Más pero no mejor, sobre China

Más opiniones y datos sobre China (argumentación impecable) nada menos que de Barry Eichengreen. "

Rescaling China’s Debt Mountain

Melancolía de dos años de desgaste perdidos

Los análisis y valoraciones de España que no tengan como referencia Europa son baldíos. Dependemos de Europa, pero de forma extraña, porque Europa es una carcasa sin cabeza y sin iniciativa. Europa nos ha dejado demandarnos en al duda y el déficit porque estábamos en un periodo electoral (2015-16: autonómicas, europeas, Cataluña, andaluzas, generales, generales II). Este desgaste brutal, que no ha traído nada bueno, todo lo contrario, no ha terminado. Después del 27 de junio, pase lo que pase, el gobierno será aún más débil, se cual sea. Durante este interludio "en funciones" , el gobierno ha dejado hacer a los separatistas y los anrisistema. Han crecido en fuerza. Tienen en sus manos ayuntamientos y comunidades. No es consuelo que sean alianzas frágiles, porque sus decisiones van en una sola dirección: deshacer nudos, instituciones, lazos, romper un acerbo común como el ie tiene cualquier país de la UE. 

La debilitación creciente del poder, su fragmentación, nos dejará el 26-J un gobierno maniatado, tanto más cuanto más se base en una coalición, por muy amplia que ésta sea. Un gobierno débil es la peor plaga para su pueblo, decía Napoleón. Un gobierno débil está en manos de los grupos de presión, sean de derechas o de izquierdas. Tiene difícil tomar decisiones que afecten a uno de esos grupos, como controlar el déficit o mantener el orden público. Le torearán unos y otros hasta que se desgaste. La única solución es que la economía reviva de verdad, pero en ese contexto político es muy difícil. La economía necesita una mínima confianza en que se cumplen ciertas normas, que no se van  a cambiar por que sí. Por ejemplo, la presión fiscal sobre tal o cual actividad. 

Echen un vistazo a los planes de unos u otros y verán que lo único probable es un desconcierto total para el empleador-inversor. Alguien dirá: estamos creciendo, creando empleo. Si, pero es preocupante que en la última EPA sean las CCAA las que más ha  creado empleo, mientras el empleo privado caía. Y esa barra libre de las CCAA se va a acabar, se tiene que acabar. Y solo lo puede acabar el gobierno, o si el desmadre sigue, tendremos que pensar en que nos meterán un rescate. Quizás tengamos que implorarlo.

Monetizando deuda. Un debate. EEUU versus Europe

Hay un debate entre Cullen Roche y Noah Smith que demuestra, aparte de otras cosas, que el primero odia al segundo (le critica sin piedad sin ni siquiera pronunciar su nombre). Aparte de eso, el debate es interesante porque es sobre la capacidad que tiene un gobierno de monetizar su deuda par reducir su volumen en circulación. Sinceramente, por primera vez no entiendo a Cullen Roche. Creo que Noah no dice ninguna barbaridad. 

La excusa para apedrearse mutuamente es las chorradas que dice Donald Trump, ese payaso chiflado. Un día dice que cuando sea presidente EEUU denunciará su deuda. Con razón todos le critican, entre otras cosas porque arruinaría a muchos americanos que tienen sus ahorros depositados en ella... Pero a los dos días dice, ante las críticas, que no, que lo que hay que hacer es monetizarla. 

¿Qué significa monetizar la deuda para Trump? Es aquí donde me parece que Noah es correcto; y Trump (si es que sabe de qué habla): Noah dice que Trump por una vez tiene razón... Al menos hoy, hasta que cambie de opinión. 

Monetizar deuda es que el banco central compre esa deuda a su precio de mercado. Al hacerlo, la paga en moneda nacional, lo que hace aumentar el dinero emitido (que no es el dinero en circulación, como veremos).

Es decir, la FED compra deuda del Tesoro en el mercado secundario, a un banco o a un privado. Sus activos aumentan en la cantidad D comprada, y sus pasivos aumentan por el dinero emitido de la misma cuantía, D. 

Los que tenían la deuda se encuentran con que sus activos han cambiado de composición: antes tenían deuda pública D, con la que no podían comprar cosas, y ahora la han convertido en dinero D, con el que pueden comprar cosas. Si la deuda estaba en poder de los bancos -y suele ser así- teóricamente, tienen más dinero para dar créditos. Al dar créditos, aumentan los depósitos, que son liquidez.La Economía crecerá. 

Como lo explica Cullen en un artículo dedicado al QE,

If QE doesn’t increase the net worth of the private sector then what does it do? The main effect of QE is in the way it alters the composition of outstanding financial assets. The reduction of the supply of US government bonds puts downward pressure on interest rates by increasing the demand for other bonds. This can result in price increases (what’s commonly referred to as the “wealth effect”) and a portfolio rebalancing which may or may not lead to an indirect increase in private sector net worth. The interest rate channel can also help to stimulate investment by helping to maintain an accommodative interest rate structure. This can also directly impact carry trades through the way financial intermediaries borrow in one currency to finance investment in a different currency. This has been cited as a potential cause of the boom in some emerging market economies in recent years. 

Obsérvese que este no es más que el ABC del QE que han hecho los bancos centrales en estos años difíciles. 

Además, al reducirse la deuda en circulación (mientras la FED no la revenda), aumenta la capacidad financiera del estado para financiarse a menor coste de interés. (Creo que esto no lo han pillado los del debate.) Esta mayor capacidad financiera es útil cuando el sector privado está endeudado: ayuda a éste a desendeudarse. 

Pero la verdad es que el QE no ha sido muy potente en reanimar la economía, ni la inflación. El motivo, como he hemos dicho muchas veces, es que el dinero que circula es endogeno, ie quiere decir que sólo aumenta cuando hay crédito nuevo. 

Will QE and an expansion of the monetary base lead to more lending? One of the more common beliefs regarding QE is that an expansion of the monetary base will eventually lead to an explosion in loans as banks “lend out” reserves to the public. The problem with this theory, is that banks don’t lend out reserves so more reserves doesn’t necessarily mean more lending. Loans create deposits and banks can obtain reserves from the central bank after the fact. In other words, bank lending is not constrained by the current level of reserves. Therefore, more reserves does not lead to more lending unless there is an increase in demand for loans from creditworthy customers. The money multiplier that we all learn in school is a myth. This is why QE1 and QE2 did not cause a surge in loans or inflation. Lending is a function of demand for debt from creditworthy borrowers. 

