Economic policy uncertainty and political polarisation in the USA

John van Reenen, Nicholas Bloom, Scott Bakerand Steven Davis produced these nice charts for the LSE blog:

The 90th Congress of 1967-68 showed a considerable overlap in voting patterns between Democrats and Republicans along liberal and conservative issues allowing the possibility of more compromise. But there was essentially no voting overlap by the 100th Congress of 2007-08.

The Reserve Bank Governor (2013) versus the Labour Party on whether its monetary policy upgrade will increase the inflation rate and destabilise the exchange rate

Attempts to keep the dollar from going “too high” would have ruinous domestic consequences as the Governor of the Reserve Bank explained last year:

If New Zealand decided to cap the NZ dollar, depending on where the cap is enforced, similar levels of intervention might be required as global foreign exchange turnover in NZ dollars relative to GDP is similar to that in Swiss francs.

The OCR would need to drop to zero first in order to eliminate the interest arbitrage motivation for NZ dollar inflows. Any attempt to retain non-zero interest rates by “sterilising” such massive intervention would be very difficult.

In effect therefore a Swiss type operation to cap the value of the NZ dollar through large scale FX intervention would also amount to quantitative easing. As I mentioned, this would be highly inflationary in the NZ context.

Graeme Wheeler, Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand

20 February 2013

Manufacturing decline not just a dollar story A speech delivered to the New Zealand Manufacturers and Exporters Association in Auckland

Sterilised interventions in the foreign exchange market are a fool’s errand

If exchange rate manipulation had any chance of working, the U.S. Fed, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan would be all over it already. Their mutual efforts to depreciate their own currencies would cancel out.

Most central banks gave up on exchange rate interventions in the mid-1990s because attempts to manipulate exchange rates without loosening monetary policy rarely worked.  Brute experience taught them that they were on fool’s errand.

These exchange rate interventions, known as sterilised interventions, become an independent source of exchange rate instability and invite counter-speculation by currency traders and hedge funds. Every hint that a central bank might intervene in the exchange rate invites currency speculation. As Milton Friedman said:

The central problem is not designing a highly sensitive [monetary] instrument that offsets instability introduced by other factors [in the economy], but preventing monetary arrangements becoming a primary source of instability…

By trying to move the value of the dollar, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand will add its own element of currency instability and invite counter speculation by currency traders and hedge funds. This is a dangerous game for a small Reserve Bank to play.

As stated by Paul Krugman in 1999 on the concept of the impossible trinity: free capital movement, a fixed exchange rate, and an effective monetary policy –

The point is that you can’t have it all: A country must pick two out of three.

It can fix its exchange rate without emasculating its central bank, but only by maintaining controls on capital flows (like China today); it can leave capital movement free but retain monetary autonomy, but only by letting the exchange rate fluctuate (like Britain – or Canada); or it can choose to leave capital free and stabilize the currency, but only by abandoning any ability to adjust interest rates to fight inflation or recession (like Argentina today or for that matter most of Europe).

Exchange rate manipulation by the Reserve Bank cannot alter the competiveness of exporters. The looser monetary policy will inevitably lead to higher CPI inflation that will erode any temporary advantage to exporters from the initial depreciation of the NZ dollar.

What did the Swiss do to keep their exchange rate down in the GFC?

Labour’s Monetary Policy Upgrade referred to the efforts of the Swiss National Bank to cap a massive appreciation of the Swiss Franc after 2009 and the Euroland sovereign debt crisis:

The Swiss have actively protected their currency from appreciating to the detriment of their tradeable sector (p.16)

The Swiss National Bank stemmed the rise of Swiss franc by loosening their monetary policy as they say so themselves:

The Swiss National Bank has successfully maintained its exchange-rate floor against the euro, often through heavy nonsterilized purchases of foreign exchange (Swiss National Bank Annual Report, 2012, p. 34).

These non-sterilised exchange rate interventions were a loosening of Swiss monetary policy. The Swiss National Bank happens to be one of a number of central banks that conduct their monetary policies by buying and selling in the foreign exchange markets.

Labour’s aim of a positive external balance through a tightening of monetary policy is a repeat of the fool-hardy policies of the Hawke-Keating government in the late 1980s.

1988 witnessed a major monetary policy tightening in Australia. The tightening was motivated by a current account deficit rather than double-digit inflation:

  • The inflation rate fell to below 3% in 1991.
  • The current account did not change much as a result of the deep recession and 10%+ unemployment rate designed to bring it under control.

