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Mario Draghi's Statement: A Fistful Of Keynesian Fallacies
Submitted by Patrick Barron via Mises Canada,
From today’s Open Europe news summary:
Draghi: ECB ready to initiate QE to counter low inflation
In an interview with Handelsblatt, ECB President Mario Draghi warned that persistently low inflation in the Eurozone meant that “the risk that we do not fulfill our mandate of price stability is higher than six months ago”. Draghi reiterated that the ECB was ready to step in with a programme of Quantitative Easing, noting that “We are in technical preparations to adjust the scope, speed and composition of our measures for early 2015.”
ECB President Mario Draghi’s latest statement is full of Keynesian fallacies, to wit:
1. That price stability is a worthy goal. No, monetary stability is essential, so that prices may reflect the true preferences and productive limitations of the market in order to allocate scarce resources to their most important purposes as dictated by the market.
2. That low inflation or even deflation is harmful. No, in a economy with increasing productivity prices will fall, benefiting all of society. Preventing prices from falling or, as ECB President Draghi desires, encouraging price inflation, causes the Cantillon Effect, whereby early receivers of the new money benefit at the expense of later receivers. Continuing monetary expansion will cause the Austrian Business Cycle.
3. That GDP is a good measure of an economy’s success. if this were the case, then Zimbabwe would be a huge success story. GDP simply adds up the monetary prices of goods sold, so higher prices on the same or even slightly lower volume of sales necessarily will be interpreted by Keynesian economists as success.
4. That monetary expansion can spur an economy to greater prosperity. If this were the case, then counterfeiters would be doing all of us a big favor. Monetary expansion distorts the structure of production, sending more resources to the expansion of enterprises further removed from final consumption. This malinvestment eventually will be revealed by losses in these industries. The current collapse of commodity prices and anticipated bankruptcies in commodity production industries are a good illustration of this process and are attributable to massive monetary expansion by central banks since the 2008 great recession.
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And he doesn't even have a sister selling herself on the net...tsk....
...yet....or that we know of.
excellently succinct analysis in this article. Its most salient illustration is how QE can create deflation rather than inflation
(not in all instances, its a matter of timing and structure as to which sectors bubbles burst first)
Draghi: ECB ready to initiate QE to counter low inflation
C'mon Mario, you pansy, actions talk and bullshit walks...
This bullshit is way past old.
Tor- that sounds completely legit to me. I'm SO doing this. I think everyone else should too. We can finally have the ZH gathering we've been talking about for so long. In prison.
Tyler- clean up in aisle 4, please?
"Tor- that sounds completely legit to me."
And secure. The NSA will never crack Tor, that's why they created it!
When I cheat on my wife it is with her siamese twin. They share the same poochie but they always know.
I would be afraid of getting on the NSA deep dive list.
Of course I am probably already on the deep dive list by posting here....
They couldn't stop the Tsarnaev brothers with all that NSA snooping, a direct warning from the Ruskies, shit they posted themselves on Facebook for the whole world to see and having them on the 'watch list'. What makes you think they give a shit about your narrow ass posting on ZH?
Now, God forbid you start making donations to a Tea Party candidate- that's whole different kettle of fish.
"your narrow ass posting on ZH?"
I will have you know, that my ass is anything but narrow... Thankyou
Only the central bankers are allowed to counterfeit money
Geeez, I first thought Senior Draghi will sent me some notes in the mail. Yo know, to encourage consumer spending. Would help against deflation. I would buy more shit I don't need.
Counter low inflation .... price stabilteee WITH inflation is a worthy goal
?
Has this man got even one brain cell?
Princess of the Yen: Central Banks and the Transformation of the Economy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Ac7ap_MAY
Two dubious wacky theories of the fiscally liberal:
1) broken windows are "good" and we get rennovation and 'growth'.
2) inflation is "good" because it creates "animal spirits" as a 'mother of invention'.
It's all sugar coated and not healthy.
I hope many eventually survive this mess.
John Law, Tulip Mania, will now will add Mario Draghi's name listed on wikipedia under manias.
He got fisted? Well deserved
We should just tax the fuck out of food. That would immediately make it more expensive. Having less food would somehow lead to prosperity.
