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venerdì 17 marzo 2017

Anatomia di una crisi

Come si esce da una crisi economica?
Cominciamo col dire che ci sono due tipi di crisi economiche.
C'è la crisi da domanda: la gente non spende più perché impaurita, per esempio da uno shock finanziario.
C'è poi la crisi da offerta: le imprese non vendono perché, per esempio, fanno a mano ciò che i concorrenti fanno con i robot.
Fortunatamente, l’economia canonica prescrive la stessa rivetta per uscire da entrambe le crisi: abbassare i salari.
Salari più bassi consentono di abbassare i prezzi e invogliare i clienti in modo da superare le crisi di domanda.
Salari più bassi sollecitano la migrazione dei lavoratori verso settori più produttivi in modo da superare le crisi dell'offerta.
Che ci vuole ad abbassare un salario? Semplice, no?
No. Abbassare i salari non è affatto semplice cosicché le crisi perdurano per decenni interi, come la Grande Depressione che colpì l' America negli anni trenta.
Il salario di solito si esprime come W (wage). Ma il salario deve tener conto dei prezzi (P) affinché possa indicare il potere d'acquisto. Il salario reale è quindi W/P.
Il salario può essere abbassato in due modi: abbassando W o alzando P.
Per abbassare W dobbiamo contare sull'imprenditore. Ma gli imprenditori deludono: non abbassano!
Non si sa perché ma non abbassano. Forse vogliono evitare il conflitto oppure non intendono demoralizzare i dipendenti, sta di fatto che preferiscono chiudere piuttosto che abbassare W. Questo è un dato di fatto, ognuno ci costruisca su la sua teoria.
Per alzare P dobbiamo invece contare sulla banca centrale. È lei che di solito che ha in mano le armi per creare non dico inflazione ma almeno aspettative inflazioniste (bastano quelle in fondo). Eppure, l'inflazione non è un fenomeno facile da controllare, se scappa di mano sono guai, per cui a volte la banca centrale – specie in quei paesi scottati in passato dall’inflazione -ci va con i piedi di piombo.
Keynes conclude: rassegniamoci, i salari sono incomprimibili. L’imprenditore non abbassa (minimo vitale) e la banca centrale è impotente (trappola della liquidità). Bisogna precedere altrimenti abbandonando il paradigma classico.
La sua proposta si fonda su un assunto forte: esistono solo crisi di domanda, le crisi di offerta sono illusorie (e comunque trascurabili).
Non può che partire da lì poiché la sua ricetta prevede di superare le crisi di domanda trasformandole in una crisi di offerta. In questo modo, se le crisi di offerta non esistono, il problema puo’ ben dirsi risolto.
Facciamo un esempio per capire. Supponiamo che il sistema sia in piena crisi: disoccupazione, povertà, sfiducia. Keynes propone: lo stato crei una domanda artificiosa (a debito), per esempio impegnandosi nella costruzione di autostrade. La proposta ha successo, tutti cominciano a costruire autostrade, tutti diventano asfaltatori ed esperti in bitumi: piena occupazione, ricchezza, fiducia... alé!
Poi il debito sale alle stelle e di autostrade c’è sovrabbondanza. Non c’è più bisogno di asfaltatori ma noi ormai siamo tutti asfaltatori specializzati in asfalti drenanti. Che si fa? Nulla, una crisi del genere è una crisi dell'offerta (sistema produttivo inadeguato alle reali esigenze della popolazione) ma le crisi dell'offerta non esistono per definizione. Keynes è un pragmatico: sposta in avanti il problema nella speranza che in qualche modo la rinnovata fiducia di sistema lo risolva da sé, il lungo periodo non lo interessa (“sul lungo periodo saremo tutti morti”).