Solo la expectativa de beneficios anima la demanda de crédito. Solo el crédito aumenta el dinero en circulación. 

Hemos llegado al punto crucial: se ha "monetizado" deuda, pero el resultado ha sido que no ha aumentado el dinero en circulación. Difícil es que eso se convierta en una hiperinflación. 

Claro, en economia no hay milagros. Todo tiene su haz y su envés. ¿Cuál es el envés de esta operativa? Sólo tiene un envés: que se al final la base monetaria inyectada se convierta en exceso de dinero y provoquen una hiperinflación. 

Sin embargo, hemos visto que, desde hace ya ocho años, los bancos centrales han comprado deuda y no se ha visto ni gota de inflación. En el gráfico, los stocks de deuda en los BC:

 

Japón tiene hasta un 70% de PIB en deuda, y el BCE  y la FED como un 20%, similar al Banco de Inglaterra. Los BC tienen un margen amplio para conservar esa deuda en su activo, hasta su vencimiento. Mientras, obtiene la renta de señoreaje, que es el tipo de interés que le devenga. 

Mientras el público tenga confianza en la solvencia del Tesoro y la gestión del BC, no habrá efectos negativos. Al vencimiento, puede decidir sustituir esa deuda  por otra del mismo nivel. 

Así, el gobierno no se declara en suspensión de pagos, e incluso puede seguir emitiendo deuda hasta que la economía se recupere y suban los ingresos fiscales y se reduzca el déficit. Lo que, por cierto, aumenta la confianza de los mercados en la solvencia del estado: impide que un problema de iliquidez  se convierta en uno de solvencia. 

Por cierto, ¿no es esto mejor que lo que se ha hecho Europa, de comprimir el déficit a lo bestia, contrayendo gastos y aumentado impuestos? Todo consiste en optimizar en el tiempo el reequilibrio de los balances, privados y públicos, y lo que se ha hecho en Europa es una bestialidad... Alemana. Con el agravante de que en 2011-12 crearon una crisis de confianza al sembrar dudas de que el BCE estuviera dispuesto a ser prestamista de última instancia de los paises miembros.

Por lo tanto, hay dos formas de reducir deuda pública: a lo bestia, con el riesgo de que los prestamistas no te crean, y ordenadamente y con tiempo, ayudando así al sector privado y reforzando la confianza de los acreedores. Es el modelo "Ordo-Alemán" frente al modelo USA. ¿Cuál prefieren? Bueno pues aquí, en España, NADIE lo ha tendido, TODOS asumen que hay que seguir a Alemania (hablo de los economistas, sobre todo). 

Una política más efectiva sería el helicopter money, que ya expliqué aquí o aquí  Eso supondría meter en paquete la política fiscal: el gobierno decreta enviar a cada ciudadano in sobre con X euros, o bajarle los impuestos por esa cantidad, para que lo gaste en consumo. En este caso sí hay un aumento neto de del volumen de activos de cada ciudadano, lo que seguramente le incitará a gastar, además de cancelar sus deudas. El gobierno se financiará con una emisión adquirida por el BC, lo que sí es monetización directa efectiva, pues no va a base monetaria: aumenta el dinero y el activo de la gente. 

Pero esto está fuera de los cerebros de los politicos, no se inquieten. 

Lo que no se puede hacer es renovar eternamente las necesidades del gobierno, porque el aumento de dinero de la base monetaria no tendría límite. Una vez que se consolidan expectativas de inflación en aumento, el BC debería hacer lo contrario para frenarla. Cuanto más tarde empiece, más traumática será la frenada. 

Los MMT (Modern Market Monetarist) , que son, como  dicen ambos debatientes, los monetaristas de izuierdas, creen que este proceso de monetización es ilimitado. Yo estoy  de acuerdo con Noah: no hay riesgo de inflación hoy, porque la economía está deprimida. Es más, nos gustaría a todos un poco de inflación. Pero sí creo que tiene un limite, como todo: 

I’m a bit more skeptical. Hyperinflation, like a stock-market crash or a bank run, is a phenomenon that depends crucially on people’s expectations of what other people will do. If everyone thinks that no one else will spend their dollars, inflation stays low. But if some people start to believe that other folks are about to go out and spend their stockpiles of cash, they will respond by doing the same, so they can buy things before prices start to rise. That will turn inflation into a self-fulfilling prophecy. And just as with bank runs and stock market crashes, we know that expectations can shift very quickly and catastrophically. Hyperinflation is like a bank run on a national currency.

So although the danger of hyperinflation looks very remote for now, a President Trump might change that. If he successfully pressured the Fed to start supporting infinite government borrowing, expectations might suddenly snap, and hyperinflation could result. It’s a risk I’d rather the U.S. didn’t take.

Motivos para no estar contentos, de Dean Baker

Yes, the economy is rigged, contrary to what some economists try to tell you

Dean Baker

I see Greg Mankiw used his NYT column to tell folks that politicians are spinning tales when they say the economy is rigged. I would say that economists spin tales when they tell you it is not. (Mankiw and I just ran through this argument on a panel in Boston last week.) Let’s quickly run through the main points.

First, the overall level of employment is a political decision. We would have many more people employed today if the deficit hawks had not seized control of fiscal policy back in 2011 and turned the dial toward austerity. The beneficiaries of higher employment are disproportionately those at the middle and bottom of the income distribution: people with less education and African Americans and Hispanics. So the politicians pushing austerity decided that millions of people at the middle and bottom would not have jobs.

Furthermore, in a weaker labor market, it is harder for those at the middle and bottom to get pay increases. So the shift to austerity also meant that tens of millions of workers would have to work for lower pay. Read all about it in my book with Jared Bernstein (free, and worth it).

The second way in which it is rigged is our trade policy. First there is the size of the trade deficit. This is the result of policy choices. Instead of forcing our trading partners to respect Bill Gates copyrights and Pfizer’s patents, we could have insisted they raise the value of their currency to move towards more balanced trade. But Bill Gates and Pfizer have more power in setting trade policy than ordinary workers.

Also, contrary to what Mankiw tries to tell folks in his column, the trade deficit did play a big role in our loss of manufacturing jobs. As my favorite graph for the day shows, manufacturing employment was roughly constant at around 17,500 million from the late 1960s until 2000. During this period, there was substantial growth in manufacturing productivity, as Mankiw says. This growth caused manufacturing employment to decline as a share of total employment, but to remain roughly constant in absolute terms.