....that might cut down on obesity.....
Is there in fact a mandate for price stability or is he making this up as he speaks?
Yes to both.
yes, the ECB has only one mandate: price stability. for comparison, the FED has two mandates: price stability and full employment
the author is from "Mises Canada", which for me is a bit like the ultra-orthodox Austrian School
with monetary "stability instead of price stability" he means, if I'm not completely out of my mind, keeping the monetary base stable while leaving prices float wherever they want
Derivatives and Synthetic Derivatives, based on the collapsing commodities, will be the tipping point probably in 2015.
How many 100's of Trillions are in the commodity derivatives ?
Good summary of the situation, and ending of #4:
"The current collapse of commodity prices and anticipated bankruptcies in commodity production industries are a good illustration of this process and are attributable to massive monetary expansion by central banks since the 2008 great recession."
Yes. Which explains why the banks was so eager to put taxpayers on the hook for these losses...but, as I've said before, it's one thing to pass a law, it's another to enforce it. Good luck trying to actually bail out banks for derivatives losses, should the economy tank once more.
I've been giving this some thought, and if these fuckers collapse the whole thing again, I don't think they can count on support this time around, law or no law. Another huge collapse WILL kill the big banks this time around, and their stupid little law won't protect them. They'll be taken over, nationalized and broken into parts more easily controlled.
"Big Finance" will no doubt continue, just under new management.
yeah but new management by the IMF with another layer to the ponzi scheme and loss of national sovereignty....if they have their way.
interesting laws have been rolled in throughout the western world.
1) To exit a term deposit you now have to give a months notice....in order to circumvent people in the know getting their money out a few days before the Bank goes belly up.
2) Your term deposit is automatically Bailed in (Stolen) by the bank when it goes broke.
You might want to look at any money in the bank and the generous interest rate being paid on it and ask yourself if maybe it would be safer elsewhere.
"...warned that persistently low inflation in the Eurozone meant that “the risk that we do not fulfill our mandate of price stability is higher than six months ago”.
Slower devaluation of a currency (inflation) thus ones labor, is "a threat"?
My New Years resolution is to stop arguing with fools.
The problem is they never stop arguing at all......
Little sniveling bitches, I'm done with them.
Price Stability is even related to inflation above zero....
I am not bounded by your resolutions:
Scumbags
He should just ease, quantitavely, some folks.
We Euroed some folks.
Just FUCKIN throw money at the problem, you Euro-trash-arse-wipe-cock-loving wanker.
Get with the program and buy a nice rug. You're fucking nothing, a squealch under foot when China or Amerika decides to live a little, you have no power, no mandate, horrendous debt, bankrupt countries, 50% unemployment amongst the young, a failing economy, plus you smell bad, like a diaper full of Indian food.
this is an excellent example of the Neo-Keynesian approach: "throw money at the problem"
"Early receivers of the new money benefit at the expense of later receivers". That's the entire point for creating all this money. The later receivers are not well-connected to government or the banking sector.
Seigniorage is actually the term used for "first use of money." When you take out a loan at the bank, and then pay it back, does your principle decline right away?
If it is a 30 year mortgage, how long is it before you start buying down the principle?
What really happens is that you go to the bank, take out a loan, and then spend the loan into the money supply. Bank money of this type is what we use for our transaction medium.
When you pay it back, you grab it out of the FUTURE money supply. You then throw your labor- now exchanged for credit money- and throw it back to the banker. What happens then?
This future credit as money, which came from somebody elses loan, might or might not be available. But lets assume it is. You throw it at the banker, and it PASSES THROUGH YOUR LEDGER, and lands on bankers double entry ledger.
OK. You have to understand this. It is not Government that is benefiting from seigniorage in this case.
The Banker gets first use of your usury. In fact if it is a 30 year loan, he might get 15 years of your labor output, then converted to money, and then he gets to use it. How much of your labor output does the government get? So, banker gets to buy things first with your money - therefore usury is interest seigniorage.
Please, don't listen to Austrian Drivel. They are mind control hypnotists.
What I'm saying is absolutely true, and how banking loans work. You pay your interest FIRST! Credit making bankers are above government. They are the shadow government.