The current account deficit as a major policy problem was then quietly forgotten in Australia.

Three conflicting monetary policy objectives

The New Zealand Labour Party wants the Reserve Bank to do three impossible things before breakfast:

  1. Loosen monetary policy to bring the dollar down such as in Switzerland after 2009;
  2. Tighten monetary policy to reduce the current account deficit such as in Australia after 1988; and
  3. Loosen and tighten monetary policy as required to stay within the inflation target.

The best contribution of monetary policy to the competitive positions of exporters is low inflation.

image

Inflation targeting removes monetary policy as in independent source of exchange rate instability. Attempts to manipulate the exchange rate undermines the inflation target that has been such a great success since 1989, and reduces the commitment of public policy to a stable, predictable business climate. Bordo and Humpage add:

…sterilised foreign-exchange intervention can sometimes affect exchange-rate movements, but sterilised intervention does not provide central banks with a mechanism for systematically altering exchange rates independent of their monetary policies.

Attempts to stabilise or undervalue exchange rates necessarily weaken a country’s control of its monetary policy and ultimately leave the real exchange rate unaffected.

What really matters?

Labour’s monetary policy upgrade is a distraction from the only game in town for the future prosperity of New Zealanders:

Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker.

Paul Krugman

The Age of Diminishing Expectations (1994)

 

David Hume on the long and variable lags on monetary policy

The Keynesian vision of macroeconomic policy

A market economy is subject to fluctuations which need to be corrected, can be corrected, and therefore should be corrected

Franco Modiglani

Milton Friedman’s vision is far more circumspect because of the limits on the information people have and their ability to update that information. His critique has nothing to do with his views on macroeconomics:

The central problem is not designing a highly sensitive [monetary] instrument that offsets instability introduced by other factors [in the economy], but preventing monetary arrangements becoming a primary source of instability…

Keynesians have a host of metaphors in their rhetorical arsenal; one frequently voiced is that a wise government should “lean against the wind” when choosing policy. Friedman jumped on this:

We seldom know which way the economic wind is blowing until several months after the event, yet to be effective, we need to know which way the wind is going to be blowing when the measures we take now will be effective, itself a variable date that may be a half year or a year or two from now. Leaning today against next year’s wind is hardly an easy task in the present state of meteorology

Friedman’s remarks, as even his strong critics admit, strike at the heart of any activist stabilisation policy. By meeting Keynesians on their own theoretical turf and scrutinising their practice, Friedman manages to produce objections that both Keynesians and non-Keynesians must take seriously.

A key part of any response to Friedman rests on the ability of forecasters to do their jobs with tolerable accuracy. After reading the annual reports of the Fed, Milton Friedman noticed the following pattern:

In the years of prosperity, monetary policy is a potent weapon, the skilful handling of which deserves the credit for the favourable course of events; in years of adversity, other forces are the important sources of economic change, monetary policy had little leeway, and only the skilful handling of the exceedingly limited powers available prevented conditions from being even worse

Central banks pay due to the implications of the leads and lags  on monetary policy only as an ex-post facto rationalisation for disappointment.

Brad Delong and Larry Summers on the ineffectiveness of fiscal policy in stimulating the economy

Image

If there is such a thing as a liquidity trap, bring it on!

In the Keynesian pipedream, in a liquidity trap, there is perfect substitutability of money and bonds at a zero short-term nominal interest rate. This renders monetary policy ineffective.

Keynesians claim that the demand for money may be so persistently high that the rate of interest could not fall low enough to stimulate investment sufficiently to raise the economy out of the depression. Allan Meltzer explains:

A liquidity trap means that increases in money by the central bank (monetary base) cannot affect output, prices, interest rates or other variables. Changes in the money stock are entirely matched by changes in the demand to hold money.

With a liquidity trap, the public simply hoards the money the central bank creates rather than attempting to run down additions to their cash balances with increased consumer expenditure. This limitless accumulation of money by the public is not a real world phenomenon. The public will not forever accumulate money.

Auerbach and Obstfeld noted in "The Case for Open-Market Purchases in a Liquidity Trap" that to the extent that long-term interest rates are positive short-term interest rates are expected to be positive in the future, trading money for interest-bearing public debt through open market operations reduces future debt-service requirements.