Manufacturing Employment

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

However, from 2000 to 2006 manufacturing employment falls by more than 3 million, or close to 20 percent. The change was the explosion in the size of the trade deficit, as an over-valued dollar made our goods less competitive. This plunge in employment devastated lives and whole communities. It was a clear policy choice. Importers like Walmart and outsourcers like GE benefited, as ordinary workers lost big-time.

In addition to the volume of trade flows, there is also the content. We could be importing doctors, dentists, lawyers, and other highly trained professionals. This would mean writing trade agreements that made it as easy as possible for smart kids in foreign countries to train to our standards in these areas and then to work freely in the United States, just like people born in New York or California.

This would have lowered the wages of the most highly paid workers and reduced the prices that the rest of us have to pay for health care, dental work, and other high-priced professional services. We didn’t go this route because highly paid professionals have more power than autoworkers and textile workers. (Yes, we can compensate developing countries so that they can train 2–3 professionals for every one that comes here — please don’t show your ignorance by arguing the opposite in a comment.)

Then we have the financial sector. This has many of the richest people in the country who make their money fleecing the rest of us. It is wrong to say that the sector is deregulated, since it benefits from all sorts of government backstops, as we saw clearly in 2008–2009. We could downsize the sector, making it smaller and more efficient, with a financial transactions tax. Such a tax could free up more than $100 billion a year (@0.6 percent of GDP) for productive uses, while hugely reducing the incomes of the very rich.

Next we come to patent and copyright protection, both government granted monopolies that allow some folks to get very rich by charging the rest of us more money. This is most apparent with prescription drugs. A drug like Sovaldi carries a list price of $84,000 when it would sell in a free market for just a few hundred dollars per treatment. This rigging reflects the political power of the pharmaceutical, software, and entertainment industry. (Yes, there are other ways to finance drug development and creative work.)

Then we get to our broken corporate governance process that allows even failed CEOs like Carly Fiorina to walk away with over $100 million. The problem is that CEO pay is largely determined by their friends on the boards of directors. It is not determined by people who are asking whether they could get as good a CEO for less money. (Why try to take money from your friend?)

In Europe and Japan, CEOs are also well-paid, but they tend to get a third or a quarter of what our CEOs earn. This matters not only because of the pay the CEOs get, but also because of its impact on pay structures throughout the economy. It is now common to see top executives of non-profit hospitals, universities, or private charities get salaries of more than $1 million a year. They argue that they would get much more working for a corporation of the same size. And, this money comes out of the pockets of the rest of us.

So folks, the economy is rigged — better to believe the politicians than the economists.

Historia de las ideas económicas. Paul Krugman versus Roger Farmer

Expongo aquí dos visiones distintas sobre el evidente fracaso de la microfundation en la Macroeconomía. La primera es de Krugman, la segunda de Farmer  Lo hago porque simple complaciencia en las historias brillantemente contadas. Ah! Y además estoy de acuerdo con ellos, aunque discrepan en algún punto. 

Microfoundations and the Parting of the Waters

The blogospheric debate about microfoundations, saltwater/freshwater and all that has, I think, been illuminating. Among other things it’s serving almost as an oral history of What Really Happened – minus the oral part, but not mediated by the usual slowness and overthinking of formal publication.

And I think the intellectual history is useful, because it gives you some idea of how people came to make the choice of which side to be on. It’s certainly possible to make the case for an eclectic, fairly salty approach on general principles, as Simon Wren-Lewis, Noah Smith, and Nick Rowe do. But the abstract logic gains force when you recall how it actually happened.

Oh, and I was there – not as a participant in the growing macro war, but as a student at the time the great divide was taking place. I felt the seduction of the microfoundations-uber-alles doctrine, but also got to watch as the demand for microfoundations, originally grounded in appeals to empirical power, became free-floating, a dogma to be defended in the teeth of the evidence.

So, if you had to choose a beginning, it would be the famous Phelps volume. The papers in that volume all started with two observations, of which the first was that there was overwhelming evidence for some kind of short-run non-neutrality of money. None of the papers in that volume questioned the proposition that nominal shocks had large real effects. You can see why if you look at annual changes in nominal versus real GDP between 1950 and 1970:

 

Obviously there was a near one-to-one correspondence. Obviously, too, it was really hard in that era, with its lack of major supply shocks, to tell a story in which real GDP was driving nominal spending rather than vice versa. So the Phelps volume began with the stylized fact that in the short run nominal demand, driven for example by changes in monetary policy, gets reflected largely in quantities rather than prices.

But as the papers also observed, it was hard to explain that fact in terms of standard microeconomics: with everyone acting rationally, money should have been neutral even in the short run. Traditional Keynesian analyses simply said that people aren’t completely rational, that they have money illusion – or maybe that contracts are focal points in which nominal wages or prices matter because of salience, even though they should be arbitrary. But these were ex post rationalizations rather than being derived from some kind of fundamentals.

So the Phelps crowd came up with a lovely story: you see, it was all about information. Individuals and firms couldn’t tell, in the very short run, whether a rise in the price they were being offered represented a shock specific to them – people for some reason wanted more of their widgets — or a general change in demand. It was rational to respond to an idiosyncratic rise in demand by producing more, so confusion could explain why short-run aggregate supply seemed upward-sloping. 

As Phelps and others (including Milton Friedman, who was thinking along similar lines) realized, this meant that the apparent tradeoff between unemployment and inflation would be unstable: sustained inflation would get built into expectations, and would no longer produce low unemployment. The stagflation of the 70s seemed to confirm this prediction, and brought the microfoundations project immense prestige. Encouraged by all this, freshwater economists gleefully proclaimed Keynes dead, the subject of nothing but “giggles and whispers”.

But here’s the thing: after that initial success, Phelps-Lucas/type microfoundations quickly collapsed both intellectually and empirically. Intellectually, the problem was that rational individuals simply should not have been confused in the way the models demanded; there’s too much information out there, whether in newspapers or in asset prices. You just couldn’t get a Lucas supply curve out of a model looking even vaguely like the real economy.

Empirically, the problem was that slumps last too long. Even if you wave away the information problem, confusion about aggregate versus idiosyncratic shocks can last for quarters, maybe, but not years.

So the truth was that microfoundations in macroeconomics had its moment, but failed utterly at the one thing it was sold, above all, as being able to do – namely, give a better explanation of why nominal shocks have real effects. Time, you might think, to reconsider the project.

And some did. There was a revival of Keynesian thinking in the late 70s and early 80s, albeit one that tried to cram as many microfoundations into the models as possible without being grossly unrealistic.

