-management techniques can make financial markets more ‘efficient’ in the sense of being able to price risks correctly. ‘Recent events’, the review notes, ‘have raised fundamental issues about the extent to which different markets are or can be made to be efficient, rational, and self-correcting. They suggest that there may be inherent limits to how far problems of market irrationality can be overcome by measures designed to make those markets more transparent, liquid and technically efficient’; and, in another place, ‘If liquid traded markets are inherently subject to herd/momentum effects, with the potential for irrational overshoots round rational economic levels, then optimal regulation cannot be based on the assumption that increased liquidity is always and in all markets beneficial.’ Except for stigmatizing as irrational all behaviour that doesn’t fit the classical model of rationality, this is the right issue to raise. Having delivered itself of these warnings, the review nevertheless concludes that the challenge to efficient market theory doesn’t require a ‘fundamental shift from the FSA’s current policy stance’. What it does require is regulation of system risk.The previous assumption was that if individual banks were safe, the financial system would be stable. But, in trying to make themselves safe under stress, banks can act in ways which undermine collective stability. The review emphasizes the need for increased flow and accuracy of information (‘transparency’) to be made available to market participants. External ‘stress tests’ should replace internal assessments of banks’ capital adequacy, to reduce banks’ vulnerability to solvency crises. ‘Dynamic’ accounting conventions should replace the static ones agreed at Basel II (2004), so that agents can anticipate future losses before they become evident in trading-book values or loan repayments. As part of its proposal for ‘dynamic’ accounting, the review suggests that banks create a non-distributable economic-cycle reserve, which would set aside profit in good years to anticipate losses arising in bad years. Bonuses should be based on distributable profit after the deduction of this reserve, thus ensuring that ‘such systems reflect a reasonable estimate of future possible credit losses and impairments, rather than a point-in-time calculation of profit which may subsequently prove illusory’.This proposal –similar to ‘balancing the budget over the cycle’ –of course assumes that cycles follow a Gaussian pattern. The Turner Review consistently rejects the radical option of reducing the scope of financial intermediation. This is because it continues to believe that the world of derivative instruments has, by diversifying risk, made the economy less shock-prone. It ignores the evidence from the present crisis that the diversification of risk can increase the danger of cumulative and self-reinforcing price movements. In sum, the review proposes a modest increase in regulation, chiefly by imposing higher information and capital-adequacy requirements on banks and other financial institutions, which should be made internationally effective. The review is worth special attention because it is by far the most able of the conventional responses to the slump, with reforms closely linked to diagnosis. It does not of course exhaust the proposals for taming finance. Other types of reform proposal are aimed at improving ‘corporate governance’. A familiar litany includes strengthening shareholder rights, increased disclosure and transparency requirements, better selection of board members, and so on. It is hard to be against measures to make the financial system less opaque.But, just as it is wrong to believe that asymmetric information was at the root of the financial breakdown, so it is a delusion to believer that more ‘transparency’ will prevent future breakdowns. For behind this thought lies the belief that all risk is calculable and that it's better directors, better regulation. Keynes’s distinction between risk and uncertainty led him in a different direction. Risk could be left to look after itself; the government’s job was to reduce the impact of uncertainty. Risky activities, Keynes implies, should be left to the market, with entrepreneurs being allowed to profit from good bets and to suffer the consequences of bad bets. On the other hand, uncertain activities with large impacts should be controlled by the state in the public interest. How to make this distinction operationally significant should be the major object of the reform of financial services in the aftermath of the crisis. One obvious application of this distinction is to banking reform. Here, the radical approach to reform is to reinstate the Glass–Steagall philosophy of separating ‘utility’ from ‘investment banking’, with retail banks –those which serve the public –allowed to take only moderate risks, leaving high-risk lending to the investment banks. The clear principle is that banks enjoying deposit insurance and access to lender-of-last-resort facilities should not indulge in gambling with depositors’ or taxpayers’ money; investment banks, which would be free to gamble with their investors’ money, should be debarred from accepting retail deposits, and excluded from any public bailouts. The logic is impeccable, but it would mean ensuring that no investment banks become ‘too large to fail’. This implies that, apart from Glass–Steagall, there needs to be some restriction on multinational banking. The alternative approach would allow retail and investment banking to be combined, as now, but would impose higher capital and liquidity requirements, which could be varied over the cycle. My own scepticism about the ability of the authorities successfully to carry out such ‘macro-prudential’ regulation leads me to favour a return to the Glass–Steagall philosophy of ‘narrow’ banking, which I would argue is desirable anyway on general social grounds. However, retail banking has also succumbed to the financial virus by abandoning prudent limits for lending. Both sellers and buyers of mortgages would be protected by limiting home loans to, say, 75% of the value of the property and three times the income of the borrower. This would reduce reliance on credit agencies. Except for the last, the reforms above would require international agreement to be effective.