  • A massive monetary expansion during a liquidity trap should improve social welfare by reducing the taxes required in the future to service the now much smaller national debt!!!!
  • A quantitative easing during a liquidity trap is, in effect, as good as or even better than a lump sum tax.

Central banks perhaps should contrive liquidity traps because they can then buy back the public debt because of the unlimited demand for money.

The logic of the liquidity trap is people will without limit give up bonds for non-interest bearing cash. If monetary policy is impotent near the zero bound, the central bank should buy trillions of dollars of federal bonds and payoff the public debt. This is a logical implication of liquidity traps for an optimal fiscal policy!!!! Is my reasoning wrong?

In addition to D.H. Robertson, Jacob Viner, Milton Friedman, Philip Cagan, Don Patinkin, Auerbach and Obstfeld, Robert H. Lucas, Greg Mankiw, and Bernanke and Blinder as sceptics about a liquidity trap, Keynes wrote in 1936:

Whilst the limiting case might become practically important in future, I know of no example of it hitherto. Indeed, owing to the unwillingness of most monetary authorities to deal boldly in debts of long term, there has not been much opportunity for a test.

Meltzer, who wrote A History of the Federal Reserve, Vol. 1: 1913-1951 points to several periods when interest rates were at or close to zero:

“In 1954, interest rates were 0.5 percent or below, and we had no problem recovering,” he says. “In 1948 to 1949, we had zero interest rates. Also in 1937 to 1938. We had no problem recovering.”

The Pigou effect states that when there is deflation of prices, employment (and output) will be increased due to an increase in wealth (and thus consumption). The deflation increases the value of cash balances and therefore the wealth of consumers. They spend some of this additional wealth.

After reading the annual reports of the Fed in the 1920s and 1930s, Milton Friedman noticed the following pattern:

In the years of prosperity, monetary policy is a potent weapon, the skilful handling of which deserves the credit for the favourable course of events; in years of adversity, other forces are the important sources of economic change, monetary policy had little leeway, and only the skilful handling of the exceedingly limited powers available prevented conditions from being even worse

Repeat after me: fiscal policy is ineffective when there is a flexible exchange rate!

New Zealand, Australia, and most other economies are small open economies. Any expansion in the budget deficit will drive up the exchange rate because of the higher interest rates. This appreciation of the local currency in response to the capital inflow will make imports cheaper. Any increase in so-called aggregate demand will simply result in an decrease in net exports. There will be no increase in local production or employment.

IS-LM-BP-Perfect capital mobility-Flexible exchange rate-Fiscal policy

 

  1. a fiscal expansion puts upward pressure on the domestic interest rate
  2. But this immediately invites a massive capital inflow.
  3. This appreciates the nominal exchange rate.
  4. This will decrease net exports, since we are able to import more goods and services with less money  because of the currency appreciation, while foreigners will import less of our products because of our appreciated domestic currency
  5. The exchange rate appreciates and the trade balance worsens until the initial increase in government spending is completely offset.

Under a floating exchange rate and high capital mobility, fiscal policy is ineffective in stimulating the economy because of exchange rate crowding out. The appreciating exchange rate will increase imports and reduce exports to render fiscal policy impotent or at least to shadow of its former closed economies self.

Euroland is presented by progressives as the type of mixed economies they prefer and larger governments they want

The OECD countries with persistently high unemployment rate are the European welfare states – about double figures for 2 decades or more now. The reality is progressive politics pits workers against worker, and the middle-class against the poor and rich with the progressives cheering for the middle-class.

Euroland has a labour aristocracy – a two-tier system with ultra-secure workers with the permanent jobs and vulnerable temporary workers. The prime-age workers with the permanent jobs are pitted against the young, the unemployed and the older workers – these three groups are either locked-out or pushed-out. It took the equally worse recession in U.S. post-war history for their unemployment rates to reach the levels in Euroland in most any year out of the last 20.

Progressive solutions have been tried and they failed: a new word had to be invented to capture the resulting high unemployment rates and stagnant productivity growth from adopting progressive policies: Eurosclerosis!

Obama’s Great Recession compared

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Economists, using charts or high-speed computer models, can accurately forecast the future

crystal_ball-551x700

Many studies, formal and informal, have been made of the record of forecasting by economists, and it has been consistently abysmal.

