土曜日, 3月 23, 2019

2019-03-22-capitalisms-elusive-magic-number-a-prevailing-real-interest-rate-that-kills-two-birds-with-one-stone/

387 考える名無しさん[] 2019/03/23(土) 21:44:21.25 ID:0 
ヤニス・バルファキス氏に言わせると、停滞は資本主義の自然状態。
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-03-22-capitalisms-elusive-magic-number-a-prevailing-real-interest-rate-that-kills-two-birds-with-one-stone/

佐藤優氏が「金融工学の真髄、格差問題の本質がこの本を読めばよくわかる」と絶賛
ヤニス・バルファキス（Yanis Varoufakis）
1961年アテネ生まれ。2015年、ギリシャの経済危機時に財務大臣を務め、EUから財政緊縮策を迫られるなか大幅な債務帳消しを主張し、世界的な話題となった。長年イギリス、オーストラリア、アメリカで経済学を教え、現在はアテネ大学で経済学教授を務めている。著書には本書の他に、EU経済の問題を指摘した『そして弱者は困窮する』（未邦訳）や「史上最良の政治的回想録の1つ」（ガーディアン紙）と評された『アダルツ・イン・ザ・ルーム』（未邦訳）など、数々の世界的ベストセラーを持つ。2016年にはDiEM25(民主的ヨーロッパ運動2025)を共同で設立し、その理念を世界中に訴えている。

関美和（せき・みわ）
翻訳家。杏林大学准教授。慶應義塾大学卒業後、電通、スミス・バーニー勤務を経て、ハーバード・ビジネス・スクールでMBA取得。モルガン・スタンレー投資銀行を経て、クレイ・フィンレイ投資顧問東京支店長を務める。主な訳書に『誰が音楽をタダにした?』（ハヤカワ文庫NF）、『MAKERS 21世紀の産業革命が始まる』『ゼロ・トゥ・ワン 君はゼロから何を生み出せるか』（NHK出版）、『FACTFULNESS 10の思い込みを乗り越え、データを基に世界を正しく見る習慣』（日経BP社）、『明日を生きるための教養が身につく ハーバードのファイナンスの授業』（ダイヤモンド社）など。





Today’s free marketeers attribute the failure of inflation to rise, despite wage growth and low unemployment, to a new normal — a new “natural” inflation rate. With their Panglossian blinders, whatever they observe is assumed to be the most natural outcome in the most natural of all possible economic systems..

Former Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, during a press conference with several members of other parties and movements to present the results of the Second Council of the Transnational List, Lisbon, Portugal, 26 April 2018. The session presented the results of the Council meeting, which discussed issues such as the name of the common list or the relationship with other movements, parties and lists for the 2019 elections. EPA-EFE/JOSE SENA GOULAO 

When the Great Depression followed the 1929 stock-market crash, almost everyone acknowledged that capitalism was unstable, unreliable, and prone to stagnation. In the decades that followed, however, that perception changed. Capitalism’s postwar revival, and especially the post-Cold War rush to financialised globalisation, resurrected faith in markets’ self-regulating abilities.

Today, a long decade after the 2008 global financial crisis, this touching faith once again lies in tatters as capitalism’s natural tendency towards stagnation reasserts itself. The rise of the racist right, the fragmentation of the political centre and mounting geopolitical tensions are mere symptoms of capitalism’s miasma.

A balanced capitalist economy requires a magic number, in the form of the prevailing real (inflation-adjusted) interest rate. It is magic because it must kill two very different birds, flying in two very different skies, with a single stone.

First, it must balance employers’ demand for waged labour with the available labour supply. Second, it must equalise savings and investment. If the prevailing real interest rate fails to balance the labour market, we end up with unemployment, precariousness, wasted human potential and poverty. If it fails to bring investment up to the level of savings, deflation sets in and feeds back into even lower investment.

It takes a heroic disposition to assume that this magic number exists or that, even if it does, our collective endeavours will result in an actual real interest rate close to it. How do free marketeers convince themselves that there exists a single real interest rate (say, 2%) that would inspire investors to funnel all existing savings into productive investments and spur employers to hire everyone who wishes to work at the prevailing wage?