So, where in this scheme is the Government making money and taking first use?
Banks are just one face of the state, another aspect of the same entity. Do you think people would be transacting in USD if the gov didn't make gold illegal (Liberty Dollar, egold, etc)? Or that the Petro Dollar scheme could be sustained by banks without the help of the US army?
Neither banks nor governments would exist in their current forms without the other; they are two heads of the same monster.
Incorrect.
The world financial system is the Great Whore that rides (controls) the Beast (governments).
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+17&version=NIV
The world financial system will be destroyed by the government:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation%2018&version=NIV
MEFO - what you type is leergely and technically true, however you thrive on the minutiae while ignoring the larger issues. Your example of a housing loan is simplistic in the extreme. What about loans to hedge funds that gain leverage of 20 X to buy stawks, bonds, asset backed algorithms like ABS and assorted CDS indices? What about the structure of the IRA / 401K retirement construct ?
You concentrate on the basic tenent of usury like you are Muslim financial advisor. Perhaps you are.
The lending of $ of someone's production to someone else, for an interest rate return is not immoral in itself. However, by creating a banking and investing oligopoly that works in concert with .Gov to use taxpayer's production $ to bail out the oligopoly when the oligopoly crashes is immoral.
It is really that simple. Western finance is built on usury, and has prove to be the most successful in history (I know how much you hate the objective truth). Those who have destroyed Western finance with their satanic control of banking, .Gov, and Federal Reserve (Central banking) are the ones that should be targeted fro justice.
Forget your "usury" arguments they are a tempest i a teapot.
so, let's take those Keynesian fallacies apart, from the perspective of what I understand out of the Austrian School
"1. That price stability is a worthy goal. No, monetary stability is essential, so that prices may reflect the true preferences and productive limitations of the market in order to allocate scarce resources to their most important purposes as dictated by the market."
Sorry, this is a no-go. The eurozone is only a part of the global economy, the EUR can't give monetary stability to the global economy, and the Global Reserve Currency, i.e. the USD providing or not providing monetary stability is outside of the ECB's scope. This fundamental or fundamentalist talk is fine for debate in the US, but here we can't indulge in this kind of utopia
So yes, I support elastic responses to monetary shocks. Note that the American reader of those lines is usually sheltered from monetary shocks... from foreigners. But the whole world does have to bear the monetary consequences of every move of the FED. So yes, price stability, and no, no "monetary stability" but elastic responses. Example: LTROs. Lent out, being repaid
"2. That low inflation or even deflation is harmful. No, in a economy with increasing productivity prices will fall, benefiting all of society. Preventing prices from falling or, as ECB President Draghi desires, encouraging price inflation, causes the Cantillon Effect, whereby early receivers of the new money benefit at the expense of later receivers. Continuing monetary expansion will cause the Austrian Business Cycle."
I fully agree on this. Problem is... the "global investor"... doesn't. Up to a point the eurozone is too dependent from outside investments, and they request some advocacy of growth before anything else, remember? (and this entails a Draghi talking this way, yes - talk is cheap) And yet... "continuing monetary expansion"? Did the author note that the ECB shrinked, retracted instead of expanding by one trillion in the last years?
"3. That GDP is a good measure of an economy’s success. if this were the case, then Zimbabwe would be a huge success story. GDP simply adds up the monetary prices of goods sold, so higher prices on the same or even slightly lower volume of sales necessarily will be interpreted by Keynesian economists as success."