Pesa di più il pragmatismo o la miopia keynesiana? Nel corso degli anni trenta Mussolini e il suo allievo Hitler hanno speso forte secondo la ricetta keynesiana. Non in autostrade ma in armamenti. La crisi che ha atterrato mezzo mondo è stata da loro brillantemente schivata. E poi? E poi è partita la guerra: l'apparato produttivo che si ritrovava la Germania, per esempio, era l'ideale per sostenere una simile impresa, la riconversione sarebbe costata lacrime e sangue sfociando nell'inevitabile crisi dell'offerta tipica della ricetta keynesiana. Guardando alla storia europea degli anni successivi possiamo ben dire che in questo caso ha pesato di più la miopia.
Molti studiosi ritengono che Keynes ci faccia cadere dalla padella nella brace e che sia necessario un passo indietro. In altri termini, forse non è poi così vero che i salari siano incomprimibili. Uno di questi studiosi è Scott Sumner.
Per Scott Summer, in particolare, la banca centrale può agire  su P in modo efficace e la politica del lavoro può almeno limitare l'aumento di W tenendo a bada i sindacati, o perlomeno non fornendo loro canali privilegiati attraverso cui agire.
L’esperimento naturale dove da sempre si fronteggiano le varie scuole macroeconomiche è costituito dalla Grande Depressione Americana seguita alla crisi di borsa del 1929. E’ su questo decennio che si concentra l’attenzione di Sumner.
Sumner – sulla base della sua analisi di quel periodo storico – ritiene che i keynesiani abbiano preso un granchio colossale nel giudicare inefficaci le politiche monetarie espansive, questo perché le hanno valutate nel momento in cui erano più esposte all’effetto controbilanciante (offsetting) delle politiche del lavoro tese ad incoraggiare W attraverso una forte azione sindacale e governativa.
E’ chiaro che se aumentano sia W che P l’effetto globale su W/P è nullo. 
***
Una delle cause del tracollo nell'analisi di Sumner...
... Many economists now see the initial contraction as being caused, or at least exacerbated, by monetary policy errors and/or defects in the international gold standard...
Si noti che il gold standard limita l'azione della banca centrale: per alzare P occorre emettere moneta, ma in regime di gold standard la cosa è possibile solo possedendo una adeguata riserva aurea. L'oro esiste in quantità limitata e, specie in periodi dove anche i privati intendono detenerlo come bene rifugio, avere riserve adeguate è difficile.
Quel che manca nei precedenti studi...
... But we still lack a convincing narrative of the many twists and turns in the economy between 1929 and 1940...
Il periodo americano dal 1929 al 1940 è una miniera di informazioni con i suoi 17 schock nella produzione industriale.
Tesi...
... I will show that if we take the gold market seriously we can explain much more about the Great Depression than anyone had thought possible...
I cambiamenti cruciali...
... changes in central bank demand for gold, private sector gold hoarding, and changes in the price of gold...
Poi c' è la politica (New Deal)...
... remaining output shocks are linked to five wage shocks that resulted from the New Deal...
La borsa registra fedelmente i cambiamenti di politica monetaria...
... financial market responses to the policy shocks of the 1930s were consistent with a gold market approach...
In questo senso è un termometro attendibile.
L'illustre precedente...
... In 1963, Friedman and Schwartz’s Monetary History of the United States seemed to provide the definitive account of the role of monetary policy in the Great Depression...
Ma il capolavoro ha un difettino...
... Friedman and Schwartz paid too little attention to the worldwide nature of the Depression, especially the role of the international gold standard...
Non sembra valorizzato il vero nodo...
... the complex interrelationship between gold, wages, and financial markets during the 1930s....
Ciò a consentito che ancora oggi circolino bufale sulla grande depressione. Almeno tre.
Prima...
... Assuming causality runs from financial panic to falling aggregate demand (rather than vice versa)...
Seconda...
... Assuming that sharply falling short-term interest rates and a sharply rising monetary base meant “easy money.”...
Terza...
... Assuming that monetary policy became ineffective once rates hit zero...
La spiacevole conseguenza di miti del genere...