But many economists had so committed themselves to the idea that Keynes was dead and rationality roolz that they simply dug in deeper. Rationality-based microfoundations must be right; if their microfoundations couldn’t explain why nominal shocks have real effects, then nominal shocks must not have real effects – it’s all real shocks. And so real business cycle theory was born.

So now we have people debating whether models with microfoundations lead to better predictions, both of the future and of policy impacts, than models with ad hoc elements; as Wren-Lewis and Smith say, this is by no means obvious if the microfoundations are wrong, as they often clearly are. But what you want to realize is that this isn’t going to convince the microfoundations crowd. After all, more than thirty years ago they decided that the joy of microfoundations trumped the utter failure of microfounded models to work in practice, and they have now trained successive cohorts of students in this view.

There are, it’s true, some hints of a guilty conscience – as Matt Yglesias points out, there’s the odd tendency of freshwater types to immediately accuse anyone with saltwater ideas of being dishonest. (I’m not a nice guy, but if look at what I said about, say, Cochrane, it was that he was ignorant, not corrupt.)

Oh, and the notion that there had been a convergence of views by 2007, which was then ruptured by the crisis, was a saltwater delusion. People like Olivier Blanchard convinced themselves that the other side was listening; it wasn’t. The hysterical reaction to the notion that fiscal policy is effective at the zero lower bound demonstrated that the freshwater types had never bothered to learn the least thing about how New Keynesian models worked.

So there’s a lot of history here; but the main driver behind this history was, I believe, the inability of many economists to accept the fact that they took a wrong turn.

Neo-Paleo-Keynesianism: A suggested definition

There has been a lot written on the blogosphere in recent weeks about the microfoundations of macroeconomics. Tony Yates argues in favour of micro-founded structural models. Adam Posen is sceptical of micro-foundations and Simon-Wren Lewis, Noah Smith and Nick Rowe call for a more eclectic approach. For those looking for a neat summary of these debates, Paul Krugman traces the history of macroeconomic ideas.  Responding to a  piece by Brad Delong, he argues that there has been a recent resurgence of what he calls “neo-paleo-Keynesianism”.  This is very useful concept and I have much in common with the ideas expressed in Paul's piece. This essay offers a novel definition of the term that Paul coined and an invitation to fellow academics to join me in pursuing an agenda based on this definition.

I agree with Paul Krugman: macroeconomics has taken the wrong path.  I disagree with Paul’s reading of when that happened.  The error has nothing to do with new-classical versus new-Keynesian approaches; it is a more fundamental error that pervades both new-classical and new-Keynesian schools of thought. Macroeconomics took a wrong turn in Cambridge Massachusetts in 1955 when Paul Samuelson, in the third edition of his textbook, introduced the idea of the “neoclassical synthesis” (see Pearce and Hoover for a discussion of the influence of Samuelson’s textbook). Everything since then has been the economic equivalent of the scientific theory of phlogiston. 

Many economists are exposed to the philosophy of science through Milton Friedman’s book, Essays in Positive Economics. Friedman promoted the views of Karl Popper who argued (here) that science progresses when theorists make bold conjectures that are confronted by facts. Those conjectures stand until they are refuted by the evidence.  Occasionally, economics students are exposed to the ideas of Thomas Kuhn who talks (here ) of paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions. Rarely does the economics curriculum of a Ph.D. program have time to push much further into the methodology of science.   That’s a pity since there is much to be learned from alternative philosophies. 

Axel Leijonhufvud has argued persuasively (here) that we have much to learn from Imré Lakatos, a philosopher of science who spent much of his career at the London School of Economics. Lakatos, (here) in contrast to Popper and Kuhn, sees science as a set of competing scientific research programs.  His approach is a useful one for understanding the current debate amongst practicing macroeconomists who are facing a series of natural experiments that provide serious challenges to both new-classical and new-Keynesian agendas.

According to Lakatos, all tests of scientific theories are necessarily tests of joint hypotheses.  The sciences, both physical and social, are best characterized as interacting communities of scholars.  Those scholars adhere to research programs that interpret the evidence through different lenses. 

Each research program has a ‘hard core’ and a ‘protective belt’. When an event in nature appears to refute a theory, the scientist must decide which of the possible components of his theory should be rejected in order to reconcile his worldview with the outcome he observed.  Assumptions that make up the hard core of a research program will never be rejected; instead, the scientist will amend one of the assumptions in its protective belt.

The new-Keynesian research program is the descendent of Samuelson’s ‘neoclassical synthesis’.  According to that synthesis, the economy is ‘Keynesian’ in the short-run when not all markets have had time to clear:  it is ‘classical’ in the long run when all price adjustment has run its course.  It is these twin propositions that form the hard core of the new-Keynesian program. According to that program, market economies are self-correcting, and although the adjustment to the long-run equilibrium may take time, that adjustment will, eventually, occur. 

Despite its name, the new-Keynesian research program is neither new, nor Keynesian. The idea, that real economic activity may be different from its long run steady state as a consequence of sticky prices, is firmly rooted in monetarist tradition.   It originated in the eighteenth century and is summarised by David Hume in his delightful essay, Of Money. Keynes argued, in contrast, in the opening chapters of The General Theory, that high unemployment of the kind that persisted in the Great Depression is one of many possible steady state equilibria. 

How can we recover this idea, without discarding three hundred years of microeconomic principles? I will refer to a research agenda that maintains the notion of unemployment as a steady-state equilibrium as paleo-Keynesianism. When combined with general equilibrium theory in a way that provides a micro-foundation to this key idea, I will refer to the resulting synthesis as neo-paleo-Keynesianism.

In contrast to new-Keynesian ideas, neo-paleo-Keynesianism does not assume that ‘frictions’ prevent wages or prices from clearing markets.  It does not deny that wages and prices move slowly, relative to quantities. But that observation does not mean that we must assume that there are menu-costs, contracting costs or any other artificial barrier to price adjustment. As I explain (here), sticky prices may simply be part of a rational expectations equilibrium.  Robert Lucas was exactly right when he argued (here) that markets are always in equilibrium. But accepting that proposition does not require us to accept that equilibrium is unique; nor must we accept that equilibrium is optimal, or that unemployment is voluntary. 

The neo-paleo-Keynesian (NPK) research program is unashamedly neo-classical. It seeks to reconcile Keynesian ideas with the microeconomics of general equilibrium theory; and it does so in a new way.  As with new-classical and new-Keynesian economics, neo-paleo-Keynesianism constructs models of rational actors who interact in markets.  In contrast to new classical and new-Keynesian programs, neo-paleo-Keynesianism contains two propositions that are absent from the hard core of these agendas: 1) there is a continuum of possible equilibrium unemployment rates and 2) the unemployment rate that prevails is determined by the ‘animal spirits’ of investors. 