another point on which I agree. and yet, again, the "global investor" thinks differently, and even the average ZHer. whenever I use this talking point on ZH, I'm confronted with dogmas like "no growth, no paying back of debt" straight out of Dr. Krugman's Neo-Keynesian 101 building set
"4. That monetary expansion can spur an economy to greater prosperity. If this were the case, then counterfeiters would be doing all of us a big favor. Monetary expansion distorts the structure of production, sending more resources to the expansion of enterprises further removed from final consumption. This malinvestment eventually will be revealed by losses in these industries. The current collapse of commodity prices and anticipated bankruptcies in commodity production industries are a good illustration of this process and are attributable to massive monetary expansion by central banks since the 2008 great recession. "
fully agree, too. but again, what can we eurozoners do? as a reminder, the pressure was immense. the FED was printing, and so the question was "why is the ECB not doing the same"? thankfully the same neo-keynesians were appeased by this lending scheme called LTRO, which, again, was the equivalent of a monetary expansion now going back
and this is the word: appeasement of the Great Beast of Neo-Keynesian Doctrine. if you do think that the Austrian School has merit, then do have a look at what the ECB has really done, and you'll note that it steered an Austrian Course (with tactical elasticity). If you then look at the eurozone countries, you'll note that they, too, are more or less solemnly swearing in on balanced budgets
the point is, my dear "Austrian": you might not want to notice, or not recognize the effort because of it's un-orthodoxy. but it's irrelevant. because you are not a big part of the "global investor"
and this "global investor" requests and requires a certain format and a certain talk, which Draghi wonderfully delivers
Large doses of Monetary expansion-- associated with fiscal incentives-- was not a Keynesian mantra per se; only in the context of the Great Depression. Using government tools was necessary in that context, to be used sparingly after that.
Keynes said those things when the world was in turmoil based on previous irrational exuberance by the Oilgarchs (exactly like the situation today, EXCEPT that today we have petrodollar hegemony which did not exist to protect Fed/BOE in those days when the gold standard collapsed).
Apart from that Keynes ALWAYS supported in "business as usual" mode, balanced budgets and balance of trade.
These were the fundamental planks of his BW baby.
It's the false paradigm of "globalisation" which has caused, under the aegis of petrodollar print to infinity, outside FED control; aka via the TBTF in Thames City; this steroid injected monetary system under supply side deregulation.
These Miserly Austrians LOVE cherry picking like the Lutherian Shaman's advocates of Red Pill.
If GDP is a bad measure of economic wealth, its time to re-invent a better measure like "GDH", gross domestic happiness!
Miserly Austrians?
In what context is this term used? In the context of all money being the property of the state (if so, you just invalidated everyones wages & labor) or after the state has destroyed its economy by its own actions the Austrian refuses to be generous and allow himself to be bailed in by the state?
Lord Keynes was first and foremost a socialist statist, so it should come as no surprise that he would elevate the states interests above any and all other interests, including the individual.
And Kuznets already said what his measure of GDP was and was not..."The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income,"...he was not talking about EBT cards doled out by the government to placate the masses so the elites could plunder ever more or the purchases made by those same EBT cards contributing to the measure of GDP itself...which it does...thats why measuring income & expenditures is wrong in trying to gauge the welfare of a nation, its overall happiness and contentedness.
A bird in a gilded cage is still a caged bird!
Its something the fucking socialist-statists (like Lord Keynes) will never understand or comprehend and never tire of toying around with because they cannot believe we just want to be left alone.
Its going to take crushing their heads like ripe melons.
My use of Miserly is a play on words : Von Mises/
If your repugnance goes beyond Keynes to JFK, FDR, Lincoln and Hamilton then you have effaced the time line of US History as created by its POLITICAL and elected leaders who tried to federate the country on a common platform (you can label them what you like).
Your positon on that front rings of Jefferson Davis's swan song.
All thats left is Rockafella, Morgan, Ford and all those Oligarchs who built the private wealth of USA. The same guys--mindset and power wise-- who are responsible for the current dystopia as for the 1929 crasH. As private wealth unabated always gets us to feudal order.
What part of US History, and by consequence Western history from Alexander to today, have you not understood?
Its always been a question of balance between elected statists and paragons of civil society.
We have lost that balance since unregulated "laisser faire" made USA into Oligarchy Disneyworld (not the other way round : when Eisenhower taxed corporates and private wealth and it never stopped the USA from being productive. We were then in Keynes's world construct).
"My use of Miserly is a play on words : Von Mises/"
Your chosen play on words has already been addressed by me and you say nothing to defend it besides this, leaving little doubt of what your true intent was.
And my repugnance extends far beyond a Fabian socialist & British subject of "royalty" (Lord Keynes) to Hitler, Mussolini, Marx, Napoleon, Stalin and more sun baked, half-crazed emirs & sultans than I care to name.
What part of the lust to dominate others & hidden alliances with oligarchs have you not learned from?
