Why is this? Can one resolve BOP crises and still not promote economic recovery? That is, it seems to me to be possible to pay off the fat cats and not promote economic recovery...
Have you checked the Bloomfield cite or the De Cecco one? Bloomfield is the one who used the "able and authoritative" phrase, by the way.
>...
>Thus when one finds the "able and authoritative" New York Times
>correspondent saying x about international capital flows, one should first
>ask: (a) Is what he is saying consistent with the import, export, and
>official settlement totals of the country in question? If not, then ask:
>(b) Does he have magic sources of information that make his observations
>much more reliable than those gotten from the balance-of-trade statistics?
>The answer to (b) is "no." There are times and places where
>balance-of-trade statistics are really badly messed up, but post-World War
>II western Europe is not one of them.
>
>Since the answer to (a) is "no" as well, the right thing to conclude is
>that Mr. Hoffman (able and authoritative as he may be) is simply one more
>example of the fact that in a world this big you can find five people
>willing to say anything. And Mr. Helleiner suffers from one of the big
>vices of political historians: taking what some observer says about
>economics as evidence without inquiring whether said observer could have
>known what he was talking about.
What, again, is your evidence that the answer to (a) is "no"?
>Do I think that more should have been done to nationalize American assets
>of western Europeans and use them to fund European recovery? Yes. Was
>Marshall Plan aid immediately turned around and used dollar-for-dollar to
>boost the New York assets of European plutocrats? No. Can Noam Chomsky
>count? No.
I was under the impression that it was not necessarily only European fat cats who were benefitting, but US corporations who were selling goods and services to Europe (Chomsky says, "the generosity was overwhelmingly bestowed by American taxpayers upon the corporate sector").
Also, Chomsky never claimed "dollar-for-dollar" parity. He claimed that the flows "approximately matched".
You yourself posted the following on September 4:
>US Imports and Exports of Goods and Services, Billions of Dollars:
>
> 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952
> ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ====
>Exports: 14.1 18.7 15.5 14.4 12.3 17.0 16.3
>Imports: 7.0 7.9 10.1 9.2 11.6 14.6 15.3
>
>
>If Marshall Plan aid had just matched the net flow of capital from Europe
>to New York banks, then U.S. trade would have been roughly balanced during
>the Marshall Plan years...
>
>It wasn't.
However, by your own data:
1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 Exports-Imports: 7.1 10.8 5.4 5.2 0.7 2.4 1.0
So, 10.8 is "roughly balanced"? Is an increase of in BOP of 52% from 1947 to 1948 "roughly balanced"?
Perhaps I should employ your methods and claim that you asserted "dollar-for-dollar" parity, and then show that the above is evidence that "Brad De Long cannot count".
But I don't do that sort of thing...
Bill