Posted on 08/20/2016 5:07:07 PM PDT by Lorianne
Why have economies polarized so sharply since the 1980s, and especially since the 2008 crisis? How did we get so indebted without real wage and living standards rising, while cities, states, and entire nations are falling into default? Only when we answer these questions can we formulate policies to extract ourselves from the current debt crises. There is widespread sentiment that this crisis is fundamental, and that we cannot simply “go back to normal.” But deep confusion remains over the theoretical framework that should guide analysis of the post-bubble economy.
The last quarter century’s macro-monetary management, and the theory and ideology that underpinned it, was lauded by leading macroeconomists asserting that “The State of Macro[economics] is Good” (Blanchard 2008, 1). Oliver Blanchard, Ben Bernanke, Gordon Brown, and others credited their own monetary policies for the remarkably low inflation and stable growth of what they called the “Great Moderation” (Bernanke 2004), and proclaimed the “end of boom and bust,” as Gordon Brown did in 2007. But it was precisely this period from the mid-1980s to 2007 that saw the fastest and most corrosive inflation in real estate, stocks, and bonds since World War II.
Nearly all this asset-price inflation was debt-leveraged. Money and credit were not spent on tangible capital investment to produce goods and non-financial services, and did not raise wage levels. The traditional monetary tautology MV=PT, which excludes assets and their prices, is irrelevant to this process. Current cutting-edge macroeconomic models since the 1980s do not include credit, debt, or a financial sector (King 2012; Sbordone et al. 2010), and are equally unhelpful. They are the models of those who “did not see it coming” (Bezemer 2010, 676).
In this article, we present the building blocks for an alternative. This will be based on our scholarly work over the last few years, standing on the shoulders of such giants as John Stuart Mill, Joseph Schumpeter, and Hyman Minsky.
Immoderate debt creation was behind that “Great Moderation” (Grydaki and Bezemer 2013). That is what made this economy the “Great Polarization” between creditors and debtors. This financial expansion took the form more of rent extraction than of profits on production (Bezemer and Hudson 2012) — a fact missed in most analyses today (for a proposal, see Kanbur and Stiglitz 2015). This blind spot results from the fact that balance sheets, credit, and debt are missing from today’s models.
The credit crisis and recession are, therefore, a true paradigm test for economics (Bezemer 2011, 2012a, 2012b). We can only hope to understand crisis and recession by developing models that incorporate credit, debt, and the financial sector (Bezemer 2010; Bezemer and Hudson 2012). Here we provide the conceptual underpinning for this claim.
SNIP
Personal debt is to be avoided. Business debt hard to avoid.
Poor Michael, finance has been the economy for a couple of decades. Movies about ‘arbitrage’ and Wall street weren’t fantasy. Any guess as to how much of our wealth is on paper? I have no idea but I bet’s it’s well over 50%.
How did we get so indebted without real wage and living “standards rising, while cities, states, and entire nations are falling into default? “
It’s called embezzlement or sometimes, graft
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