domingo, 7 de agosto de 2016
Las "bondades" del Euro
Keynes: la libre competencia
Skidelsky resume la posición anti liberal de Keynes como,‘Suppose that by the working of natural laws individuals pursuing their own interests with enlightenment in conditions of freedom always tend to promote the general interest at the same time! Our philosophical difficulties are resolved… The political philosopher could retire in favour of the businessman –for the latter could always attain the philosopher’s summum bonum by just pursuing his own private profit.’‘The principle of the survival of the fittest could be regarded as a vast generalization of the Ricardian economics. Socialist interferences became, in the light of this grander synthesis, not merely inexpedient but impious, as calculated to retard the onward movement of the mighty process by which we ourselves had risen like Aphrodite from the primeval slime.’
Obsérvese que se refiere a algunas parcelas de la economía, no todas. Dinero, crédito, diseminación de la información, para elidir males como riesgo, incertidumbre e ignorancia."Keynes then develops what is essentially a public-goods argument for state intervention. Each age must ‘distinguish afresh the Agenda of government from the non-Agenda’. Services which are technically social must be separated from those which are technically individual, the most important new items on the agenda being control of currency and credit; dissemination of information to remedy the evils arising from ‘risk, uncertainty, and ignorance’; collective decision concerning the allocation of capital between home and foreign investment; and a population policy paying attention to quality as well as numbers."
España cañí
sábado, 6 de agosto de 2016
Río, no Madrid. La maldición olímpica de los JJOO
Olympics, the award of the games to an emerging world city tends to be a sign that a watershed has been reached. Rio is the fourth emerging city to be awarded the games. Like its three predecessors — Mexico in 1968, Seoul in 1988 and Beijing in 2008 — it won the games aftéer a long period of sustained growth. The games recognised that growth. And in every previous case, the Olympiad was the cue for that growth to stall or slow, followed in Korea and Mexico by crises, and in China by what look like desperate measures to avert one.
In this way, the Olympics function like magazine covers. Just as an appearance on Sports Illustrated’s means that an athlete has peaked, or on a business magazine means a stock has topped out, so winning the games signals that the period of growth is “in the price” and it is time for a decline.
In Brazil’s case the hex seems to have applied when it won the games, in October 2009. That was almost the exact top of the Brazilian stock market. Over the seven prior years, Brazil’s Bovespa index had outperformed the FTSE All-World index by more than 300 per cent. In the six-plus years since then, it has underperformed by almost 70 per cent, as commodity prices have turned down, and the inefficiencies in Brazil’s economy have been cruelly revealed. Now the anger among Brazilians suggests catharsis and a market bottom.
Mireia en Río
viernes, 5 de agosto de 2016
Tiempo de Helicopter Money
jueves, 4 de agosto de 2016
Bolsas y bonos, casas y oro
Irlanda ¿dónde está el truco?
¿Cómo es posible? bueno, Parece que hay "problemas" de Contabilidad Nacional, o de doble contabilidad, si lo he entendido. Irlanda es el país con más inversión directa extranjera por metro cuadrado, y no ha encontrado el sistema para evitar dobles contabilizaciones de beneficios de estas compañías que se envían al país de origen, pero por alguna razón se contabilizan en Irlanda.
La renta empresarial se divide entre beneficios y salarios. Eso es lo que va al PIB. Si el beneficio exportado al país de origen de la multinacional, debe restarse del PIB como salida de de renta. En definitiva, ese 26% no es disfrutado por los irlandeses.
En el país encontramos un artículo dedicado al tema, según un informe oficial
En fin, ue si en 2016 llegaron muchas compañías de esas y fuera n declaradas residentes, es decir, internas, empieza el lío contable."Según ese documento, la marcada subida del PIB se debió a factores circunstanciales, como las actividades de compañías de arrendamiento de aviones, que, en algunos casos, llegaron a domiciliar sus multimillonarios balances de cuentas en Irlanda durante el pasado año.
