MetaFilter posts tagged with Economics and crisis

Level 2 is more worrisome. Level 3 is hair-raising.

vidur — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 18:12:28 -0800

"We decided to go on an adventure through the financial statements of one bank [Wells Fargo], to explore exactly what they do and do not show, and to gauge whether it is possible to make informed judgments about the risks the bank may be carrying. We chose a bank that is thought to be a conservative financial institution, and an exemplar of what a large modern bank should be."

The limit does not exist

Hypnotic Chick — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 12:15:00 -0800

The complete guide to America's jobs crisis and the failure of monetary policy using animated gifs

Pick your side. Pick your history.

vidur — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 19:42:37 -0800

"Some date the crisis to August 9 2007, the day it became clear that Europe’s banks were up to their necks in US housing debt. The ECB flooded markets with €95bn of liquidity. It seemed a lot of money then. The term “trillion” was still banned by the Telegraph style book in those innocent days. We have since learned to swing with the modern dance music from central banks." [Five years on, the Great Recession is turning into a life sentence]

Financial Markets, Politics and the New Reality

the mad poster! — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 13:01:29 -0800

Financial Markets, Politics and the New Reality: "Louis M. Bacon is the head of Moore Capital Management, one of the largest and most influential hedge funds in the world. Last week, he announced that he was returning one quarter of his largest fund, about $2 billion, to his investors, [saying] it is impossible to make money when there is heavy political involvement, because political involvement introduces unpredictability in the market… Adam Smith and David Ricardo, who modern investors so admire, [never] used the term "economics" by itself, but only in conjunction with politics; they called it political economy… The investors' problem is that they mistake the period between 1991 and 2008 as the norm and keep waiting for it to return."

Hint: the answer is democracy.

mhjb — Sun, 20 May 2012 03:43:08 -0800

The Costs of Capitalism's Crisis: Who Will Pay? Economics professor Richard Wolff gives some context to the latest economic crisis and suggests a solution to prevent this from happening again.

nonsense economics

crayz — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:48:49 -0800

"I call it the destruction of shared prosperity hypothesis. ... [A]round 1980 the U.S. adopted a fundamentally flawed economic paradigm ... that abandoned full employment and severed the link between wages and productivity growth. ... Financial deregulation, regulatory forbearance, financial innovation, financial mania, and plain vanilla financial fraud kept the economy going by making ever more credit available, However, as the economy cannibalized itself by undercutting income distribution and accumulating debt, it needed ever larger speculative bubbles to grow. The house price bubble was simply the last and biggest bubble and was effectively the only way around the stagnation that would otherwise have developed in 2001." - an interview with Thomas Palley on the origins and prognosis for the crisis

Bubbles and Public Facts

kliuless — Mon, 23 May 2011 14:23:01 -0800

The Destruction of Economic Facts - "Renowned Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto argues that the financial crisis wasn't just about finance—it was about a staggering lack of knowledge" (via)

During the second half of the 19th century... To prevent the breakdown of industrial and commercial progress, hundreds of creative reformers concluded that the world needed a shared set of facts. Knowledge had to be gathered, organized, standardized, recorded, continually updated, and easily accessible... The result was the invention of the first massive "public memory systems" to record and classify—in rule-bound, certified, and publicly accessible registries, titles, balance sheets, and statements of account—all the relevant knowledge available... for investors to infer value, take risks, and track results... Over the past 20 years, Americans and Europeans have quietly gone about destroying these facts. The results are hardly surprising. In the U.S., trust has broken down...

