Prof. Robert Shiller lecturing at the London School of Economics had a say also on the current world crisis (minute 59 of his lecture). He never mentioned the euro here, but it is as if he did. Here is what he said.
“There is a fundamental problem right now in the UK and the US of inadequate demand so that we are below our potential rate of output. It’s causing the nations to go into debt and it’s causing austerity, especially in the UK…
What we seem to be doing is hoping that people will start spending again and then all our problems will be solved if they would, but we wont take any action anymore to make that happen. And so there is a fundamental problem: “well, people aren’t spending because … people arent’ spending”, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, it’s like… a stupid problem, that we have, there’s no reason …
This is what our President Franklin Roosevelt said in the 1930s, “There is no plague of locusts”, there is nothing wrong with the economy in 1933, the only thing to fear is fear itself”, so he tried moral exhortation, “Come on, go out there and start spending, if you all do it we will be fine, there is nothing wrong”. We are exactly in that position in the UK today.
So how do we get people spending again? Well, I am thinking it is only government stimulus [...] we should go back to the balanced budget stimulus. If we are concerned about national debt, the government has to tax people and spend the money and that makes up for the missing aggregate demand, and it will bring unemployment down, it will bring our economy back…
They just never did this enough, they never created enough demand. I am referring to an old economic literature from the 1940s of Paul Samuelson and William Peston who began advocating balanced budget stimulus for the contingency. They thought that after WWII the world might slip back into depression and the government had such high debt then that they couldn’t do deficit spending. Their solution has never really been needed until now …
My proposal to the British government: … raise taxes, raise expenditure and get the economy going again without raising debt.
And by the way that doesn’t mean the government hiring bureacrats with the money … it means spending the money on things that other people would like to spend their money on if we weren’t in this economic slump. It’s just seems the obvious and immediate thing to do to correct the situation. But it’s not just in our vocabulary these days.”
14/05/2012 @ 07:48
D’accordo ovviamente che il sostegno pubblico alla domanda, destinandovi il gettito della eventuale maggior pressione fiscale, è lo stimolo trascurato nell’attuale congiuntura europea.
Tuttavia, (lo dico sapendo che la cosa è ben presente nella linea dei post) per UK il problema si pone in modo un pò diverso è più lineare nella sua elasticità moltiplicativa sul PIL.
All’interno della UEM infatti le differenze di tasso di cambio reale non convertono con altrettanta linearità gli aumenti della spesa pubblica, a causa dell’asimmetria degli squilibri commerciali indotti dall’aumento della domanda (e della disponibilità di capitali…a indebitamento estero).
Cioè, in varia misura (che per la verità decresce a condizioni di correzione interna, cioè unilaterale, che significano recessione e deflazione salariale, su cui puntano i governi “non core” UEM…purtroppo) la domanda aumenterebbe ma ciò si convertirebbe in aumento delle importazioni e comunque in cristallizzazione di deficit commerciali che comprimono il GNP (proprio per la maggior convenienza dell’offerta di beni esteri da parte dei paesi con differenziali inflattivi inferiori e tassi di cambio reale deprezzati).
Insomma, neppure basterebbe un deprezzamento omogeneo dell’euro (tranne puntare solo all’espansione sul mercato USA), se non intervengono, all’interno dell’UEM, differenziali di stimolo della domanda in funzione dei tassi di cambio reali (cosa di cui abbiamo già parlato con riferimento alle politiche che teoricamente ci si potrebbe attendere dalla Germania, ma invano, non essendo tra l’altro neppure così sicura una “nuova” disponibilità a seguito del mutamento elettorale del loro quadro politico)