"Asimismo, un número de multinacionales, sobre todo del sector tecnológico, han movido a la isla parte de sus activos, entre otros los relacionados con las patentes, para aprovechar los beneficios fiscales que ofrece el Ejecutivo de Dublín, lo que ha contribuido a inflar las cifras, confirmó hoy Kenny."
Una solución es mirar el PNB, o producto nacional bruto, el que se hace con los factores nacionales y por ende excluye los factores aportados desde fuera... Pero no del todo, señal de que hay beneficios exportados que siguen adjudicados a factores internos."According to the rules of national accounting, a subsidiary of a multinational in another country is only cosnidered a subsidiary if it’s not a postbox company but if it also owns for instance some real estate. The headquarters of some very large multinationals have been relocated to Dublin and employ as far as I know a few hundred employees and presumably own some real estate…. The profits of ordinary subsidiaries are relocated to the country of origin of the multinational, in an accounting sense. The profits of these multinationals (think: microsoft) are as these are not ordinary subsidiaries but headquarters (at least legally) relocated from (in the microsoft case) the USA to Ireland, This runs havoc with all the ,normal’ GDP ratio’s like labour income (which drops like a stone when expressed as a % of GDP but which rises in a nominal sense). There are arguments to relocate the profits of subsidiaries to the parent country. The rules take account of this. But Ireland is a topsy turvy case: multinationals are not establishing a subsdiary in Ireland but are (legally) relocating their headquarters! This was presumably not foreseen by the GDP statisticians; imo the rules have to be changed to take account of this topsy turvy case."
miércoles, 3 de agosto de 2016
Inercia y brusquedad
Inicialmente, TED spread era la diferencia entre las tasas de interés de los contratos de tres meses del departamento de tesoro de los Estados Unidos y de los contratos a tres meses de Eurodollars representados por el LIBOR. Sin embargo, desde que el Chicago Mercantile Exchange dejó de utilizar los futuros de T-bills, el TED spread es ahora calculado como la diferencia entre el T-bill de tres meses y la tasa LIBOR de tres meses.
"TED es un acrónimo formado por T-bill y ED, el símbolo de transacción para los contratos de futuros en Eurodollar. El tamaño de la diferencia es usualmente denominado en puntos base. Por ejemplo, si la tasa de un T-bill es de 5.10% y el ED se transa a 5.50%, entonces el TED spread es de 40 puntos base (100 puntos base = 1 punto porcentual). El TED spread fluctua a través del tiempo, pero se ha mantenido históricamente en el rango de 10 - 50 puntos base hasta el año 2007. Cuando el TED spread aumenta, se asocia con un presagio de problemas en el mercado accionario de Estados Unidos, pues indica que la liquidez ha disminuido.
"El TED spread es un indicaador de riesgo de crédito percibido en la economía general.[1] Esto se debe a que los T-bills son considerados libre de riesgo, mientras que LIBOR refleja el riesgo de crédito de préstamos entre bancos. Cuando el TED spread aumenta, es una señal de que los prestamistas creen que el riesgo de cesación de pagos en los préstamos interbancarios está aumentando. Los prestamistas interbancarios, por lo tanto, demandan un mayor tasa de interés, o aceptan retornos inferiores en inversiones seguras como los T-bills. Cuando el riesgo de cesación de pagos entre bancos es considerado bajo, el TED spread disminuye.[2]
Solo para muy nostálgicos (1962)
martes, 2 de agosto de 2016
Cataluña, el Palmar de los piojitos
"La estrategia de lentitud y apaciguamiento del Tc, que de momento comparte todo el establishment institucional, puede defenderse por las tortuosas necesidades del Estado de derecho e incluso como pedagógico contraste de las gritonas vejaciones que los nacionalistas catalanes infligen al sistema. Pero tiene sus contrapartidas. Da inesperadas y desmoralizantes razones para insistir en el descrédito de la política y de su escenario principal: un parlamento local puede ilegalizarse y si, en realidad, no ocurre nada, quizá sea porque la política ya es nada. Otra contrapartida es más clásica y alude al curso que sigue una infección no tratada. La última, y la más inquietante, es admitir que la Cataluña sediciosa es un poder fáctico: es decir, una reserva que se extiende sobre la democracia."
lunes, 1 de agosto de 2016
Financial repression
"The behavior of real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates helps clarify the role of the post-crisis monetary-policy shift. As shown in the figure below, which plots the share of advanced economies with negative long-term interest rates (ten-year treasuries yielding less than the rate of inflation) from 1900 to 2016. In the run-up to the crisis, there are no recorded negative real returns on government bonds; since the crisis, the incidence of negative returns increases and has remained high. Of course, the share of countries with negative short-term treasuries (not shown here) is even higher since 2009.