How might one accomplish this agenda? One approach that I describe (here) combines a search theory of unemployment with an asset-pricing model and (here) I develop a model driven by animal spirits that returns to paleo-Keynesian ideas without invoking sticky prices or wages.  My survey paper (here) explains what is different about neo-paleo-Keynesianism, from the new-Keynesian alternative.[1]

What is wrong with new-Keynesian economics and why should we prefer the NPK approach? Lakatos provides us with an answer. Research programs are not refuted, as in Popper, nor are they dramatically overturned, as in Kuhn. They simply attract more new adherents than their competitors. In the language of Lakatos, research programs are progressive or degenerative.

In the normal course of events, a successful research program meets challenges to its hegemony by modifying hypotheses in its protective belt.  A progressive research program is one that occasionally makes a prediction that is confirmed by experiment or, in the case of macroeconomics, by history. A degenerative research program is one that struggles with continued refutations by continually modifying its protective belt in ever more inelegant ways. 

The new-Keynesian research program, like the new-classical program before it, is degenerative. Like Ptolemaician astronomy, it explains new data by adding ever increasing layers of complexity. And like that theory; new-Keynesian economics has not succeeded in making a single prediction that has been confirmed by fresh evidence that was unavailable when the theory was constructed.

So where does that leave the neo-paleo-Keynesian? What event is explained by this approach? First and foremost, there is the persistence of long-term unemployment in the wake of a financial crisis. For a new-Keynesian, it is hard to explain why wages and prices have been so sticky that employment still has not recovered more than five years after the onset of the stock market crash. For a neo-paleo-Keynesian it is an expected outcome for a theory in which high involuntary unemployment is an equilibrium state.

There are those who claim that we should return to the Keynes of the General Theory while rejecting the attempt to build microfoundations. That is the message, for example, of post-Keynesians like Paul Davidson. While there are attractive elements to that path, I do not believe that we should abandon all of classical economics.  There is much to like in the ideas of demand and supply and several branches of economics have had notable successes by following the idea that actors are rational and goal oriented. Examples that come to mind are auction theory that was used successfully to sell the rights to the electromagnetic spectrum in the UK and matching theory that was used to develop kidney exchanges. 

The path of combining multiple equilibria with ‘animal-spirits’ has the potential to explain many of the puzzles thrown out by recent experience. I showed (here) that it offers an alternative explanation of the monetary transmission  mechanism, one that outperforms the new-Keynesian alternative, and I argue (here) that active stabilization of financial markets offers an alternative approach to traditional fiscal policy as a means of maintaining full employment.

If Keynes were alive today, one thing is certain; he would not be a Keynesian in the sense in which that term is used today. Keynes was notorious for changing his views on a daily basis and was said to be capable of holding several conflicting opinions at the same time. Would he be a neo-paleo-Keynesian? Who knows?  What seems certain, to me, is that existing ideas have failed us.  For me, that’s enough to try something new. 

---

[1] I am not the only one that is seeking a return to paleo-Keynesian ideas. Others I would place in this category include Stephanie Schmitt Grohé and Martín Uribe (here) who drop classical principles of market clearing and return to the Keynesian concept of involuntary unemployment.  Narayana Kocherlakota constructs (here) a model of incomplete factor markets, Greg Kaplan and Guido Menzio (here) combine search in the labor market with search in the product markets and Pascal Michaillat and Emmanuel Saez (here) takes prices as parametric. All of these papers are examples of multiple steady state equilibria.

¿Y a mí qué si hay vida en otros planetas?

Me está empezando a cansar hasta el hartazgo la búsqueda de un planeta en que haya vida. ¿Qué tipo de vida? animal, vegetal, mineral? no sé, pero lo que quieren sugerir es vida humana, lo cual es francamente imposible. 

Para ello recurro a "Sapiens", que es mi Biblia en estos asuntos. La especie humana, homo sapiens, ha tenido un historia nada ejemplar desde que hace relativamente poco empezó a andar y articular un lenguaje. El Sapiens, desde sus primeros vahídos, fue un animal que se valió de su inteligencia y sagacidad para obtener su sustento. Para ello, nos cuente Harari el autor, mientras fue cazador recolector, arrasaba un territorio hasta dejarlo exhausto y se marchaba tan fresco en busca de otro. Por ejemplo, algo que deberían saber los ecologistas a la violeta de hoy: cuando descubrió el fuego, descubrió también que si quemaba un bosque, los animales se cazaban más fácilmente. 

Durante toda su historia el sapiens ha sido un depredador, tanto del medio ambiente como de sus habitantes, y tan sólo El Progreso técnico ha evitado que el proceso de elaboración y consumo se parara. Gracias a él, las materias primas no se han agotado hasta ahora. 

Así que que me temo que si alguien está interesado en descubrir vida en Marte es porque, aparte deponerse la medalla,  para poder cobrar una bonita renta que le pagará el Cristobal Colón o Hernán Cortés que vaya a la conquista de ese nuevo mundo. 

Porque lo que enseña Sapiens, es que  la ciencia nunca ha sido desinteresada y pura, ni ética. Ni no ética. No lo es porque no puede. Primero, porque alguien, estados, capitales, la han de pagar. Y se apropian de ella. Segundo, la ciencia obtiene valoración de lo que hace desde fuera a ella. La ciencia crea nuevos caminos de conocimiento de la naturaleza, pero el uso de lo que descubre puede ser bueno o malo para la humanidad, y nuca se sabe con certeza. Se hacen razonamientos curiosos ara justificar la guerra, el armamento, la investigación que lleva a mejorarlo incesantemente. Que hay gente "mala", que a su vez nos repudia y hace lo mismo, armas y bombas, todo en nombre de una ética laica o de una religión, que da lo mismo. 

Así que no creo que la búsqueda de un planeta habitado sea desinteresado. Nuestra especie, nuestros genes, no son desinteresados. Quien lo dice es hipócrita. Si fuera verdad lo del planeta, al final sería más bien un motivo de nueva expansión bélica del hombre, ser que necesita constantemente horizontes que le impulsen a la conquista. 

Lo bueno del capitalismo es que ese impulso se había desviado hacia la conquista del beneficio, lo que es productivo para todos, dentro de un orden institucional adecuado. Como decía el otro día en "El legado de Adam Smith", fue una revolución que el hombre creyera en el futuro y el progreso, conquistas militares se convirtieran en la conquista del futuro, de paso acabando con el hambre, la pobreza, el desclasamiento. 

