A CHE SERVE CONTENERE IL DEBITO?

A che serve contenere il debito?
Fondamentalmente a farlo quando davvero è indispensabile, cioè quando la crisi morde sul serio. Sarebbe una catastrofe essere fortemente indebitati non trovare un ulteriore prestatore quando si è con l’acqua alla gola.
Ecco, se non vogliamo gravare le generazioni future con un debito pubblico in costante aumento, dobbiamo trovare un bel po’ di denaro. Ciò significa spendere meno o tassare di più.
Personalmente, preferirei frenare la spesa. Ad esempio, potremmo aumentare l’età pensionabile, mi sembra una misura intelligente. Il pensionamento anticipato lo si puo’ ottenere usando i propri risparmi. Ecco allora che acquisterebbero senso le parole di chi continua a ripetere: “abbiamo un alto debito ma anche un alto risparmio privato”).
Un altra mossa è la privatizzazione della scuola: oggi la retta di una scuola paritaria è circa la metà di quella di una scuola statale. Un bel risparmio.
Facciamo poi pagare la sanità a chi puo’ permetterselo. Sono stato ricoverato una settimana e non mi hanno chiesto un euro. Non sono ricco ma per un servizio simile qualche centinaio di euro potrei anche pagarlo. Altro bel risparmio per lo stato.

Ma riconosco che le mie preferenze potrebbero non riflettere quelle degli altri. Molte persone vogliono più tasse per garantire redditi minimi, prepensionamenti e il welfare in generale. Votiamo e decidiamo.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/business/national-debt-trump.html


https://feedly.com/i/entry/QhasdlGC/je393PPTQKFFVBvU9pU8A5e2Nj247Raws0=_16b757fdc0a:3791d4:d044c787 

Riduzione del debito pubblico: meglio aumentare le tasse o ridurre la spesa?

| noiseFromAmeriKa: "Riduzione del debito pubblico: meglio aumentare le tasse o ridurre la spesa?"

'via Blog this'

Il deficit aggredito

Modi per aggredire il debito: vendere qualche regione. Magari la Lombardia.

Gli USA pensano all' Alaska.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/to-solve-our-debt-problems-lets-sell-alaska/2012/12/14/1c63c1d6-4352-11e2-9648-a2c323a991d6_story.html?hpid=z4

EMH e Eugene Fama

Fama è un po' il Philip Roth dell' economia: il fatto di non aver preso ancora il Nobel getta discredito sul premio più ancora che su di lui.

Sull' efficienza dei mercati:

As the market efficiency ideas took shape, it 

dawned on me that the reason the trading rules I’d 

developed earlier didn’t work out of sample was 

because price changes were random, which at that 

point was what people thought an efficient market 

meant. We know now it doesn’t. Market efficiency 

means that deviations from equilibrium expected 

returns are unpredictable based on currently available information.  But equilibrium expected returns 

can vary through time in a predictable way, which 

means price changes need not be entirely random...

Sulla crisi finanziaria del 2008:

: I think the global crisis was first a problem of political pressure to encourage the financing of subprime mortgages... . I don’t think the crisis was a problem with markets.

Dove sta dunque il bubbone?

The worst thing to come out of that 

experience, in my view, is the concept of “too big 

to fail.” Basically, the institutions that are considered to be too big to fail have their debt priced 

as if it’s riskless, which gives them a low cost of 

capital and makes it very easy for them to expand 

and become an even bigger problem. Plus, everybody now accepts the assertion that they are too 

big to fail, which creates a terrible moral hazard 

for the management of these financial institutions.

Soluzioni:

The simplest solution would be to raise the capital 

requirements of banks. A nice place to start would 

be a 25% equity capital ratio, and if that doesn’t 

work, raise it more. The equity capital ratio needs 

to be high enough that a too-big-to-fail financial 

institution’s debt is riskless,

Che ne pensi della finanza comportamentale?

is  ex post storytelling and doesn’t 

generate new testable hypotheses It’s not a 

science. In Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast 

and Slow,  he states that our brains have two sides: 

One is rational, and one is impulsive and irrational. 

What behavior can’t be explained by that model?

Come risolvere in USA il problema del debito?

Simple. Balance the budget. I heard a 

very prominent person say in private that we could 

balance the budget by going back to the level of 

government expenditures in 2007. The economy 

is currently about the size it was then. If you just 

rolled expenditures back to that point, I think it 

would come close to balancing the budget.

http://www.cfapubs.org/doi/pdf/10.2469/faj.v68.n6.1

***********************************.

Paradossi:

here is something I never would have expected.  The failure of LTCM, a firm founded and run on the premise that the EMH was wrong, actually shows that .  .  . the EMH is wrong!

Eppure:

The efficient market hypothesis implies that it should be very difficult to beat the markets, as asset prices should already reflect all publicly available information.  Many people found this hard to accept; surely really smart people are better investors than the average schmuck!  Not surprisingly, the very smartest people of all, including not one but two Nobel Prize-winning finance professors, gave in to temptation and joined a hedge fund that was set up to find market anomalies and to make investments that took advantage of the market’s inefficiencies.  That hedge fund was called “Long Term Capital Management.”  Of course anyone who has read ancient Greek tragedies knows what happened next...

