Monsanto-like, I continue to abuse loopholes in the posts-per-day regulation ....
"Seth Ackerman" writes:
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> [The bourgie consensus is now that the U.S. economy is bottoming, or
>> has already bottomed, and is about to turn up, perhaps strongly. The
>> leftie consensus is that it's only begun worsening. Hmmm.]
>
> So far no one has successfully refuted Wynne Godley's argument that the
> financial imbalance in the US private sector will prevent any real
recovery.
>
> The private sector is running a deficit of almost 6%. The historical
average
> since 1960 is a surplus of almost 3%. That's an enormous departure from
> historical norms. Every other country that's gone this route in recent
> times - Japan, Sweden, Finland, England - have all eventually experienced
a
> sharp reversion to the mean - and then overshot.
Being fair, the USA goes into this one with substantially lower nominal interest rates than were the case at the beginning of any of those recessions. Balance sheet gearing matters in prolonged real downturns, but what sends people and firms into financial distress is cashflow.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 04:05:14 -0800 (PST) From: Barry DeCicco Subject: Re: falsifiability
From: Jim Farmelant
>>Some natural sciences are non-experimental, or mostly
>>non-experimental, like astronomy, geology, and
>>paleontology.
>>Jim F.
>And economics. Which is sometimes good for tripping
>up the stereotypical engineer/physical
>scientist-libertarian, who thinks of economics as the
>only 'real' social science.
------------------------------
I think it's helpful in the case of economics to make the distinction that the Russians did, between political economic and "economic cybernetics". The second one, which is the one which has all the formalism, is a branch of engineering and was correctly treated as such by the Soviet mathematical academies. It's the discipline of attempting to describe real-world problems in formal terms and finding optimal solutions to those formal descriptions.
Also interesting to note that Stalin was extremely suspicious of the cyberneticians and was of the opinion that economic planning decisions had to be made on considerations of pure political economy.
-----------------------
Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 14:35:51 +0000 (GMT) From: "=?iso-8859-1?q?Cian=20O'Connor?=" Subject: Re: falsifiability
>However economics suffers from the same
>problems as marxism. Sure you can falsify it's
>predictions when the event doesn't happen - but as the
>purpose is to predict what will happen this doesn't
>seem terribly useful (or worse because people rely on
>its predictions, it can make things worse).
------------------------------
Bad news for the meteorologists.
-----------------------------------
Charles Brown wrote:
>To approach it another way, would fund managers or >(whatever the
appropriate financial officers are) put their >money where their mouths
are, be more or less >enthusiastic about investing in "Third World "
countries with >the U.S. military running all over the world making war ?
>Are third world investments more or less safe following the >U.S.victory
in Afghanistan ?
Just on one orthogonal, but, I think, important technical point:
Investment by the fund management sector of the developed world in the "Third World", under any normal meaning of the term, is minimal. If you take Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Indonesia, Thailand and South Africa, you've basically accounted for the vast majority of all portfolio investment in "emerging markets". And the investment in South Africa is massively concentrated in the mining and financial sectors.
dd
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