"But the figure also shows that the 2010-2016 period is not the first episode of widespread negative real returns on bonds. The periods around World War I and World War II are routinely overlooked in discussions that focus on deregulation of capital markets since the 1980s. As in the past, during and after financial crises and wars, central banks increasingly resort to a form of “taxation” that helps liquidate the huge public- and private-debt overhang and eases the burden of servicing that debt.
"Such policies, known as financial repression, usually involve a strong connection between the government, the central bank, and the financial sector. Today, this means consistent negative real interest rates – equivalent to an opaque tax on bondholders and on savers more generally.
"So if a prolonged period of low and often negative real interest rates is not unprecedented, where is the novelty? More often than not, negative real rates were accompanied by higher inflation (as during the wars and the 1970s) than what we observe today in the advanced economies. Even when average inflation was modest (as in the 1950s and 1960s), it was still more volatile.
"In the 1930s, in the midst of economic depression and sharp deflation, US Treasury bills sometimes traded at negative yields (and real returns were still positive). In today’s low-inflation or outright deflationary environment, central banks may need negative policy rates (this is the novelty part) to produce negative real rates. In the eurozone and Japan, taxing banks that hold reserves (negative-interest-rate policy) will also encourage more bank lending, and thus stimulate growth.
"In an era when public debt write-offs (haircuts) are widely viewed as unacceptable (witness the European Union’s position on Greece) and governments are often reluctant to write off private debts (witness Italy’s reluctance to impose a haircut on holders of banks’ subordinated debt), sustained negative ex post returns are the slow-burn path to reducing debt. Absent a surprise inflation spurt, this will be a long process."
Lo pagaremos todos
No soy de izquierdas ni de casualidad. Es más, creo que la izquierda ha jugado a un entreguismo europeo del que espero que la historia le exija cuentas. Cuando el autor habla de élites, se refiere a unas élites que son de derechas (Junker) como de izquierdas (Schultz), una plasta burocrática que se reparte las prebendas logradas esquilmando al pueblo con una economía sin pies ni cabeza.A little history is in order first. The formation of the union itself, from its genesis in the Treaty of Rome in 1957, was as much a result of geopolitical pressure from the US as it was of the grand visions of those who led it. The six founding countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) built on the hope of the European Coal and Steel Community that was established in 1950, that greater economic relations would secure lasting peace and prosperity. Somewhat ironically, they were egged on by the United States, which in the post Second World War period not only provided huge amounts of Marshall Plan aid to western Europe, but urged the reduction of trade barriers between them to encourage more intra-regional economic activity and provide an effective counter to eastern Europe during the Cold War.
Subsequent expansion of membership (the UK joined the EU in 1973, along with Ireland and Denmark, followed in the 1980s by Greece, Spain and Portugal, and then by Austria, Finland and Sweden in the 1990s and then some years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a large intake of 12 central and eastern European countries in the 2000s, with the most recent member being Croatia in 2013) has brought the number of member countries in the EU to 28. Over the years, expansion has been accompanied by the push for “ever greater union”: the Maastricht Treaty in 1993 that laid down the ground rules for economic engagement and strengthened the institutional structure of the European Commission and the European Parliament; the creation of the Single Market of free movement of goods, services and people starting from 1994; the Treaty of Amsterdam that devolved some powers from national governments to the European Parliament, including legislating on immigration, adopting civil and criminal laws, and enacting the common foreign and security policy; and even a common currency, the euro, shared by a subgroup of 19 members from 1 January 1999.
Some would say that it is remarkable that a continent with a fairly recent history of wars and extreme regional conflicts could have achieved such a combination of expansion and integration. There is no doubt that, from the start, this was a project of the political and corporate elite of Europe, and the “voice of the people” was not really taken into account. Yet in many ways it was also a visionary, even romantic, project that could only go as far as it has gone because, even as it increasingly furthered the goals of globalised finance and large corporations, it still contained the (inadequately utilised) potential for ensuring some citizens’ rights across the region.