We agree on the fact that statists and oligarchs rule the world and they be bloodthirsty bastards.
But its always been an imperfect world made by an imperfect species : Man.
So given that imperfect premice, the question is trying to find balance between rival imperfections.
Your whole approach is laudable in a perfect world, not the one we live in.
We have to adapt philosopical and economic THEORY to human reality built on passions and unrivaled ambitions expressed by the most potent men of each generation. Thats the REALITY of political governance.
Unless you neuter the world and make all humanity into eunuchs you won't even start to address the issues that face us. Robespierre did try doing that and it bit him back.
I don't see the point in belabouring theory in a world that needs practical solutions.
Utopia and libertarian anarchy...is for the birds!
As for my True intent its even beyond my comprehension what that is supposed to mean.
I reject the premise that passionate, ambitious men are inherently evil men even as I reject the notion of being governed by my damnable inferiors.
Yes, I refuse to "adapt philosopical and economic theory to human reality" which is what Keynes or any other socialist does, as it only empowers the state to become ever more tyranical, the oligarchs ever more fascinated and still bolder with its depredations on us all.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." - Tacitus...and yet with government warehouses packed to the ceilings with laws & regulations (now requiring virtual digitizing because they are so numerous) I am told unrestrained deregulation and laissez faire is what ails the philosopical and economic theory of men?
You can't be serious.
They have followed Keynes into his grave and become necrophiliacs, just print a little more and we'll be fine they say (like fiat-heroin junkies) even as Austrians say time & time again it cannot work and it hasn't, more people on the government dole, the elites getting ever richer, under the protection of law & the state.
And still we are asked to bend, we are asked to be "practical", the answer is, as always, still no.
"As for my True intent its even beyond my comprehension what that is supposed to mean."
You sure about that?
"These Miserly Austrians LOVE cherry picking like the Lutherian Shaman's advocates of Red Pill."
These are your words are they not, of Red Pills, Lutherian Shamans and miserly Austrians?
This isn't one of your sensuous novels (good writing by the way, for that genre) this is real life we're talking about, not fiction.
"I reject the premise that passionate, ambitious men are inherently evil men even as I reject the notion of being governed by my damnable inferiors. "
Very well stated. I raise my glass to YOU.
As I raise mine to you kind sir.
Its true isn't it?
I have no idea why this attachment of virtue & brilliance to leadership is even present considering what they have done and continue to do. They can't even do the basic things (like balancing a nations checkbook or not running a profitable company into the ground) and yet so many give great latitude and deference to their words regardless of their deeds/actions? Its as if, failure & incompetence is valued more highly as a quality of leadership these days.
Sometimes I feel like I'm living in an alternate universe...lol.
I stand by that, I'm no lover of economic theory that negates the power equation of nation state constructs. Invisible hand in reality is a sham. Our present conundrum has destroyed that myth.
As for your "inferiors" that says it all.
Your logic is as lopsided as your opening statement / You cannot reject an evidence. Its called being in denial.
"Power corrupts"-- is the most constant statement of man's historical thread.
And unbridled ambition always leads us to that blind alley. That is the legacy of Pax Americana today.
And Pax americana is not the state, its the private Oligarchs who were ambitious to the point were evil seemed justified as it was manifest destiny being meted out to those "inferior" humans out there.
You talk like the people you pretend to despise.
Maybe you should have been born before "Django unchained" made that southern logic be shown for what it was, behind the potato bags with slit eyes, a mindset which made them lose the South.
Von Mises is the face of an economic ideology that the Romanovs loved.
So why go on harping about the Queen and your republican origins.
They were lost when J. Davis created his own southern rationale. And Jeb Bush and the Koch brothers are just a manifestation of that regression; just like Reagan and Nixon were in their times, front men for the Oligarchs.
Choose your mentors. Those tea drinkers, like you, are men with phony ideals, whose values don't stand the acid test of reality.
Now see, it wasn't that hard to coax all of that out of you afterall, was it? ;-)
well if you roll the dice without spots on it I'll call you for what that crap game looks like.
Smoke n mirrors !
So if you stand by what you said (as you now say you do) about Austrian economics and philosophy (because they are very much tied together as a unit) being "miserly" why the smoke & mirrors on your part?