Forecasters often complain that they can do well enough as long as current trends continue; what they have difficulty in doing is catching changes in trend. But of course there is no trick in extrapolating current trends into the near future.

You don’t need sophisticated computer models for that; you can do it better and far more cheaply by using a ruler.

The real trick is precisely to forecast when and how trends will change, and forecasters have been notoriously bad at that. No economist forecast the depth of the 1981–82 depression, and none predicted the strength of the 1983 boom.

The next time you are swayed by the jargon or seeming expertise of the economic forecaster, ask yourself this question: If he can really predict the future so well, why is he wasting his time putting out newsletters or doing consulting when he himself could be making trillions of dollars in the stock and commodity markets?

Murray Rothbard

Murray Penthouse.jpg

Milton Friedman on what presidents can do to increase the economic growth rate

First of all, I don’t think the president has a great deal to do with keeping the economy going…

I think presidents have a great deal to do with keeping the economy from growing…

I think the economy is largely independent of the government, and what keeps it going is its own internal development.

However, you can short-circuit that internal development. If you impose very high taxes, and eliminate the incentive to innovate, to improve, to take risks, and do things, you’ll kill the economy. And that’s what’s happened over and over again in other countries around the world.

Is unemployment voluntary or involuntary?

Robert Lucas in a famous 1978 paper argued that all unemployment was voluntary because involuntary unemployment was a meaningless concept. He said as follows:

The worker who loses a good job in prosperous time does not volunteer to be in this situation: he has suffered a capital loss. Similarly, the firm which loses an experienced employee in depressed times suffers an undesirable capital loss.

Nevertheless the unemployed worker at any time can always find some job at once, and a firm can always fill a vacancy instantaneously. That neither typically does so by choice is not difficult to understand given the quality of the jobs and the employees which are easiest to find.

Thus there is an involuntary element in all unemployment, in the sense that no one chooses bad luck over good; there is also a voluntary element in all unemployment, in the sense that however miserable one’s current work options, one can always choose to accept them.

I agree that we all make choices subject to constraints. To say that a choice is involuntary because it is constrained by a scarcity of job-opportunities information is to say that choices are involuntary because there is scarcity.

Alchian said there are always plenty of jobs because to suppose the contrary suggests that scarcity has been abolished. Lucas elaborated further in 1987 in Models of Business Cycles:

A theory that does deal successfully with unemployment needs to address two quite distinct problems.

One is the fact that job separations tend to take the form of unilateral decisions – a worker quits, or is laid off or fired – in which negotiations over wage rates play no explicit role.

The second is that workers who lose jobs, for whatever reason, typically pass through a period of unemployment instead of taking temporary work on the ‘spot’ labour market jobs that are readily available in any economy.

Of these, the second seems to me much the more important: it does not ‘explain’ why someone is unemployed to explain why he does not have a job with company X. After all, most employed people do not have jobs with company X either.

To explain why people allocate time to a particular activity – like unemployment – we need to know why they prefer it to all other available activities: to say that I am allergic to strawberries does not ‘explain’ why I drink coffee. Neither of these puzzles is easy to understand within a Walrasian framework, and it would be good to understand both of them better, but I suggest we begin by focusing on the second of the two.

Another way to understand unemployment is to use a device at the start of Alan Manning’s book on labour market monopsony:

What happens if an employer cuts the wage it pays its workers by one cent? Much of labour economics is built on the assumption that all existing workers immediately leave the firm as that is the implication of the assumption of perfect competition in the labour market.

In such a situation an employer faces a market wage for each type of labour determined by forces beyond its control at which any number of these workers can be hired but any attempt to pay a lower wage will result in the complete inability to hire any of them at all

Suppose workers offered to work for 1 cent. Would employers accept? Many do because they have intern and work experience programmes for students, but is this result of general application?

Understanding the reallocation of labour at the end of the recession requires careful attention to the 1980s writing of Alchian on the theory of the firm. Alchian and Woodward’s 1987 ‘Reflections on a theory of the firm’ says:

… the notion of a quickly equilibrating market price is baffling save in a very few markets. Imagine an employer and an employee. Will they renegotiate price every hour, or with every perceived change in circumstances?

If the employee is a waiter in a restaurant, would the waiter’s wage be renegotiated with every new customer? Would it be renegotiated to zero when no customers are present, and then back to a high level that would extract the entire customer value when a queue appears?

