Brief Overview as to the State of World Macroeconomics II

Part one can be found here.

Here's a depressing round table with Krugman and some other huge macroeconomists. It's 55 minutes and grim.

To add to that Ezra Klein talks about pretty similar scenarios in which growth is basically stagnate for the next 10-20 years.

Almost no one, not even my most liberal friends, want to hear about more stimulus spending. Yet, government size has decreased by 350,000 jobs since Obama took office, and over the last two years government expenditures have risen a paltry 3% - well below what they were for the previous two years and far below typical economic growth rates. But year America is somehow now socialist. The point is to fill the gap in spending temporarily until it picks up again. Exact numbers are given and they're huge - the initial bill was about half the size it needed to be and 40% tax cuts. Of course it was going to have a weak effect.

The market has been doing fairly well recently and some people are calling for a correction (essentially a devaluation) of anything from very little to 90%. The Big Picture's writer, Barry Ritholtz, is guessing that about 25% is perhaps at the high end, but at the same time - do you want to make money or do you want to be right?

Staying with Ritholtz for a minute - he says we need an intervention as a nation. This is in light of the fact that the foreclosure process (great article) has recently been shown to be in tatters, or rather, businesses that serve foreclosures are falsifying documents proving ownership of a loan that courts then use to seize property. Yeah, that's illegal.

Peter Diamond and two collaborators won the Nobel Prize in Economics (I know, I know - it's not the original) this morning. Why does his name sound familiar? Obama selected him as a Fed governor but the Republicans in the Senate blocked his nomination citing his lack of relevant experience. Then why did Obama choose him? Well, besides the fact that he was Bernacke's professor he also wrote the seminal paper, which he's now won a Nobel for, on... wait for it... unemployment in a distressed market (see: America, present).

Tax receipts get proposed:

I often get asked, or rather chided, about my support for TARP. It's somewhat hard to explain shadow banking to someone who doesn't really know how a reserve ratio works. Anyways, America get its money back and may even make a profit. PLus the banking system didn't collapse... yay? Somehow I feel as if that would have led to zombie attacks... I know, it's weird.

And the real reason I wanted to write about this: "China has an unloaded water pistol at our head"

Everyone knows that we trade a lot with China. They are out second largest trading partner after Canada, but what most people don't know is that China keeps its currency undervalued on purpose in order to increase its export volume. Normally if an import country taxes a good coming in, a tariff, the country where the good originated from gets mad so almost no one does that. Trade is mostly open in the world today - as in most cases it should be. But China "sterilizes" its inflows. What does that mean? When there's a trade imbalance one countries monetary base (amount of currency in its economy) gets bigger, so every year money flows from the US to China faster than the opposite. Every year Chinese currency becomes stronger in proportion to our currency as their monetary base grows. Normally this would mean that their currency, the renminbi, would be appreciate relative to the dollar. Literally, a dollar would buy less in China. Chinese exports would cost more and the US would buy less. That's how trade usually balances itself, so why doesn't that happen.

The Chinese sterilize inflows. That means that the Chinese government uses that excess domestic currency to buy US government debt so that their monetary base won't expand which keeps prices low and exports up. This essentially allows the Chinese to put a tariff on US imports and a subsidy on exports, but most people don't understand sterilization and thus it isn't perceived that way (Krugman's explanation).

The US recently passed the Levin Bill allowing the government the power to place a tariff on any country that manipulates its currency. The Chinese are pissed. They keep saying they will let their currency float (act naturally on the markets) but they never do - they just keep stringing us out.