Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Quite a resilient fellow. I read “Saving Masud Khan” some years ago, and was impressed by his risky candor, but was unaware that he was comparable to Baker (is it me or does his brother look a little bit like Baker?). Thanks for posting this Fred.

Meanwhile, Ishmael Reed says that, as long as the media is excessively kind to barely-disguised racists, he's "on Obama's side."

Jesus, what a clusterfuck...

grand guy

bethune
why not a run down of his contributions

Al, for a moment I thought the other dude in the picture was Baker.

StO, perhaps there's some mystery involved. Economists (Fred, Owen among others) learn arcana not ordinarily revealed to non-initiates. They're a secretive lot. Some say they're the heirs of Hassan-i Sabbah, first commander of Alah Amut, and that their macro-economics are actually code, decipherable only by members of their dread fellowship.

I won't directly state my suspicions, of course. Not with super sleuths recruited by Cass Sunstein ready to perform emergency interventions at the first sign of "epistemic closure". Suffice to say no one has ever reported seeing Dean Baker in the same room as Lord Kilbracken.

hmm, contributions (in hashshishin cipher):

Stock-Flow Consistent model that synthesized/integrated:
- Minsky's financial instability hypothesis
- Neo-wicksellian/woodford horizontal, endogenous money supply
- imperfect information, incomplete markets
- real and monetary phenomena integrated in one model
- realistic stocks, bonds, commercial & central banks, inflation accounting
- demand-led, path-dependent Kaleckian growth
-critique of mundell-flemming, compensation approach to forex

"They showed that the budget surpluses of the late 1990s (and relatively small deficits in the late 2000s) corresponded to debt accumulation (investment greater than savings) in the private sector. "
jamie could have been more careful here

first he should have kept the late 90's
and late 00's seperate
second
he ought to notice the trade gap

third
never leave consumption and invest6ment
undefined
and last
if left undefined
never use the phrase investments
unsorted
(including as above
never leave out
the trade balance )

in particular
the corporate versus household expenditures

and put "savings" always in brackets

the result of this slap dash
is a mass communications train wreck
like" investment greater then savings "

that suggests households need to save more
and corporations are "over investing"

save from what income and invest what income
in what "investments" ??

in fact these labels are very political obviously
in use and definition
in their slight of hand going all the way back to keynes early analytic simplification
if we used"socially productive investment"
the game if played "honestly"
might be self exposing
example where more precise decisions in the aggregation process come in :

is building a house
a productive investment
in the way building a factory is ??
more importantly
funds flowing into and out of the hi fi cloud above the real economy
like the formation of a credit card pool
"socially productive investment ??

in general pure financial transacting
is not part of the gdp accounting
is this clear to folks ??

the buying of existing "real" assets
is not part of social investment

if one takes investment
as i think one ought to
as the social expeenditure
on plant and equipment
the building of infrastructure
research and development
and okay some elements of "education"
and of course training
fine

example
to suggest
the answer to a trade deficit is more "private savings"
is a grotesque libel
that flows directly from the categories availible to these simple identuity summations

the federal budget deficit is "dis savings "
the imports in excess of exports is "dis savings "
now of course a "player can keep these uses of the word savings seperate and hopefully clear of their calvinist "connotations"
but the public at large ??
i realize
this is being all to awefully brief and partial
and jamie is decidedly on the side of the little guy and gal
but i think his passage here
unearths the label=libel hussle
we the weebles
all face
reading "professional " econ cons
prattling away in their
jargonic short hand

where jamie is trying to communicate
to a wide audience
using these labels
in fact using the simple national accounts identity "as is "

only reinforces the usual
"categories "

this is not political correctness

this sloppy talk
by a pwog econ con
allows mephisto types
to use it to perform public magic tricks
and get away with it looking like
real dismal science

and among other atrocities
make wage class household expenditures
look like
unsustainable hog fests
in need of a socially beneficial cut back