... the view that Fed policy was “easy” during late 2008 was almost universal... we congratulate the Fed for avoiding the mistakes of the 1930s, even as it repeats many of those mistakes....
***
Il problema dei nessi è il problema eterno dello statistico. Qui, fortunatamente, abbiamo una risorsa che aiuta...
... financial markets respond immediately... there was an especially close correlation between news stories related to gold and/or wage legislation and financial market prices...
La sentenza individua due chiari colpevoli del disastro...
... The demand shocks were triggered by gold hoarding (or changes in the price of gold), and the supply shocks were caused by policy-driven changes in hourly wage rates....
livello internazionale la "stretta monetaria" dell'ottobre 1929 appare chiara...
... World monetary policy (as measured by changes in the gold reserve ratio) was stable between June 1928 and October 1929, and then tightened sharply over the following twelve months. It was this policy switch, perhaps combined with bearish sentiment from the reduced prospects for international monetary coordination, which triggered a sharp decline in aggregate demand...
La crisi tedesca del 1931 non va trascurata...
... The German economic crisis of 1931 was a key turning point in the Depression. It led to substantial private gold hoarding, and between mid-1931 and late 1932 strongly impacted U.S. equity markets...
L'errore di Keynes...
... Keynes suggested that the Fed’s spring 1932 open market purchases might have been ineffective due to the existence of a “liquidity trap.”... The open market purchases were associated with extensive gold hoarding, and this prevented any significant increase in the money supply...
Un errore del genere ha impedito ai keynesiani di capire gli anni settanta facendo così sparire un’illustre scuola macroeconomica (ormai Keynes piace solo ai politici spendaccioni e a qualche editorialista d’assalto)...
... A misinterpretation of two key policy initiatives, the open market purchases of 1932 and the NIRA, had a profound impact on macroeconomic theory during the twentieth century. Because early Keynesian theory was based on a misreading of these policies, it could not survive the radically altered policy environment of the postwar period...
Altro insegnamento: le aspettative contano più dei fatti...
... President Roosevelt instituted a dollar depreciation program in April 1933 with the avowed goal of raising the price level back to its 1926 level. This program was unique in U.S. history and was the primary factor behind both the 57 percent surge in industrial production between March and July 1933 and the 22 percent rise in the wholesale price level in the twelve months after March 1933. The initial recovery was triggered not by a preceding monetary expansion, but rather by expectations of future monetary expansion....
La sciagura delle politiche dei salari alti...
... The National Recovery Administration (NRA) adopted a high wage policy in July 1933, which sharply increased hourly wage rates. This policy aborted the recovery, led to a major stock market crash, and helped lengthen the Depression by six to seven years.... a second “Great Depression” began in late July 1933...
Le politiche espansive minate dall'incertezza dei comportamenti ondivaghi...
... The gold-buying program of late 1933... was essentially a monetary feedback rule aimed at returning prices to pre-Depression levels... Although the program helped promote economic recovery, it eventually became a major political issue and led key economic advisors to resign from the Roosevelt Administration...
L'uscita dal gold standard: una finta per almeno due anni...
... Although the conventional view is that Franklin D. Roosevelt took America off the gold standard, U.S. monetary policy became even more strongly linked to gold after 1934 than it had been before 1933. A recovery in the United States finally got underway when the Supreme Court declared the NIRA to be unconstitutional in mid-1935....
Per ogni politica buona c'è una politica cattiva: offsetting everywhere
... During 1937, the expansionary impact of gold dishoarding began to be offset by wage increases, which reflected the resurgence of unions after the Wagner Act and Roosevelt’s landslide reelection...
Casi esemplari di offsetting...
... Because the expansionary impact of dollar depreciation was largely offset by the contractionary impact of the NIRA wage codes, economic historians have greatly underestimated the importance of each shock considered in isolation...
Si tratta di compensazioni che fanno saltare l'edificio keynesiano...