Así que  el descubrimiento desatará un impulso nuevo, que no sabemos, nunca lo hemos sabido, si será de consecuencias buenas o malas. Damos por sabido que el descubrimiento de la agricultura fue bueno, pero Harari demuestra que el hombre pasó a alimentarse peor y a sufrir desnutrición dependiendo de la cosecha, que por su parte era deficiente en nutrientes básicos como la carne. Todos tendemos a pensar que lo pasado es bueno, que no había otro camino, ya que hemos llegado hasta aquí y creemos que no puede ser mejor, salvo reivindicaciones materiales y seudo morales por las que siempre nos quejamos, porque creemos que la vida es elásticamente memorable. Pero eso son frustraciones individuales fruto de la envidia de los que lo hacen mejor. 

Sí, tendemos a pensar que hasta aquí hemos venido por un camino recto sin alternativas, cuando la verdad es que no sabemos a donde hubiéramos llegado sin nuestros impulsos depredadores. Así que no creo que un nuevo planeta habitado fuera una buena cosa sin mal alguno. Simplemente una oportunidad de expansión como lo fueron los descubrimientos de nuevas tierras. Expansión que no fue bien para todos los implicados, reconozcámoslo. 

¿Qué la consista del Nuevo Mundo vino acompañada de descubrimientos científicos y técnicos  extraordinarios? Precisamente. Los descubrimientos nacen por que a alguien le interesa explotarlos, y paga por ellos, a Colón la brújula, al gobierno USA el proyecto Manhattan, y así. El paquete ciencia-militar-capital va siempre unido, nos guste o no. 

Algunas paradojas y misterios surgidos en la economía post crisis

La crisis fue como una marejada que se llevó al fondo del mar una buena parte de nuestra riqueza. Los trabajos de recuperación han sido encomiables, pero lo que nos han devuelto no es exactamente los que teníamos. 

Teníamos una economía que, se creía, funcionaba sola. El Banco Central sólo tenía que ocuparse de mantener la inflación moderada, tanto al alza como a la baja (un 2% se consideraba lo óptimo). Los mercados funcionaban: el financiero medía bien sus riesgos en los que incurría, por su propio interés. El mercado de bienes, cuanto más competencia albergara mejor. De ahí una alta estimación de la globalización, que presionaba a la baja los precios internos. El mercado de trabajo, cuanto menos regulado, menos paro. La Combinación Perfecta de política económica era: escasa intervención del Estado, tanto con sus impuestos como con su gasto, apertura al comercio exterior, razonable desregulación, coberturas sociales de bienes públicos (educación, sanidad, ayuda a los parados, etc), confianza en los estabilizadores fiscales automáticos, y un BC corrector de los shocks inesperados de la demanda. Era lo que se llamaba "The Great Moderation". Funcionó bien una década, en la que todos se felicitaban por no haber soportado una recesión en diez años, hasta la de 2000. La facilidad con la que se salió de ella permitió que todo el mundo siguiera engañado con lo que había en el sótano. 

En el sótano había unos riesgos financieros cada vez más enormes. El apalancamiento llegó a su máximo histórico, pero nadie lo quería ver. Se daba por sabido que el crecimiento permitiría crear unos activos más altos que la torre de deuda. 

La crisis llegó, y hubo que recapitular. Se recapituló. Desenterraron a un oscuro economista keynesiano, Minsky, que había predicho que cuando la economía parece estable, las finanzas se hinchan de confianza y acaban descabalgando. El paradigma de la "Great Moderation" (que no es más que el modelo de unos monetaristas que se llamaban Neokeynesianos: renuncio a explicar esta contradicción), empezó a craquelarse. 

Mientras, había que recuperar lo que se podía del fondo del mar, y se trabajó duro. EEUU con más éxito que Europa, porque ésta descubrió que lo que había forjado estaba bien para la ilusión de la "Great Moderation", pero que no se había dotado de instrumentos potentes para hacer lo que hacía EEUU. 

Sin embargo, EEUU, aunque recuperó una cierta similitud, lo que había rescatado no era igual a lo que había. La política de recuperación de la vieja normalidad -política esencialmente monetaria- no trajo esa normalidad, sino un sistema de incentivos diametralmente distintos. La abundancia de liquidez y los bajos tipos de interés no incentivaron la inversión, sino que se desplegaron nuevos incentivos que nadie entiende bien y que suscitan el temor de que lleven a la acumulación de nuevos desequilibrios financieros. La economía es en su mayor parte incentivos, y que estos sean correctos o incorrectos deciden que la economía vaya bien o mal.  

Hoy se asiste a una dislocación de los incentivos, lo que se aprecia en dos fenómenos que son dos caras de una misma moneda. 

1) La impotencia creciente de los Bancos Centrales para cumplir sus promesas de elevar la inflación. 2) El misterio del embalsamiento de la liquidez en un círculo vicioso que no llega a la economía real. 

Los BC, al surgir la crisis, tuvieron que hacer frente al posible colapso de la banca mundial. Hubiera sido tremendo. La caída total de la confianza en las instituciones financieras hubiera implicado una deflación, un paro, y seguramente una hambruna mundial, mucho más graves que la de la Gran Depresión. Eso se evitó. 

Luego, a los bancos centrales se les encomendó que revivieran la actividad económica, según el modelo Monetarista: la inyección masiva de liquidez sería suficiente para que los tipos de interés bajaran e incentivaron la inversión, más contando con la ayuda de una subida de la inflación, que redundaría en tipos de interés reales más bajos. 

No ha funcionado. Mejor dicho, ha fracasado, y además, los bancos centrales ya no brillan a los ojos de los políticos y del público como esa superpotencia que podía con las fuerzas depresivas. Es verdad que en EEUU hay una  recuperación, pero muy floja, porque la inversión ha brillado por su ausencia. La inflación desde luego no ha aparecido, y amenaza con bajar más, como demuestra James Hamilton en su blog: las expectativas de inflación, medidas de tres formas diferentes, han bajado respecto al 2015.

 

 

Caeteris paribus, menor inflación significa menores márgenes empresariales. Esto es un reflejo más de que la política monetaria expansiva apenas ha llegado a la economía real. 