Its because you really don't, deep down, believe in individual sovereignty, isn't it?
This is something you will have to come to terms with on your own falak, not me. And perhaps you have already, it certainly seems you have. I submit to nothing on this entire planet, not institutions, nor governments, nor implied guilt (lol...really?), not force, not coersion, not "equality" (whatever that is), not race or society (again, whatever that is or has become), nothing.
I am a free man and will remain so until I die.
Oh sure, some local gendarme can hassle me, some technocratic statist know-it-all can inform the state as to my real purpose and intentions and blather on about the danger I pose to it (and them) but they can never stop me.
This brings me immense joy in times like this, something a slave like yourself to it, will never understand.
You take care of yourself falak because I'm telling you straight out, I will not take care of you, you really are on your own and you're going to have to deal with it.
It could have been different.
"It" being a mystery to me... to which a slave I be.
Cross purposes, but not cross swords; as words are not deeds.
I don't believe that free will is anything else but contagious in the good sense. It doesn't spread Ebola.
"Talk to the organ grinder, not the monkey"
Germany being the organ grinder and Mario Draghi the monkey.
Stop listening to the gibbering monkey.
Do rich people like paying taxes to help out poor people?
Do rich nations like spending large sums to bail out poor nations?
Germany -rich
Club med - poor
Mario Draghi - paper tiger
I agree with the four points raised except this one in part:
"...GDP simply adds up the monetary prices of goods sold, so higher prices on the same or even slightly lower volume of sales necessarily will be interpreted by Keynesian economists as success."
I believe the GDP that gets reported is net GDP: "GDP=nominal GDP-CPI inflation".
Of course this all becomes a fantasy since the GDP and inflation numbers are rubbish to begin with.
My thanks to the many contributors to these sites. Ived learned much from their efforts to explain what's going on and why. A month or two ago i came across a term "The financialization of assets" ...which didn't mean that much at the time, but has gained in meaning with each new article. I am now prepaered to give my simplistic view:
There is a real economy in which capital, labor and raw materials come together to produce real value. There is also a financial economy which places bets on the real economy, but does not in itself create real value.
The financial economy has been allowed to balloon until the bets are 1000 times larger than the real economy. The gambling profits became large enough to purchase the political system, which was then bent to allow even greater bets to be made.
All gambling ends with a loss at some time. In 2008, the gambling losses threatened to take down the largest gamblers, the TBTF Banks. I believe that, if they had been allowed to fail, there would have been a serious immediate depression affecting nearly everone on the planet...but the REAL ECONOMY would have repaired itself, and moved on...
That didn't happen. The Financial gamblers were made good their gambling debts, and the financial economy continued to expand their bets, albeit using soverign pork to feed thier gambling appetite.
'Financialization of assets' can be explained using the oil price as example. Oil in the real economy is worth so much, lets call it X. The gambling debts on the price of oil are however worth 1000 X. When the price of oil fell in the real economy due to lowered demand, it should have been a positive factor for the real economy......but when there are Trillions of Dollars bet on the continueing oil price at 110....then we are at a crisis once again.
'Financialization of Assets' is another way of saying: "The gambling bets on each and every part of the real economy have exploded to 1000 times the value of the real economy itself"
I'm a simpleton, and all the charts and economic theories tire me out. I don't trust them. The markets are managed and historical chart shapes are meaningless. We will reach the new crisis, and there is little we can do about it now...other than see to our loved ones safety.
There is one bubble i am waiting to see pricked: The bubble of financial economy smashed down and resurrected in a glas stiegal cage.
Breadonwaters, great post.
Maverick
THANKYA VERA MUCH!
The financial economy CAN add value to the real economy, but what has happened is that the financial economy has been given such preference over the real economy that it has come to subsume it.
Now it's more like we grow food so that the futures market has something to bet on, instead of having a futures market that pours information into the process of growing food.
Breadonwaters and Nimby, good posts
Watched an interesting documentary called something like 'WWI from the Middle Eastern Perspective'. Very interesting to see how meddlesome the British were at that time - and of course, all the way up to the late 1940's when they created the Middle Eastern boundaries. What was most interesting is that the US is doing the same type of meddling today!