"Godley’s method is similar to [Dean] Baker’s"
really

godley --i defer to bethune here --
has an explicit balance sheet "department" in his grand model
ie he models the hi fi cloud as i call it
as well as the real economy "captured"
in " national income accounts "

ps
"an indicative difference (or ratio) deviates far from prior values"
now that is gnomic eh ??

i guess jamie suddenly realized he nee to compress the nut of his presentation into a runic conveyance that simply mystifies ...
"a broad " readership as an old comrade of snuffy's was wont to call us pwog dupes

"Godley’s approach is embedded explicitly in a framework of accounts, so that there is a structured approach to figuring out what is and what is not tolerable. This is a definite advance. "
this ought to be
the topic here
not all the prior jitter bugging

but i suspect jamie himself trembles at the full consequences of this explicit model

to gesture at it without pinning down its consequences
beyond an example ...well....
"public sector surpluses were (not long ago) driven by private-sector debt accumulation"
this is i suspect completely inscrutable
fast action shufflin' and dealin'
i think i know what jamie is getting at
but to the rest of us
that comes off like water running up hill
since surpluses reduce outstanding
-- ie oin private hands --
public debt
when as i recall
the total budget surpluses
run during the clinton miracle years
can be
more then accounted for
by the social security surplus
or the capital gains tax revenue boom from the stock marjket bubble
ie not real economy sourced
but pure cloud "rain"
--to be paine jargonic about it--
if the cloud does not exactly rain back
the funds it sucks up out of the real economy every period
(not more or less )
then this "cloud sector must be accounted for
explicitly
much as the foreign and domestic flows
of funds and products
must be explicitly accounted for
in our "open macro " models

"how long will public policymakers, unaccustomed to thinking about these relationships, tolerate those deficits?"
written by an "idealist"

not a class conflict warrior

obviously the elite knows what's up
they are hardly prisoners of their "categories" and partial mind models

no
they are trying to imprison us with these partial and distortionary models

hey that's why keynes could be "incorporated"
legitimized even alligned with
--recall nixon--
err from time to time
in the status quo
" paradigm wars "

"Stock-Flow Consistent model that synthesized/integrated:
- Minsky's financial instability hypothesis
- Neo-wicksellian/woodford horizontal, endogenous money supply
- imperfect information, incomplete markets
- real and monetary phenomena integrated in one model
- realistic stocks, bonds, commercial & central banks, inflation accounting
- demand-led, path-dependent Kaleckian growth
-critique of mundell-flemming, compensation approach to forex"

godley is your mentor
so u
bethune
provide the exegesis
point by point !!!!!

sunstein posse sited on the horizon

circle the wagons

haha bit of a tall order don't you think? but ok.. I've got some ideas for a couple posts.

Galbraith's summary does leave a lot to be desired. I actually cut off the last paragraph because he had gotten so far out into the rough.

In the first place, the fact the economy is tyranny controlled by private banks via the Fed and that debt is used to maintained the feudal arrangement is consistently ignored by Keynesians as well as Marxists. Yet it would seem to be the central problem to resolve before we can start to fix everything else.

And: there's no such thing as serious economic theory; in the sense of providing insights that go beyond the superficially obvious. Economic theories are really there to provide jobs for economists and to obscure from the public economic reality.

".. debt is used to maintain(..)
the feudal arrangement.."

this " is consistently ignored by Keynesians as well as Marxists"

have no idea what feudal means here
is it a metaphor like hayeks road to serfdom ??
or wage slaves ??

the only theory i know like this is the proto nazi theorists with their interest rate slavery notions

mr ward
are u a wage earner or an independent spirit?
that you don't see the value of political economy as practiced by samuelsonians or friedmanites or us marxists
doesn't surprise me
nor i might add
disturb me

a couple more obituaries are up:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/20/wynne-godley-obituary

his partner, Marc Lavoie, has commented on this one:

http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2010/05/20/remembering-wynne-godley/

bethune-ski
thanx for the link

to prog-eco