¿Entonces, donde se ha quedado? En primer lugar, en los depósitos que la banca tiene en su BC. De ahí la medida de tipos negativos a esos depósitos, para forzar a la banca a que busque rentabilidad positiva en la inversión productiva (ya expresé mis dudas sobre lao tipos negativos). Pero ésta no despunta: ni las empresas se endeudan para invertir, ni la banca, maniatada por la nueva regulación y recapitalización, pies dejar de exigir garantías y tipos de interés inalcanzables para muchos. 

El segundo lugar, como dice El-Erian en su libro, la empresas tienen grandes bolsas de liquidez que usan para colocaciones financieras, no equipamiento. 

En otras palabras, los BC, con su política de inyecciones masivas, y su miedo a provocar volatilidad, han creado una drogodependencia de les empresas y las finanzas, a quienes sólo les ocupa lo que hace el BC. Éste, a su vez, temeroso de caer en otra castastrofe, juega a moderar la volatilidad, lo que da una falsa seguridad de falta de riesgo. Los bajos tipos interés han ayudado a elevar los mercados, y estos se han hecho dependientes: cualquier anuncio del la FED de poner el freno suavemente, podría desencadenar un desmorone sistémico. 

Queda la esperanza de que tanta líquidez, y unos beneficios muy elevados, acaben por "aterrizar" en la inversión real. Pero se está eternizando esa esperanza. El-Erian,

While acknowledging the risks inherent in a policy approach that excessively decouples financial asset prices from fundamentals, defenders of prolonged reliance on unconventional monetary measures point to three potential mitigating factors: an economic liftoff (also known as the attainment of “escape velocity”), where rapid growth would validate what previously were artificially high asset prices; effective “macro-prudential” measures that contain the spillover from excessive risk taking; and, should both fail, a stronger financial architecture and new tools to clean up the financial mess without much contamination to the real economy. Chair Yellen eloquently spoke to these issues

(Europa no ha llegado a esa fase, como nos cuentan nuestros maestros del Chart en Inbestia: los beneficios no han llegado, quizás porque el BCE empezó más tarde.)

En suma, estamos en un sistema de incentivos cuyo mapa no conocemos bien, y por lo tanto no hay un GPS fiable. La crisis no sólo ha destrozado economías y torcido vidas: ha acabado con los modelos fiables.

 

Patrón oro, Gran Depresión, proteccionismo

En The Slide to Protectionism in the Great Depression: Who Succumbed and Why? De Eichengreen & Al, encontramos una excelente narración de lo que pasó en el desastroso periodo de entreguerras, narración que permite aclarar y ordenar la catarata de decisiones erróneas que colapsaron la economía mundial en lo que se conoció como la Gran Depresión. El documento es muy interesante por cuanto lo que circulan por España entre los profesionales son explicaciones parciales, mal articuladas, y basada en los dogmas y mitos de la escuela a la que se cree pertenecer. 

Así, una de las versiones de la GD es la de los austriacos, para los que el patrón oro no jugó ninguna papel nocivo, al revés: fue su abandono lo que causó la crisis. 
Tampoco es cierto otro error muy común, que fue la hiperinflación la que hundió a Alemania. La hiperinflación se acabó cuando Alemania se adhirió al patrón oro en 1924... Lo que le provocó una gran deflación, una dislocación mucho mayor de su economía. No fue la hiperinflación lo que hizo ganar las eleciomes a Hitler en 1933... 
Otra de las versiones trivializadas es la de que fue auge del proteccionismo el causante de la GD. El artículo demuestra que el proteccionismo vino después que la GD. 
Este artículo tiene la virtud de colocar cada una de estas versiones parciales en orden correlativo, de modo que se puede apreciar qué fue lo importante y lo que fue subsidiario en la GD. De él selecciono la parte narrativa, obviando la parte empírica que el lector puede seguir en el original. 

El argumento básico es que la crisis monetaria que causó el patrón oro fue la que tuvo como consecuencia posterior el auge del proteccionismo, una vez que uno de los países pilares del sistema, Gran Bretaña, decidió abandonar el patrón oro en 1931. En 1933 le siguió EEUU. Es decir, las medidas contingentes o tarifarias a las importaciones, o bien su alternativa, el control de salida de capitales, fueron medidas de "retaliation" de los países que no quisieron abandonar el corsé del oro. 

Pero la causa de la crisis fue monetaria, una  contracción mundial del dinero en circulación de la que fue culpable el patrón oro, al exigir de sacrificio en su altar una recesión y deflación brutal  los paises miembros. 

... What accounts for the cross-country variation in the use of protectionist measures? We argue the exchange rate regime and associated economic policies were key determinants of trade policies in the early 1930s. Countries that remained on the gold standard, keeping their currencies fixed, were more likely to restrict foreign trade. With other countries devaluing and gaining competitiveness at their expense, they resorted to protectionist policies to strengthen the balance of payments and limit gold losses. Lacking other instruments, notably an independent monetary policy with which to address the deepening slump, they used trade restrictions to shift demand toward domestic goods and, they hoped, stem the rise in unemployment.

In contrast, countries that abandoned the gold standard, allowing their currencies to depreciate, saw their balances of payments strengthen. They gained gold rather than losing it. Abandoning the gold standard also freed up monetary policy. With no gold parity to defend, interest rates could be cut. No longer constrained by the gold standard, central banks had more freedom to act as lenders of last resort. Because they possessed other policy instruments with which to ameliorate the Depression, they were not forced to resort to trade protection as a second-best macroeconomic tool...

El sistema de pagos ligado al oro del periodo de entreguerras nació lastrado por el empeño de rehabilitar las paridades oficiales de antes de la Primera Guerra Mundial, lo que adolecía de falta absoluta de realismo: las economías había salido de la guerra tocadas de manera muy diferente, y además, a las potencias perdedoras se les había cargado con indemnizaciones de guerra utópicas. Para colmo, la oferta total de oro estaba muy desigualmente distribuida, lo que agrandaba las diferencias de capacidad financiera. 

... Unfortunately, the interwar gold-exchange standard was less robust than its prewar predecessor. Governments largely resurrected the prewar pattern of exchange rates despite the fact that relative financial strength and competitive positions had changed as a result of the war. Old gold parities were restored without lowering price levels to prewar levels, resulting in a lower ratio of the value of gold to nominal transactions. The remaining gold was unevenly distributed, with some 60 per cent in the hands of the United States and France.

Esas debilidades se intentaron compensar con un sistema más flexible, en el que el $ y la £ podían usarse como reserva a la par que el oro. Eso obligaba doblemente a EEUU y GB a ser más escrupulosos con su gestión monetaria, aunque, reiteradamente, esa seriedad era cuestionada. 

