Martin Wolf & Paul Krugman - EconomicsMartin Wolf & Paul Krugman - Economics

Posted at 2012. 7. 11. 22:57 | Posted in 경제학/일반

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c57b0d1e-ca81-11e1-89be-00144feabdc0.html#axzz20IE39S4A
Martin Wolf. "We still have that sinking feeling". <FT>. 2012.07.10


"The US is the most important of the crisis-hit economies. But it is not the only one to have experienced large private sector retrenchment: so has the UK. In fact, the International Monetary Fund forecasts that the private sectors of all the large high-income countries will be in either balance or surplus this year (see chart). It follows that these countries must be running large current account surpluses or large fiscal deficits. Germany is doing the former. Others are running fiscal deficits.

Since these big countries are unlikely to be able to run large current account surpluses together (with whom?), they have to run fiscal deficits once their private sectors run huge surpluses. These surpluses, in turn, are partly explained by the desire to de-leverage, partly by unwillingness to borrow and partly by the inability or unwillingness of the financial sector to lend. All this, then, is the painful hangover after the great credit binge."

"So the big story continues to be one of private sector de-leveraging, tempered by easy monetary policy and offset by the leveraging of the government’s balance sheet. The willingness of the authorities to do both of these things, despite foolish criticism, prevented us from experiencing a second great depression and continues to do so. The idea seems fantastic that these large fiscal deficits are crowding out private spending when interest rates are so low in countries blessed by not being in the eurozone."
(...)


"The conclusion is that fiscal deficits, readily financed in important countries, need to be still bigger because they must both facilitate de-leveraging and sustain demand. The other plausible way to accelerate de-leveraging is mass bankruptcy, also known as a depression. Does the BIS want that?"
(...)

"We know that big financial crises cast long shadows, particularly in countries whose underlying rate of growth is modest, which makes de-leveraging slow. Policy must both sustain demand and facilitate de-leveraging. This means aggressive monetary and fiscal policies, working in combination, along with interventions aimed at recapitalising banks and accelerating restructuring of private debt."


Keynesian economics에 관한 오해에 대해


http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/the-cracked-conservative-mirror/
Paul Krugman. "The Cracked Conservative Mirror". 2011.08.12

"Keynesianism, in particular, is not about chanting “big government good”. It’s about viewing recessions through the lens of an economic model under which temporary increases in government spending can, under certain circumstances, help reduce unemployment. 
Indeed, not all recessions call for fiscal stimulus; it’s the special conditions of the liquidity trap that make it essential now — which is why the Bush deficits, run under non-liquidity trap conditions, say nothing at all about the desirability of deficits now."



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