Faith in capitalism’s capacity to generate this magic number stems from a truism. Milton Friedman liked to say that if a commodity is not scarce, then it has no value and its price must be zero. Thus, if its price is not zero, it must be scarce and, therefore, there must be a price at which no units of that commodity will be left unsold. Similarly, if the prevailing wage is not zero, all those who want to work for that wage will find a job.

Applying the same logic to savings, to the extent that money can fund the production of machines that will produce valuable gadgets, there must be a low enough interest rate at which someone will borrow all available savings profitably to build these machines. By definition, concluded Friedman, the real interest rate settles down, quite automatically, to the magic level that eliminates both unemployment and excess savings.

If that were true, capitalism would never stagnate — unless a meddling government or self-seeking trade union damaged its dazzling machinery. Of course, it is not true, for three reasons.

First, the magic number does not exist. Second, even if it did, there is no mechanism that would help the real interest rate converge towards it. And, third, capitalism has a natural tendency to usurp markets via the strengthening of what John Kenneth Galbraith called the cartel-like managerial “technostructure”.

Europe’s current situation demonstrates amply the non-existence of the magical real interest rate. The EU’s financial system is holding up to €3-trillion ($3.4-trillion) of savings that refuse to be invested productively, even though the European Central Bank’s deposit interest rate is -0.4%. Meanwhile, the European Union’s current-account surplus in 2018 amounted to a gargantuan $450-billion. For the euro’s exchange rate to weaken enough to eliminate the current-account surplus, while also clearing the savings glut, the ECB’s interest rate must fall to at least -5%, a number that would destroy Europe’s banks and pension funds in the blink of an eye.

Setting aside the magical interest rate’s non-existence, capitalism’s natural tendency to stagnation also reflects the failure of money markets to adjust. Free marketeers assume that all prices magically adjust until they reflect commodities’ relative scarcity. In reality, they do not. When investors learn that the Federal Reserve or the ECB is thinking of reversing its earlier intention to increase interest rates, they worry that the decision reflects a gloomy outlook regarding overall demand. So, rather than boosting investment, they reduce it.

Instead of investing, they embark on more mergers and acquisitions, which strengthen the technostucture’s capacity to fix prices, lower wages, and spend their cash buying up their companies’ own shares to boost their bonuses. Consequently, excess savings increase further and prices fail to reflect relative scarcity or, to be more precise, the only scarcity that prices, wages, and interest rates end up reflecting is the scarcity of aggregate demand for goods, labour, and savings.

What is remarkable is how unaffected free marketeers are by the facts. When their dogmas crash on the shoals of reality, they weaponise the epithet “natural”. In the 1970s, they predicted that unemployment would disappear if inflation were subdued. When, in the 1980s, unemployment remained stubbornly high despite low inflation, they proclaimed that whatever unemployment rate prevailed must have been “natural”.

Similarly, today’s free marketeers attribute the failure of inflation to rise, despite wage growth and low unemployment, to a new normal — a new “natural” inflation rate. With their Panglossian blinders, whatever they observe is assumed to be the most natural outcome in the most natural of all possible economic systems.

But capitalism has only one natural tendency: Stagnation. Like all tendencies, it is possible to overcome by means of stimuli.

One is exuberant financialisation, which produces tremendous medium-term growth at the expense of long-term heartache. The other is the more sustainable tonic injected and managed by a surplus-recycling political mechanism, such as during the WWII-era economy or its postwar extension, the Bretton Woods system. But at a time when politics is as broken as financialisation, the world has never needed a post-capitalist vision more.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of the automation that currently adds to our stagnation woes will be to inspire such a vision. DM

Yanis Varoufakis, a former finance minister of Greece, is Professor of Economics at the University of Athens.

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No, not really. But now that we have your attention, we wanted to tell you a little bit about what happened at SARS.

Tom Moyane and his cronies bequeathed South Africa with a R48-billion tax shortfall, as of February 2018. It's the only thing that grew under Moyane's tenure... the year before, the hole had been R30.7-billion. And to fund those shortfalls, you know who has to cough up? You - the South African taxpayer.

It was the sterling work of a team of investigative journalists, Scorpio’s Pauli van Wyk and Marianne Thamm along with our great friends at amaBhungane, that caused the SARS capturers to be finally flushed out of the system. Moyane, Makwakwa… the lot of them... gone.

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posted by yoji at 6:09 午前