While the resulting gold shortage was addressed by encouraging the more widespread use of foreign exchange reserves, this heightened the fragility of the system. The willingness of countries to hold foreign exchange was only as strong as the commitment of the reserve-center countries, the United States and Britain, to honor their commitments to convert their liabilities into gold at a fixed price. If those commitments were called into question, there might be a scramble out of foreign exchange, putting sharp deflationary pressure on the world economy And the credibility of those commitments was now less than before World War I. Whether central banks would subordinate other objectives to defending their gold parities was called into question by democratization, the rise of trade unions, and growing awareness of the problem of unemployment. If they wished to maintain investor confidence, central banks could not now show any inclination to deviate from the gold standard rules.

Finalmente, la decisiva cooperación que hubo entre los principales bancos centrales, antes de la guerra, no fue posible, por razones obvias, después de ésta. 

Finally, the international cooperation that had helped to support the prewar system, allowing countries in crisis to continue to adhere to gold parities, was more difficult in the aftermath of a war that had bequeathed ill will, war debts, and reparations. 

Estos motivos determinaron la incapacidad del sistema para hacer frente al primer choque de la GD. En cuanto se agudizó la desconfianza en el $ y la £, estos países se vieron obligados a subir los tipos de interés para frenar las salidas de oro, lo que amplificó el primer choque, los primeros temblores de los mercados. Una jugada especialmente maligna fue la de Francia, que para no perder oro devaluó su paridad, recuperó competitividad y volvió a recibir entradas de oro, oro que guardada en el BF sin monetizarlo. El efecto fue una contracción aún  mayor de la liquidez mundial. 

For all these reasons, the interwar gold standard was incapable of withstanding the shock of the Great Depression.5 The system immediately came under strain with the economic slowdown and recession that began in 1928-29. The trigger for this downturn continues to be debated, although recent accounts have highlighted the decision by the Federal Reserve Board to tighten monetary policy and the French decisions to de jure stabilize the franc at a depreciated rate and to convert holdings of foreign exchange reserves into gold, all in 1928 (Hamilton 1987, Eichengreen 1992, Johnson 1997). These policies drained gold from the rest of the world and required other countries to pursue more restrictive monetary policies. 

La causa del colapso del comercio mundial fue la crisis financiera de 1931, desatada en Austria.

The spark that caused the world trading system to collapse was the financial crisis in the summer of 1931.11 The failure of the largest Austrian bank, the Creditanstalt, unsettled financial markets and caused capital flows to seize up. The German government depended on foreign loans to finance its expenditures, and the drying up of those loans triggered a run on the mark and a loss of gold reserves (Ferguson and Temin 2003, Temin 2008). The government was forced to impose strict controls on foreign exchange transactions. In theory Germany could have devalued, but the reparations agreement fixed its obligation in dollars of constant gold content. This meant that devaluing would have had devastating effects on the public finances. In any case memories of hyperinflation when the gold standard was in abeyance meant that abandoning the system would have unleashed a collective hysteria.12 To limit losses of gold and foreign exchange reserves, Germany therefore imposed controls on capital movements as well as trade finance. Hungary was hit, since its financial system was tied to Austria’s; it imposed controls in July 1931. Other countries such as Chile, which was battered by declining copper prices, followed with controls of their own...

...  In August the pressure spread to Britain as trade credits extended to Germany by British merchant banks were frozen.13 A sharp increase in interest rates did little to stem the Bank of England’s gold losses. Against the backdrop of rising unemployment which rendered the Bank reluctant to raise interest rates further, the need for lender-of-last-resort intervention now tipped the balance. On September 19, Britain abandoned the gold standard and allowed sterling to depreciate.

That depreciation sent shockwaves through the world economy. Other countries either followed Britain off gold or imposed restrictions on trade and payments as a defensive measure to reduce imports and strengthen the balance of payments. Within days, other countries with close trade and financial ties to Britain -- Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden among them - - allowed their currencies to depreciate relative to gold. Japan, concluding that its recent resumption of gold convertibility had been a mistake, followed in December...

Una vez empezada l "huid del oro", los paises que se quedaron tenían pocas alternativa vas para evitar la contracción. O bi n limitar o penalizar las importaciones, o bien controlar la salida decapitales. 

... Thus, in the midst of the global depression, countries that remained on the gold standard sought to improve their balance of payments position and preserve their gold and foreign exchange reserves. This could be achieved either by limiting capital exports through exchange controls (Germany) or by limiting spending on imports through trade restrictions (France), or both. In fact, such policies were substitute for one another. If exchange controls were comprehensive, they could be administered in a manner that left no need for additional measures such as tariffs or quotas. Import licensing and government allocation of foreign exchange meant that officials could determine the total amount of spending on imports and allocate that spending across different goods and country suppliers. Therefore, a country imposing exchange controls might not have to resort to higher tariffs and quotas because it already had the ability to limit imports through administrative action....

...  If countries remaining on the gold standard raised trade barriers as a result of their inability to resort to other more conventional policies to stabilize their economies and financial systems, it follows that countries should have begun relaxing their trade restrictions once they abandoned gold. There is evidence of this. In 1934, a year after the United States went off gold, Congress enacted the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act authorizing the president to reduce U.S. import duties in trade agreements with other countries. Within four years, the agreements reached under the act had essentially undone the Smoot-Hawley tariff increase (Irwin 1998).

Una vez abandonado el patrón oro por lo países más importantes, estos pudieron relajar sus medidas tarifarias y de control de pagos,

Similarly, once the remaining gold bloc countries devalued in September 1936 and started recovering from the slump, they began removing some of their trade barriers. League of Nations (1942, 85) noted that “Before the end of October 1936, tariff reductions and/or quota relaxations had been announced in France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Latvia.” For example, having devalued in September, France reduced its tariffs by 15-20 per cent the next month, and Switzerland reduced many of its import tariffs by more than 50 per cent.46 Relaxing the gold constraint and pursuing more expansionary monetary policies relieved the pressure to maintain restrictive trade policies. On the other hand, countries imposing exchange controls never formally abandoned the gold standard and consequently continued to restrict trade through such controls for the rest of the decade... 

Conclusions

 ... Our account helps explain why some countries were more inclined than others to a protectionist response and lends structure to the otherwise chaotic tale of the collapse of world trade. It suggests that had more countries been willing to abandon the gold standard and use monetary policy to counter the slump, fewer would have been driven to impose trade restrictions in the desperate if ultimately futile effort to stem the rise in unemployment...