E qui ci sta a fagiolo l' aneddoto con Fama:

You have to be impressed by the resourcefulness of the anti-EMH, crowd.  If LTCM and its merry band of Nobel-Prize winning economists had actually beat the market, if they had used market anomalies to get rich, well then it would have been the death knell of the EMH.  Every time Fama said “if you’re so smart how come you’re not rich,” people would have responded that Scholes and Merton did get rich by spotting market inefficiencies.  Instead they failed miserably, and this shows . . . it show that markets are inefficient because the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. 

La cosa non vi ricorda qualcosa?

 It reminds me of people who see monopoly everywhere.  High prices?  Clearly monopolistic exploitation.  Low prices?  Ah, that’s predatory pricing.  The same price as your competitor?  Obviously price fixing.

http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=4121

Tre pregiudizi sul welfare

Ci si sgola per spiegare che dobbiamo affrontare la nostra crisi di bilancio senza toccare il welfare.

Eppure i fatti parlano chiaro: il modo più efficace per ridurre il debito, se non l' unico, consiste nel tagliare il welfare:

By Andrew G. Biggs, Kevin A. Hassett, Matt Jensen

Most developed countries face the need for significant policy changes to balance their budgets over the long run. Yet there is significant disagreement in the literature concerning the identification and impact of successful fiscal consolidations. In this paper, we explore the impact that differing assumptions and methodologies have on conclusions, and derive bounds across specifications that can be used by policymakers in designing their own reforms. Using cyclically adjusted panel data for select OECD countries from 1970-2007, we explore how the compositions of successful and unsuccessful consolidations differ for varying definitions of success. While conclusions about the growth impact of reforms vary depending on methodology, we find that there is much less disagreement concerning composition. Specifically, we find strong evidence that expenditure cuts outweigh revenue increases in successful consolidations. We also find evidence that the type of the spending cuts is an important determinant of success, as is the type of tax increases. We use these results as a guide, and discuss specific proposals for reducing the United States' deficit that draw on the lessons from past consolidations.

Non manca mai poi chi chiede una maggiore spesa governativa per consentire alle donna una partecipazione al lavoro più consistente.

Se da noi è tanto bassa, si dice, lo si deve anche a carenze nei servizi di welfare offerti.

A costoro bisognerebbe ricordare che l' aumento dell' occupazione femminile ha sempre preceduto l' eventuale incremento nella spesa per servizi sociali che, evidentemente, non ne è la causa.

Tiago Cavalcanti & José Tavares
Economic Inquiry, January 2011, Pages 155–171

Abstract: The increase in income per capita is accompanied, in virtually all countries, by two changes in economic structure: the increase in the share of government spending in gross domestic product (GDP), and the increase in female labor force participation. We argue that these two changes are causally related. We develop a growth model based on Galor and Weil (1996) where female participation in market activities, fertility, and government size, in addition to consumption and saving, is endogenously determined. Rising incomes lead to a rise in female labor force participation as the opportunity cost of staying at home and caring for the children increases. In our model, higher government spending decreases the cost of performing household chores, including, but not limited to, child rearing and child
care, as in Rosen (1996). We also use a wide cross-section of data for developed and developing countries and show that higher market participation by women is positively and robustly associated with government size. We then investigate the causal link between participation and government size using a novel unique data set that allows the use of the relative price of productive home appliances as an instrumental variable. We find strong evidence of a causal link between female market participation and government size

Altri dicono che dobbiamo aumentare il nostro welfare per "includere", tutto cio' avrebbe l' auspicabile effetto di iniettare fiducia nel sistema. Ma i fatti dicono che il nesso di casualità va in senso inverso e che il welfare è un frutto dell' alta fiducia che circola nella società.

Andreas Bergh & Christian Bjørnskov
Kyklos, February 2011, Pages 1–19

Abstract: Despite the fact that large welfare states are vulnerable to free-riding,
the idea that universal welfare states lead to higher trust levels in the population has received some attention and support among political scientists recently. This paper argues that the opposite direction of causality is more plausible, i.e. that populations with higher trust levels are more prone to creating and successfully maintaining universal welfare states with high levels of taxation where publicly financed social insurance schemes. The hypothesis is tested using instrumental variable techniques to infer variations in trust levels that pre-date current welfare states, and then using the variation in historical trust levels to explain the current size and design of the welfare state, and finally comparing the explanatory power of trust to other potential explanatory factors such as left-right
ideology and economic openness. To infer variation about historical trust levels, we use three instruments, all used previously in the trust literature: the grammatical rule allowing pronoun-drop, average temperature in the coldest month and a dummy for constitutional monarchies. Using cross-sectional data for 77 countries, we show that these instruments are valid and that countries with higher historical trust levels have significantly higher public expenditure as a share of GDP and also have more
regulatory freedom. This finding is robust to controlling for several other potential explanations of welfare state size.

http://www.aei.org/paper/100179

http://mungowitzend.blogspot.com/2011/01/women-cant-live-with-em-cant-live.html