... it is a model based on two assumptions, the ineffectiveness of monetary policy and the lack of a self-correcting mechanism in the economy. The first assumption confuses the two (unrelated) concepts of gold standard policy constraints and absolute liquidity preference. And Keynes’s stagnation hypothesis falsely attributes problems caused by government labor market regulations to inherent defects in free-market capitalism...
Averli trascurati troppo ha ripercussioni ancora oggi nella mentalità di molti analisti che ripetono gli errori di allora nel diagnosticare la crisi attuale...
... If the monetary model in this book is correct, then we have fundamentally misdiagnosed the stock and commodities market crashes of late 2008,... Unfortunately, just as contemporaneous observers misdiagnosed those earlier crashes, our modern policymakers attributed the current recession to financial market instability, rather than to the deeper problem of falling nominal expenditures caused by excessively tight monetary policy....
Come giudicare il New Deal di Roosevelt? Male. Timido in politica monetaria e disastroso in politica del lavoro. Schizoide tra passività e interventismo, senza un piano comprensibile ai mercati. Di fatto ha trascinato la crisi per un decennio, poi le guerre mondiali hanno spazzato via tutto...
... At the deepest level, the causes of the Great Depression and World War II are very similar—both events were generated by policymakers moving unpredictably between passivity and interventionism...
La variabile chiave dei salari...
... high frequency fluctuations in real wages during the 1930s were tightly correlated with movements in industrial production. Understanding real wage cyclicality is the key to understanding the Great Depression...
I gravi errori di Roosevelt...
... New Deal legislation led to five separate nominal wage shocks, which repeatedly aborted promising economic recoveries...
Ma perché un'analisi incentrata sul gold standard è tanto utile?...
... is even more useful during the first five years after the United States departed from the gold standard. Under an international gold standard, the domestic money supply, the interest rate, and gold flows are not reliable indicators of domestic monetary policy...
Solo guardando all'oro capiamo la cosa più difficile da capire in macroeconomia: se siamo in presenza di politiche monetarie espansive.
***
Torniamo al problema metodologico della causalità. Di solito il prima e il dopo è l'unica bussola che possediamo...
... Economists often look for leads and lags...
Per noi il problema è quello di identificare gli schock monetari.
Assumendo emh (efficient market hypothesis) i mercati finanziari - che reagiscono istantaneamente - forniscono il segnale più affidabile circa la politica monetaria.
Ma per molti emh è problematica, lo abbiamo visto quando - nel 2008 - si è interpretato il crollo sui mercati come l'esplosione di una bolla immobiliare anziché come un segnale di politiche monetarie restrittive.
Ad ogni modo anche molti simpatizzanti di emh invocano un approccio più eclettico, per esempio Deirdre McCloskey. Il riferimento è sempre al capolavoro...
... the most relevant example would be Friedman and Schwartz’s Monetary History. Their work combined an extremely detailed narrative, insightful theoretical analysis, and a wealth of descriptive statistics...
Le ragioni dell'ecclettismo sono fondate: nel momento in cui le aspettative contano più delle azioni il mondo dei media e delle notizie diventa cruciale...
... I develop a narrative of the Great Depression that relies heavily on the relationship between policy news and the financial markets...
Difficile capire i mercati senza conoscere le voci di corridoio che circolano in un Ministero.
Certo, per la statistica sarebbe meglio studiare 100 crisi piuttosto che una sola, ma la crisi americana degli anni trenta presenta una volatilità che ci mette a disposizione una varietà di situazioni che per lo studioso sono una manna, inoltre, occupando un intervallo ben definito consente di isolare le notizie e il “sentiment”...
... It is easy to imagine finding a spurious correlation for a single observation; it is less obvious that it would be easy to do so for many dozens of observations that all exhibit a common causal relationship... It has been my good fortune that stock prices during the Depression were unusually volatile, and unusually closely related to policy-oriented news events linked to the world gold market and also to federal labor market policies....