BONUS

The Gaussian copula function tattoo
The financial crisis was a major event which was caused by Wall Street's shortsighted greed — a greed which is epitomized in the way that the copula function became ubiquitous even though risk managers and even Li himself knew full well that it was extremely limited in how it should be used. If we want to 'be vigilant and not forget' the destructive potential of Wall Street, then the Gaussian copula function is actually a really good thing to get as a tattoo. There's an irony here too. Elms got this tattoo, in part, because of its very incomprehensibility — the way it epitomizes the way that Wall Street is 'predicated in obfuscation'. But Wall Street embraced Li's formula for the opposite reason — that it was very tractable and easy to understand, at least if you were a quant with a degree in finance. Elms's tattoo is the version of the formula which I used in the Wired article — but it's not, actually, the version of the formula which was used day-to-day on Wall Street... Most representations of the copula look nothing like that, and are much harder to understand. All of which shows that Elms is absolutely right, at heart, about the copula function and what it represents. To Wall Street, it's simple and easy — disastrously so. To the rest of us, however, it makes a Semiotext(e) book look like a Sesame Street lyric. And that, I think, is why Levin and Elms are going to be disappointed, and Blankfein is going to remain out of jail. Back in 1933, when Ferdinand Pecora uncovered huge scandals on Wall Street, they were easy for all Americans to understand, and easy to protect against. This time around, Wall Street's activities are incomprehensible not only to the lay person but even to senior bankers: a big part of the reason why the crisis was so big and so bad is precisely that people like Stan O'Neal and Bob Rubin failed at their job of understanding the risks their banks were taking. They were knavishly foolish, but still more fools than knaves — which means that it's extremely hard to make a strong case in front of a jury that what they did was criminal.
The new argument against financial innovation - "It is from the not yet but soon to be famous Alp Simsek, at Harvard, and smart people tell me it is important and already influential..." cf. Speculation and Risk Sharing with New Financial Assets
While the traditional view of financial innovation emphasizes the risk sharing role of new financial assets, belief disagreements about these assets naturally lead to speculation... Financial innovation always decreases the uninsurable variance because new assets increase the possibilities for risk sharing. My main result shows that financial innovation also always increases the speculative variance. This is true even if traders completely agree about the payoffs of new assets. The intuition behind this result is the hedge-more/bet-more effect: Traders use new assets to hedge their bets on existing assets, which in turn enables them to place larger bets and take on greater risks. This effect suggests that financial innovation is more likely to be destabilizing in more complete financial markets and when it concerns derivative assets... A question emerges as to how new assets should be introduced to minimize their short run impact on the speculative variance. I show that staggering (or delaying) the introduction of new assets is not effective because it reduces traders learning simultaneously with their speculation. A viable alternative is to set temporary position limits (or taxes) on new assets.
Financial Repression - "There are only a few ways to bring down sovereign debt burdens. Growth is one, but growth may be impaired by high debt burdens. Austerity is another, but to cut debts this way requires a long period of painful policy, of the sort that's rarely tolerable to electorates. Default is another way. And rapid inflation is another way still... a fifth option—financial repression—was key to quickly and relatively painlessly addressing large sovereign debts... The tight financial controls associated with post-Depression financial regulation and the introduction of the Bretton Woods system enabled a period of financial repression that persisted from the end of the war to around 1980. This period was characterised by low real interest rates (during this time they were quite often negative) persistently, modestly high inflation rates, and rapid reduction in debt levels thanks largely to this 'financial repression tax'. It was an incredibly effective mix of policies." cf. The Liquidation of Government Debt [1,2,3]

What's the problem?

kliuless — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 05:43:33 -0800

Interview with Gary Gorton (pdf) - Fascinating look at private institutional bank money creation (really) and subsequent run on the shadow banking system that hearkens back to the late-19th century banking crises with securitization playing the role of checking before the advent of deposit insurance. "Gorton is a lucid narrator of a complex tale." (via via)

"Leading bankers destroy £7 of value for every pound they generate."

emjaybee — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 15:08:38 -0800

The New Economics Foundation, also responsible for the Happy Planet Index and Jubilee 2000 campaign, has released a study (full text here) about the values and costs of different professions to society.

