(article written by Michael Sankowski, reprinted from Monetary Realism)
Over at Naked Capitalism, there are two interesting posts up, and I’d like to point out an important link between them.
One is an interview with Jamie Galbraith “Finance as Wealth Transfer Mechanism” who says this:
“The act of extending credit – a macroeconomic force – generates fees and capital gains and other incomes that accrue, largely, to the top strata. You can see this very plainly in US data, but also in most other countries we’ve looked at, from Brazil to China. In sectoral data, it shows up in the fact that rising inequality is closely associated with relative gains by the financial sector.”
The other post is by…Dan Kervick. We said we will take good ideas from anywhere, and well, Dan has some great points in this post:
“People frequently rail against the pork barrel spending and earmarks that result from the legislative process. But the pork barrels don’t worry me nearly as much as handing our economy over to another generation of theory-addled elitists like Alan Greenspan. As part of the democratic process, representatives come from all over the country to look for the resources to deliver the things their constituents want and need. They wrangle and haggle. And yes, in the process they land a few “bridges to nowhere.” But most of what they get are bridges to somewhere. The people in New Hampshire might not like the way the people in Georgia use their share of our national resources, and the people in Georgia might feel the same way about the people in Oregon. But the end result is that things get built; people are hired; public goods are created; national and local needs are met; things get done.”
I’ve railed about the anti-democratic tradition running though economics over at Traders Crucible. Then I wrote about a long list of practical problems with Monetary Policy in this post. Turns out Jamie identified another major problem with using Monetary Policy – the high fees flow to one group of people.Here is a full list of problems with monetary policy:
- promotes debt slavery
- works very slowly
- ignores the lowest 30% of earners
- anti-democratic look here.
- difficult to manage
- It must – must – end in a massive real estate bust – which destroys the primary store of value for the lower 80% of the population.
- Difficult to observe effectiveness
- Uses real estate lending as a transmission mechanism
- Indirect instead of direct action
- Promotes a rentier class
- Promotes a massive banking system
- Zero lower bound
- Can’t be very effective in a real estate crash.
- Promotes the military industrial complex to the exclusion of social welfare
- high fees
- fees flow to rentier class (slightly different than Neil’s version)
Fiscal policy, by contrast, works through expanded government purchases ?G. These must be financed by distortionary taxes to amortize the debt in the future. These taxes do drive a wedge between the social and the private values of output in the future. And what the government buys is determined by a political rather than by an optimizing economic logic. [2]”
He’ll be here all week, folks! But more seriously, his caveat here is outrageous
“or if questions of the relative distribution of wealth are left to a more openly political process and walled-off from technocratic macroeconomic questions of stabilization policy)”
I’ll translate to human readable language
“If you just ignore biggest ways Monetary Policy distorts every credit related transaction, it causes less distortion than Fiscal Policy. ”
It’s time for the economics profession to fess up on what it’s doing. It’s time to recognize Monetary Policy chooses winners and losers just like Fiscal Policy chooses winners and losers.
We need a way to move forward in the world. Ignoring the basic facts how Monetary Policy actually moves from central bank operations into the real world isn’t helping. And it also doesn’t help most of economics doesn’t even have room for the financial system in the model.
This is why it’s hard for economists to find the distortions, they don’t include the sectors where these distortions happen in the basic models of the economy.
In this case, I fully agree with Scott Fullwiler. Here is JKH on this idea:
“What is ground zero for language in economics?
Is it the language of economists and accountants or the language of the street or some language in between?
My own view is that there is a default ground zero language inherent in:
C + I + G + (X – M) = C + S + T
…
No related posts.
Michael Sankowski spends a lot of his time applying quantitative mathematics to financial markets. When he's not playing the guitar, he has been a professional trader for 20 years. He's traded billions of dollars on four continents and is a well-known financial writer. He's a CFA, CAIA, and has created patented Futures products. He's here to help you make more money (and especially not lose your money).