Inoltre, la bussola dei mercati finanziari, ci mette a disposizione un segnale rapidissimo e affidabile di quel che avviene nel mondo opaco della politica (monetaria e no). I mercati reagiscono in un tempo medio che va dai 4 agli 8 minuti. Non è un modo di dire…
... A recent study of the U.S. Treasury bond market showed that if one divides the trading day into five-minute intervals, virtually all of the largest price changes occur during those five-minute intervals that immediately follow government data announcements...
***
Sul piano dei salari abbiamo 5 schock autonomi...
... On the supply side, there were five autonomous wage shocks during the New Deal, each of which led to higher nominal wage rates...
Sul piano della moneta è possibile registrare altrettante variazioni...
... On the demand side, a series of gold market shocks produced a highly unstable price level, which then impacted real wage rates...
Il mix di questi eventi spiega praticamente tutto...
... The mixture of gold market and labor market shocks can explain the high frequency changes in industrial production, and indeed can explain the Great Depression itself...
Si noti come una causa cruciale del tracollo sia la mancata collaborazione internazionale tra banche centrali, risorsa particolarmente preziosa in regime di gold standard. Il perché è chiaro: visto che l'oro ė disponibile in quantità limitate è bene che sia messo nelle mani della banca centrale più bisognosa. Se invece si crea una corsa all'accaparramento - sia da parte dei privati che da parte delle altre timorose banche centrali - gli inconvenienti sono facilmente prevedibili...
... I concentrate most of the analysis on how a lack of policy cooperation led to central bank gold hoarding and how devaluation fears triggered private gold hoarding... If I were to choose a metaphor for the approach taken in Part II, it might be something like “the Midas curse”—that is, a world impoverished by an excessive demand for gold...
***
Come possiamo concludere? Forse così: il modello classico (domanda e offerta) è perfettamente in grado di spiegare un evento anomalo come la Grande Depressione - e a maggior ragione la crisi del 2008. Il ricorso al confuso pragmatismo informale dei keynesiani non è necessario, sperare che poi le cose vadano “a posto da sole” non è obbligatorio, il convento passa di meglio. Le alternative ci sono e gli economisti le conoscono: meno timidezze nella politica monetaria e briglie al sindacato. La conferma che le cose stiano in questi termini? La conversione dei keynesiani in neo-keynesiani, ovvero in economisti che fondamentalmente accolgono queste critiche.
uovo

giovedì 16 marzo 2017

The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression by Scott B Sumner
You have 85 highlighted passages
You have 79 notes
Last annotated on March 16, 2017
1 IntroductionRead more at location 128
Note: 1@@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit
Many economists now see the initial contraction as being caused, or at least exacerbated, by monetary policy errors and/or defects in the international gold standard.Read more at location 130
Note: LA CAUSA ACCERTATA Edit
Some argue that New Deal policies delayed recoveryRead more at location 131
But we still lack a convincing narrative of the many twists and turns in the economy between 1929 and 1940.Read more at location 132
Note: 29 40 Edit
disturbances in the world gold market.Read more at location 134
Note: ELEMENTO SOTTOVALUTATO Edit
the seventeen high-frequency changes in the growth rate of U.S. industrial productionRead more at location 137
Note: 17 Edit
I will show that if we take the gold market seriously we can explain much more about the Great Depression than anyone had thought possible.Read more at location 138
Note: Tesi Edit
changes in central bank demand for gold, private sector gold hoarding, and changes in the price of gold.Read more at location 140
Note: I TRE SHOCK POSSIBILI Edit
remaining output shocks are linked to five wage shocks that resulted from the New Deal.Read more at location 141
Note: POI CI SONO GLI SHOCK DELLA POLITICA Edit
financial market responses to the policy shocks of the 1930s were consistent with a gold market approach,Read more at location 149
Note: GOLD E MERCATI FINANZ Edit
