Matt Nolan

Supply shocks, demand shocks, and corridors

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In a recent post by Arnold Kling I see him hinting at the similarities between his recalculation view of the current recession and the corridor theory of Axel Leijonhufvud.  Now I agree with both these theories, and feel they add an important flavour to current debate – but I think the theories actually tell us about very separate elements of any large scale recession.

In order to get my head around my feelings I’ll have a brief talk about shocks, and the kind of shocks I think are being represented by the different theories.  Feel free to tell me where I am blatantly wrong.

Now, for the non-economist readers I guess this post is a little wonkish in nature – although there will be no maths sitting around this time.

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Matt Nolan

Against the 10 reasons for Fitch downgrading NZ

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Bernard Hickey posted on the 10 reasons why Fitch should downgrade New Zealand’s credit rating, it is an interesting post that you should run off and read before looking at this 🙂

Now that you have read that I am, for the sake of argument, going to counter each of these points. I cannot provide a “slamdunk” against anything, but I can raise the other side of the argument so that we can really think about the issues that little bit more.

Note that in many ways I agree with Bernard Hickey about our current situation being slightly precarious. However, I feel that going through these factors on the other side is a useful exercise for understand exactly what we need to look at.

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Matt Nolan

We doth blame the household too much

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I was raised as a microeconomist so I guess I have a bias, but all this discussion about our poor debt position being the fault of households makes me nervous.

It is easy to blame households, hell the RBNZ did that just today. As they point out, household savings is extremely low, and real consumption (the volume of consumption in 1995/96 prices) as a share of GDP has risen sharply in recent years. On Sunday Rod Oram did the same – blaming our debt position on households spending far too much.

However, I find that when economists start to agree we are usually wrong. Given that this argument doesn’t feel right to me in the first place I am being forced to disagree.

I have two “pieces of evidence” to suggest that households aren’t at fault here, and instead it is weird investment incentives and poor government policy that is likely to be at fault. These are:

  1. My good friend Ricardian equivalence,
  2. Nominal GDP shares.

This discussion is a slight expansion on my recent Dom Post article (secondary link), and I am hoping everyone here will be willing to attack me as much as possible 😉

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Matt Nolan

On penalty cash rates

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Scott Fullwiler from New Economic Perspectives (ht Economists View) describes some issues he has with the “negative interest rate” idea being put forward by Willem Buiter , Greg Mankiw , and Scott Sumner

Now I have previously put my foot forward and said I agree with this idea (here and here) and I still feel the same, let me describe why with reference to Dr Fullwiler’s post.

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Matt Nolan

Cartoon: Recessions don’t hurt everyone

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(Source GWS)

Remember, even during the Great Depression there were people that were better off than they would have been.  There are always winners and losers.

When prices are falling, and when relative prices change, there are people who benefit from that – as well as people that lose out.  During such an event we normally only hear one side of the story …

Will Taylor

Investment bankers piss take

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These are real investment bankers (who I may or may not know…). Laughed my ass off when this arrived in my inbox this morning.

financialcrisis