However, as the EU bureaucracy expanded and as the rules–particularly the economic ones – became ever more rigid and inflexible, with the forceful imposition of fiscal austerity measures in countries with deficits and even in countries where there was no real need to do so, the Commission itself and the entire process came to be seen as distant, tone-deaf to people’s concerns and impervious to genuine pleas for help and a degree of empathy.
Germany, the undisputed leader of the bloc, epitomised this sense of rigid adherence to (often nonsensical and contradictory) rules. The lack of consistency in creating a monetary union without a genuine banking union or any solidarity with fiscal federalism has created years of economic depression in some countries and deflationary pressures across the Eurozone and most of the EU. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the tragic case of the Greek economy, but this is also true of other countries in the periphery that have been forced into austerity measures with little to show in terms of benefit for more than five years now.
So in the expanding but unfinished project that is the European Union, corporate elites have basically achieved their goals and won – as indeed they have been winning in pretty much every region of the world over the past three decades.
Brexit. Devaluación externa versus devaluación interna
La esterlina se ha pegado un buen batacazo después del Brexit, como vemos aquí:
Aparte del herido orgullo patrio, esto es un reacciona lógica al cambio de expectativa y al aumento de incertidumbre sobre cómo van a ir la cosas desde ahora. Recordemos que la variable más elusiva pero importante de la economía es la formada por las expectativas sobre el futuro, y cómo influirán en ese futuro los cambios que en ellas.
Sin embargo, de momento, como dice Roger Bootle, la depreciación de la libra ayuda a paliar los costes de ajuste a la nueva situación. Y ayuda desde dos planos distintos. El comercial y el financiero.
1) En el comercial, ahora el exportador británico ve que por el mismo precio en dólares, recibe más libras. Antes recibía 1£/1,5$ (0,66) y ahora 1£ por cada 1,3$ (0,77). Sus ingresos en libras han aumentado. Los trabajadores de ese exportador puede que reciban una compensación extra, pero en todo caso el margen de explotación habrá subido y la capacidad de invertir y contratar también.
El importador, por el contrario, que paga al proveedor en $, ve que por cada precio en libra debe poner más dólares, por lo que importe: antes 1,3 £/$ Y ahora 1,5 $. Tendrá que subir el precio interno en libras si quiere conservar su ingreso unitario en £, dependiendo del poder de mercado que tenga. Pero en todo caso sus ingresos bajan, su mercado se estrecha, e incluso puede verse obligado a despedir gente o reducirle el sueldo.
Por lo tanto, hay un trasvase de demanda y de recursos de las importaciones, que se encarecen, a las exportaciones, que se abaratan, y lo mismo pasa en los componentes de la demanda interna, en que se reducirá las importaciones y todo lo que se componga de ellas.
2) En el plano de las finanzas, también se producen ajustes importantes. Los activos internos en libras son ahora más baratos en dólares, lo que aumentará su demanda del exterior -habrá más entrada de capitales privados. Eso ayudará a financiar los desequilibrios de balanza de pagos con más facilidades, y dará más confianza al inversor exterior a más largo plazo.
En suma, el tipo de cambio es la síntesis de todos los precios internos en relación a los externos, y, como decía Friedman (1953)*, es más sencillo cambiar éste que cambiar todos uno a uno, que es lo que se pretende, inútilmente, con la devaluación interna.
Por supuesto, hay riesgos. El principal es que la devaluación se convierta en una costumbre, genere una inflación, y cree más problemas que los que soluciona en principio. Eso depende del rigor con que le gobierno gestione la política monetaria, de la que el tipo de cambio no es más que una parte.
Pero en la situación actual de incertidumbre ampliada por el Brexit, y de un gran déficit de balanza de pagos, la caída de la libra solo puede ayudar a suavizar el ajuste. En todo caso, no hay una relación directa entre devaluación e inflación, como pretendem algunas escuelas. Como he dicho, depende de la relación interna a los focos de inflación que se generan, que no son sistemáticos sino en países de tradición de inflaciónes altas.
(*) "The case for flexible exchange rate"
domingo, 31 de julio de 2016
Predicciones de optimismo ¿con fundamento?
Milton Friedman, liquidador de Keynes