In 1963, Friedman and Schwartz’s Monetary History of the United States seemed to provide the definitive account of the role of monetary policy in the Great Depression.Read more at location 153
Note: IL PRECEDENTE Edit
Friedman and Schwartz paid too little attention to the worldwide nature of the Depression, especially the role of the international gold standard.Read more at location 154
Note: DIFETTINO DI UN CAPOLAVORO Edit
the complex interrelationship between gold, wages, and financial markets during the 1930s.Read more at location 177
Note: IL NODO Edit
I was shocked to see so many misconceptions from the Great Depression repeated in the current crisis:Read more at location 188
Note: 3 BUFALE SULLA GD Edit
Assuming causality runs from financial panic to falling aggregate demand (rather than vice versa).Read more at location 189
Note: CASUALITÀ Edit
Assuming that sharply falling short-term interest rates and a sharply rising monetary base meant “easy money.”Read more at location 191
Note: EASY MONEY Edit
Assuming that monetary policy became ineffective once rates hit zero.Read more at location 192
Note: ZERO BOUND Edit
the view that Fed policy was “easy” during late 2008 was almost universal.Read more at location 194
we congratulate the Fed for avoiding the mistakes of the 1930s, even as it repeats many of those mistakes.Read more at location 198
Note: ERRORI RIPETUTI Edit
Chapter 1Read more at location 202
Note: t Edit
financial markets respond immediatelyRead more at location 203
Note: RISORSA X CAPIRE I NESSI Edit
there was an especially close correlation between news stories related to gold and/or wage legislation and financial market prices.Read more at location 204
Note: CORRELAZIONI Edit
The demand shocks were triggered by gold hoarding (or changes in the price of gold), and the supply shocks were caused by policy-driven changes in hourly wage rates.Read more at location 206
Note: TESI E COLPEVOLI Edit
Chapter 2Read more at location 208
Note: t Edit
World monetary policy (as measured by changes in the gold reserve ratio) was stable between June 1928 and October 1929, and then tightened sharply over the following twelve months. It was this policy switch, perhaps combined with bearish sentiment from the reduced prospects for international monetary coordination, which triggered a sharp decline in aggregate demand.Read more at location 210
Note: LA STRETTA Edit
Chapter 3Read more at location 213
Note: t Edit
The German economic crisis of 1931 was a key turning point in the Depression. It led to substantial private gold hoarding, and between mid-1931 and late 1932 strongly impacted U.S. equity markets.Read more at location 214
Note: GERMANIA 1931 Edit
Chapter 4Read more at location 218
Note: t Edit
Keynes suggested that the Fed’s spring 1932 open market purchases might have been ineffective due to the existence of a “liquidity trap.”Read more at location 218
Note: TRAPPOLA? Edit
The open market purchases were associated with extensive gold hoarding, and this prevented any significant increase in the money supply.Read more at location 221
Note: MA Edit
Chapter 5Read more at location 223
Note: t Edit
President Roosevelt instituted a dollar depreciation program in April 1933 with the avowed goal of raising the price level back to its 1926 level. This program was unique in U.S. history and was the primary factor behind both the 57 percent surge in industrial production between March and July 1933 and the 22 percent rise in the wholesale price level in the twelve months after March 1933. The initial recovery was triggered not by a preceding monetary expansion, but rather by expectations of future monetary expansion.Read more at location 224
Note: ASPETTATIVE DI SVALUTAZIONE Edit
Chapter 6Read more at location 228
Note: t Edit
The National Recovery Administration (NRA) adopted a high wage policy in July 1933, which sharply increased hourly wage rates. This policy aborted the recovery, led to a major stock market crash, and helped lengthen the Depression by six to seven years.Read more at location 229
Note: NRA E SALARI Edit
a second “Great Depression” began in late July 1933,Read more at location 231
Note: c Edit
Chapter 7Read more at location 233
Note: t Edit
The gold-buying program of late 1933Read more at location 233
Note: POLITICA ESPANSIVA Edit