… But what is the right interval for renegotiation or change in price? The usual answer ‘as soon as demand or supply changes’ is uninformative.

Alchian and Woodward then go on to a long discussion of the role of protecting composite quasi-rents from dependent resources as the decider of the timing of wage and price revisions.

Alchian and Woodward explain unemployment as a side-effect of the purpose of wage and price rigidity, which is the prevention of hold-ups over dependent assets. They note that unemployment cannot be understood until an adequate theory of the firm explains the type of contracts the members of a firm make with one another.

My interpretation is the majority of employment relationships are capital intensive long-term contracts. Employers spend a lot of time searching and screening applicants to find those that will stay longer. In less skilled jobs, and in spot market jobs, employers will hire the best applicant quickly because job turnover costs are low. Back to Manning again:

That important frictions exist in the labour market seems undeniable: people go to the pub to celebrate when they get a job rather than greeting the news with the shrug of the shoulders that we might expect if labour markets were frictionless. And people go to the pub to drown their sorrows when they lose their job rather than picking up another one straight away. The importance of frictions has been recognized since at least the work of Stigler (1961, 1962).

Whatever may be among these frictions, wage rigidity is not one of them. Wages are flexible for job stayers and certainly new starters.

See What can wages and employment tell us about the UK’s productivity puzzle? by Richard Blundell, Claire Crawford and Wenchao Jin showing that in the recent UK recession 12% of employees in the same job as 12 months ago experienced wage freezes and 21% of workers in the same job as 12 months ago experienced wage cuts. Their data covered 80% of workers in the New Earnings Survey Panel Dataset.

Larger firms lay off workers; smaller firms tended to reduce wages. This British data showing widespread wage cuts dates back to the 1980s. Recent Irish data also shows extensive wage cuts among job stayers.

See too Chris Pissarides (2009), The Unemployment Volatility Puzzle: Is Wage Stickiness the Answer? arguing the wage stickiness is not the answer since wages in new job matches are highly flexible:

  1. wages of job changers are always substantially more procyclical than the wages of job stayers.
  2. the wages of job stayers, and even of those who remain in the same job with the same employer are still mildly procyclical.
  3. there is more procyclicality in the wages of stayers in Europe than in the United States.
  4. The procyclicality of job stayers’ wages is sometimes due to bonuses, and overtime pay but it still reflects a rise in the hourly cost of labour to the firm in cyclical peaks

How do existing firms who will not cut wages survive in competition with new firms who can start workers on lower wages? Industries with many short term jobs and seasonal jobs would suffer less from wage inflexibility.

Robert Barro (1977) pointed out that wage rigidity matters little because workers can, for example, agree in advance that they will work harder when there is more work to do—that is, when the demand for a firm’s product is high—and work less hard when there is little work. Stickiness of nominal wage rates does not necessarily cause errors in the determination of labour and production.

The ability to make long-term wage contracts and include clauses that guard against opportunistic wage cuts should make the parties better off. Workers will not sign these contracts if they are against their interests. Employers do not offer these contracts, and offer more flexible wage packages, will undercut employers who are more rigid. Furthermore many workers are on performance pay that link there must wages to the profitability of the company.

How can downward wage rigidity be a scientific hypothesis if extensive international evidence of widespread wage cuts since the 1980s and 30%+ of the workforce on performance bonuses is not enough to refute it?

Alchian and Kessel in “The Meaning and Validity of the Inflation-Induced Lag of Wages Behind Prices,” Amer. Econ. Rev. 50 [March 1960]:43-66) tested the hypothesis that workers suffered from money illusion by comparing the rates of return to firms in capital intensive industries with those of labour intensive industries. Labour intensive industries were not more profitable than capital intensive industries. Employers in labour intensive industries should profit from the misperceptions of workers about wages and future prices, but they did not.  Alchian and Kessel found little evidence of a lag between wage and price changes.

In Canadian industries in the 1960s and 1970s, wage indexation ranged from zero to nearly 100%. Industries with little indexation should show substantial responses of real wage rates, employment and output to nominal shocks. Industries with lots of indexation would be affected little by nominal disturbances. Monetary shocks had positive effects but an industry’s response to these shocks bore no relation to the amount of indexation in the industry. Shaghil Ahmed (1987) found that those industries with lots of indexation were as likely as those with little indexation to respond to shocks.