The Wealth of Nature

symbollocks — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:15:01 -0800

Recently, John Michael Greer has been exploring a little known idea of the deceased economist E.F. Schumacher (a student of the oft-discussed Keynes). "Schumacher drew a hard distinction between primary goods and secondary goods. The latter of these includes everything dealt with by conventional economics: the goods and services produced by human labor and exchanged among human beings. The former includes all those things necessary for human life and economic activity that are produced not by human beings, but by nature. Schumacher pointed out that primary goods, as the phrase implies, need to come first in any economic analysis because they supply the preconditions for the production of secondary goods. Renewable resources, he proposed, form the equivalent of income in the primary economy, while nonrenewable resources are the equivalent of capital; to insist that an economic system is sound when it is burning through nonrenewable resources at a rate that will lead to rapid depletion is thus as silly as claiming that a business is breaking even if it’s covering up huge losses by drawing down its bank accounts." The series of essays so far: Survival Isn't Cost-Effective - (In which he tears apart one of the most proposed solutions for peak oil - ecovillages and lifeboat communities.) "The unstated assumption seems to be that as soon as the intrepid residents of such a community move into their solar-heated cohousing units, start up the wind turbines and the methane generators, and get to work harvesting tree crops from the permacultured landscaping all around, industrial civilization will disappear in a puff of smoke and take its taxes, debts, and miscellaneous expenses with it. Pleasant though the prospect might seem, I am sorry to say that this isn’t going to happen." The Thermodynamic Economy - (In which he tackles tackles the problem of stagflation.) "He [Schumacher] pointed out that for a modern industrial society, energy resources are not simply one set of commodities among many others. They are the ur-commodities, the fundamental resources that make economic activity possible at all, and the rules that govern the behavior of other commodities cannot be applied to energy resources in a simplistic fashion. Commented Schumacher in Small is Beautiful: 'I have already alluded to the energy problem in some of the other chapters. It is impossible to get away from it. It is impossible to overemphasize its centrality. [...] As long as there is enough primary energy – at tolerable prices – there is no reason to believe that bottlenecks in any other primary materials cannot be either broken or circumvented. On the other hand, a shortage of primary energy would mean that the demand for most other primary products would be so curtailed that a question of shortage with regard to them would be unlikely to arise' (p. 123)." Where Economics Fails - (Where he explores the misapplication of the idea of supply and demand.) "the theoretical relationship between supply and demand functions only when supply is not constrained by factors outside the economic sphere. The constraints in question can be physical: no matter how much money you’re willing to pay for a perpetual motion machine, for instance, you can’t have one, because the laws of thermodynamics don’t take bribes. They may be political: Nazi Germany had a large demand for oil from 1943 to 1945, for example, and the Allies had plenty of oil to sell, but anyone who assumed on that basis that a deal would be cut was in for a big disappointment. They may be technical: no matter how much you spend on health care, for instance, sooner or later it’s going to fail, because nobody’s yet been able to develop an effective treatment for death." The Wealth of Nature - (In which he explains why Adam Smith was wrong to say "The annual labor of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessities and conveniences of life.") "Thus Adam Smith’s dictum cited earlier badly needs reformulation. The product of the natural environment of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessities and conveniences of life; the annual human labor is simply the energy input required to turn some of that product into forms useful for human beings. The wealth of nations, it turns out, is ultimately the wealth of nature, and the sooner the value of natural cycles and primary goods is taken into account, the better chance our descendants will have of avoiding the self-defeating habits that are pushing modern industrial system down the long road to collapse."

Why Wall Street Always Blows It

SeizeTheDay — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 11:10:15 -0800

Why Wall Street Always Blows It, and why we're always to blame, as told by banished securities analyst Henry Blodget.

"To redeem the demand tickets they have written, the balancers must in turn sell dragonslayer tickets."

orthogonality — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:30:40 -0800

Nitroeconomics (if you want to sound more scientific you can call it synthetic economics) is different. It is set in the virtual world of Nitropia, which doesn't exist but easily could.... We can use nitroeconomics to understand real situations in the real world, such as the subprime crisis, with a simple three-step process.... The first cool thing about Nitropia is that it has no financial system at all. Unlike other, inferior virtual economies, it does not distinguish between "money" and other virtual objects. A monetary token in Nitropia is an object like any other - a magic sword, an inflatable penis, or whatever. A player in Nitropia who has a lot of money just owns a lot of these tokens. There is no special, separate "bank balance."

A[n Austrian-school] straightforward explanation of the present financial crisis (part 1) (Posting a link does not necessarily endorsement or derision of the content of that link.)