was essentially a monetary feedback rule aimed at returning prices to pre-Depression levels.Read more at location 235
Note: c Edit
Although the program helped promote economic recovery, it eventually became a major political issue and led key economic advisors to resign from the Roosevelt Administration.Read more at location 235
Note: MINATO DALL INCERTEZZA Edit
Chapter 8Read more at location 238
Note: t Edit
Although the conventional view is that Franklin D. Roosevelt took America off the gold standard, U.S. monetary policy became even more strongly linked to gold after 1934 than it had been before 1933. A recovery in the United States finally got underway when the Supreme Court declared the NIRA to be unconstitutional in mid-1935.Read more at location 239
Note: USCITA EFFETTIVA DEL GOLD STANDARD SOLO DAL 35 Edit
Chapter 9Read more at location 243
Note: t Edit
During 1937, the expansionary impact of gold dishoarding began to be offset by wage increases, which reflected the resurgence of unions after the Wagner Act and Roosevelt’s landslide reelection.Read more at location 246
Note: SALARI E ORO SI COMPENSANO Edit
Chapter 10Read more at location 249
Note: t Edit
Chapter 11Read more at location 255
Note: t Edit
A misinterpretation of two key policy initiatives, the open market purchases of 1932 and the NIRA, had a profound impact on macroeconomic theory during the twentieth century. Because early Keynesian theory was based on a misreading of these policies, it could not survive the radically altered policy environment of the postwar period.Read more at location 256
Note: FINE DI KEYNS X COLPA DELLA TRAPPOLA Edit
Chapter 12Read more at location 260
Note: t Edit
At the deepest level, the causes of the Great Depression and World War II are very similar—both events were generated by policymakers moving unpredictably between passivity and interventionism.Read more at location 263
Note: TRA PASSIVITÁ E INTERVENTISMO. ZERO REGOLE Edit
Chapter 13Read more at location 265
Note: t Edit
high frequency fluctuations in real wages during the 1930s were tightly correlated with movements in industrial production. Understanding real wage cyclicality is the key to understanding the Great Depression.Read more at location 267
Note: LA VARIABILE CHIAVE Edit
New Deal legislation led to five separate nominal wage shocks, which repeatedly aborted promising economic recoveries.Read more at location 269
Note: IL GRANDE ERRORE DEL NEW DEAL Edit
is even more useful during the first five years after the United States departed from the gold standard. Under an international gold standard, the domestic money supply, the interest rate, and gold flows are not reliable indicators of domestic monetary policy.Read more at location 271
Note: UTILITÀ DELL APPROCCIO GOLD STANDARD Edit
Methodological IssuesRead more at location 274
Note: t Edit
The problem of causalityRead more at location 274
Economists often look for leads and lagsRead more at location 276
Note: PRIMA E DOPO Edit
we still don’t know how to identify monetary “shocks.”Read more at location 277
Note: depressione Edit
gold marketRead more at location 279
Note: 2 mercati Edit
labor market)Read more at location 279
“efficient market hypothesis”Read more at location 280
Note: emh... Edit
we probably cannot go beyond financial market reactions to economic shocks.Read more at location 281
Note: c unico punto di riferimento x la policy Edit
(A modern example of this conundrum occurred when many pundits blamed the Fed for missing a housing bubble that was also missed by the financial markets.)Read more at location 283
Note: VASO NN COLTO DA EMH Edit
advocates the more eclectic approachRead more at location 285
Note: DEIDRE Edit
the most relevant example would be Friedman and Schwartz’s Monetary History. Their work combined an extremely detailed narrative, insightful theoretical analysis, and a wealth of descriptive statistics.Read more at location 286
Note: L ESEMPIO Edit
the narrative gives a sense of whether policy changes were exogenous,Read more at location 293
Note: PUNTO DI FORZA DI FROED Edit
I develop a narrative of the Great Depression that relies heavily on the relationship between policy news and the financial markets.Read more at location 312
Note: NOTIZIA E REAZIONE Edit