If the signing of new wage contracts was important to wage rigidity, there should be unusual behaviour of employment and real wage rates just after these signings, but the results are mixed. Olivei and Tenreyro (2010) used the tendency of contracts to be signed at the start of years to show that monetary policy had significant effects in January but little effect in December because the effects were quickly undone.

Alchian (1969) lists three ways to adjust to unanticipated demand fluctuations:
• output adjustments;
• wage and price adjustments; and
• Inventories and queues (including reservations).

Alchian (1969) suggests that there is no reason for wage and price changes to be used regardless of the relative cost of these other options:
• The cost of output adjustment stems from the fact that marginal costs rise with output;
• The cost of price adjustment arises because uncertain prices and wages induce costly search by buyers and sellers seeking the best offer; and
• The third method of adjustment has holding and queuing costs.

There is a tendency for unpredicted price and wage changes to induce costly additional search. Long-term contracts including implicit contracts arise to share risks and curb opportunism over relationship-specific capital. These factors lead to queues, unemployment, spare capacity, layoffs, shortages, inventories and non-price rationing in conjunction with wage stability.

Are you now or have you ever been a monetarist?

The Quantity Theory of Money

Milton Friedman argued that no member of the Fed would have ever answered yes to that question.

The Schumpeterian view of business cycles

David Andolfatto argues for the Schumpeterian view of economic development where the distinction between growth and business cycles is artificial. Everyone agrees that long-run growth is the product of technological advancement. The Keynesian school views trend growth as being stable with new technologies unfolding at a smooth rate.

In the Schumpeterian view, there is no reason to believe that the process of technological advancement is smooth. It is more reasonable to suppose that new technologies appear in clusters.

There will be incremental innovations, and from time to time, grand innovations that transformed the entire economy. These grand innovations require the economy to slow down while it invests in a whole range of secondary innovations to make the most of these great new technologies. Writing workable software for new computers is an example.

These technology shocks may cause fluctuations in the growth rate through what Schumpeter called a process of creative destruction. Innovations cluster in specific industries and this generates the boom. When the cluster of innovation comes to an end in a particular sector, there is a generally increased risk of failure as old and new firms and entrepreneurs and investors adapt themselves to the new situation.

If business cycles come from innovation, they are an essential feature of economic development. They cannot be eliminated without harming innovation so we should not be too quick to smooth out the business cycle.

Technological advancements that ultimately lead to higher productivity may, in the short run, induce cyclical adjustments as the economy restructures: resources flow out from declining sectors to the expanding sectors, and people retrain and learn the next technologies and invest in the secondary innovations to make, for example, new computers to be of practical application. The first innovators will find the job a difficult one, later innovators will find things very easy, and the last to adopt the innovation will find not much to do. Faster or slower adoption of new technologies will have important implications for production, investment and consumption.

Diffusionrates

There is no guarantee that all new technologies will work out as planned. What may have looked promising may turn out to be a disappointment.

This leads to the role in news on the business cycle. Obviously, people form expectations about future technologies and invest and consume in the expectation of better or worse times ahead. They will adjust investor and consumer expectations as new information of varying and conflicting quality becomes available about technological prospects and the success of technological developments to date.

Output and employment will go up and down on the basis of these shifting expectations. These shifts in expectations are perfectly rational and are made on the basis of new information about the prospects and performance of new and existing technologies. Of course, some of these forecasts will turn out to be a disappointment and there will be a slowdown in the economy as people regroup.

The problem is not a lack of accurate forecasting by both the old and new firms. If technologies come in clusters, and are clustered in industries, there will be an above and below average number of forecasting errors with resulting consequences for business failures and new investment.

The productivity slowdown in the 1970s is attributed by some to a doubling of technology adoption costs because of the ICT revolution. This doubling in the cost of adopting new technologies was not measured as investment in the national accounts when constructing GDP data.

Boyan Jovanovic argues that the share market crash in the early 1970s may have been driven by an expectation by investors that a lot of existing capital had become obsolete because of the ICT revolution. investors wrote down the value of the companies with the soon-to-be obsolete capital and the stock-market incumbents of the day which were not ready to implement it.  Product-market entry of new firms and new capital takes time, and their stock-market entry takes even longer. In the meantime, the stock market declines.

Why do people assume the trend growth is stable? Economic growth is no more than a random collection of innovations that are adopted across the economy each year.

Does a fiscal stimulus stimulate?

 

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