Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Krugman discovers incompetent governments are unknowlingly competent!

Krugman is back on this hidden fiscal multiplier affect from government spending. let's define the fiscal multiplier.  Says the web:
In economics, the fiscal multiplier (not to be confused with monetary multiplier) is the ratio of a change in national income to the change in government spending that causes it.
Correct? Who knows, likely one of several definitions. lets go with it. On what part of the national income are taxes collected?  Where does government get the money to spend? Well, at equilibrium, rates match growth and for all practical purposes, all of the money spent is from taxes, at net present value.  The catch is that government have to match term length and the path of gains. No Keynesian has a clue about how to do this.

Greece:

So, then, on what basis does the IMF concludes the fiscal multiplier in Greece is 1.3?  They conclude simply, that governments around the world are simply ignorant of this fantastic deal on government spending.   This is Olivier Blanchard and  bad analysis. They review some four or five studies all of which conclude that most nations are completely unaware of this apparent profit.  All of the studies are studies of mostly developed nations under varying conditions.  The study discovers government managers who missed the boat on government investment decisions.

First, the Keynesian hedge claim on manipulated rates:

Keynesians will claim there is an inherent hedge for governments that can control interest rates via the central banks, but this is highly dubious given that we have a derivative industry devoted to matching prices and rates, and this industry has insurance contracts on some 80 trillion o the world economy. About every 40 years government have to restructure the monetary regime because this hedge is nonexistent, its a myth. I talked about Italy. One economist claims the ECB can reduce nominal rates. But deflation adjusted rates in Italy are set at pnet present value and equilibriated.

Back to Greece:

So Greece will pay real rates, say rates equal to growth.  If the new government in Greece gains a 30 percent gain in taxes for its spending then it is out of the woods, right?  Sure, as long as the pay off period is shorter then their lending terms.  Greece pays 9% today on ten year debt.  Most governments have a planning period of ten years, hence the ten year bond is almost always the benchmark. In the USA we have basically paid the ten year rate on all debt for the last 30 years.  If Greece's problems can be fixed within a ten year term then Greece would never have had this problem, except for one thing, according to Blanchard, Greek politicians are simply unaware of this fantastic deal!

Keynesians analysis failure:

It is impossible for so many, in fact the majority, of developed nations to have government managers are are both obviously incompetent and accidentally competent.  How is it that Italy failed to realize that they should have debt of 200% of GDP, like Japan, instead of 132% of GDP? How does Krugman make this stupid claim that Italy really needs to snooker Germany into a bigger investment in Italy?  Why hasn't Krugman discovered that Germany with debt to GDP of 80% of GDP is missing out on a great opportunity?

MIT has been generating crap for 20 years. Blanchard is from MIT, the physicists are MIT still believe the Big Bang theory, they still think every finite element of the vacuum has absolutely perfect knowledge of Pi,e, and Phi. The only thinkg good out of MIT recently has been their mathematicians working on Bell Curve filtering, and even there they have not yet learned their Schramm-Loewner.




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