It is easy to imagine finding a spurious correlation for a single observation; it is less obvious that it would be easy to do so for many dozens of observations that all exhibit a common causal relationship.Read more at location 313
Note: CAUSA SUL NUMERO Edit
It has been my good fortune that stock prices during the Depression were unusually volatile, and unusually closely related to policy-oriented news events linked to the world gold market and also to federal labor market policies.Read more at location 319
Note: FORTUNA DELLA VOLATILITÁ Edit
stock prices were highly correlated with industrial productionRead more at location 329
One purpose of this study is to show that monetary policy lags are much shorter than many researchers have assumed,Read more at location 330
Note: LAG BREVI Edit
A recent study of the U.S. Treasury bond market showed that if one divides the trading day into five-minute intervals, virtually all of the largest price changes occur during those five-minute intervals that immediately follow government data announcements.Read more at location 342
Note: 5 MINUTI Edit
Although we need to look at qualitative news stories, this does not mean that we should dogmatically reject the tools of modern statistical analysis.Read more at location 353
Note: NOTIZIE MA ANCHE REGRESSIONI Edit
This supports new Keynesian models in which changes in the current setting of the policy instrument are much less important than changes in the future expected path of monetary policy.Read more at location 366
Note: ASPETTATIVE Edit
The Plan of the BookRead more at location 378
Note: t Edit
On the supply side, there were five autonomous wage shocks during the New Deal, each of which led to higher nominal wage rates.Read more at location 383
Note: SALARI 7 SCHOCK Edit
On the demand side, a series of gold market shocks produced a highly unstable price level, which then impacted real wage rates.Read more at location 384
Note: SCHOCK GOLD Edit
The mixture of gold market and labor market shocks can explain the high frequency changes in industrial production, and indeed can explain the Great Depression itself.Read more at location 385
Note: MIX Edit
In Part II (Chapters 2–4), I focus on the Great Contraction of 1929–1932.Read more at location 388
Note: 1929 32 CONTRACTION Edit
I concentrate most of the analysis on how a lack of policy cooperation led to central bank gold hoarding and how devaluation fears triggered private gold hoarding.Read more at location 390
Note: CAUSE Edit
If I were to choose a metaphor for the approach taken in Part II, it might be something like “the Midas curse”—that is, a world impoverished by an excessive demand for gold.Read more at location 392
Note: MIDAS CURSE Edit
Because the expansionary impact of dollar depreciation was largely offset by the contractionary impact of the NIRA wage codes, economic historians have greatly underestimated the importance of each shock considered in isolation.Read more at location 396
Note: OFFSET E ILLUSIONI Edit
it is a model based on two assumptions, the ineffectiveness of monetary policy and the lack of a self-correcting mechanism in the economy. The first assumption confuses the two (unrelated) concepts of gold standard policy constraints and absolute liquidity preference. And Keynes’s stagnation hypothesis falsely attributes problems caused by government labor market regulations to inherent defects in free-market capitalism.Read more at location 409
Note: DIFETTI DEL MODELLO KEYNESIANO Edit
If the monetary model in this book is correct, then we have fundamentally misdiagnosed the stock and commodities market crashes of late 2008,Read more at location 414
Note: RIFLESSI SULLA CRISI DI PGGI Edit
Unfortunately, just as contemporaneous observers misdiagnosed those earlier crashes, our modern policymakers attributed the current recession to financial market instability, rather than to the deeper problem of falling nominal expenditures caused by excessively tight monetary policy.Read more at location 415
Note: VERE CAUSE DEL 2008. POLITICA RESTRITTIVA. NO BOLLA Edit
A Simple AS/AD FrameworkRead more at location 420
It would be an understatement to suggest that the AS/AD model works well for the contraction of 1929–1933; it is the event the model was built to explain.Read more at location 421
Note: IL MODELLO CHE SPIEGA Edit