Category: Economic growth

–Financial frauds who give exactly the same advice to every client, no matter what the situation.

The debt hawks are to economics as the creationists are to biology. Those, who do not understand Monetary Sovereignty, do not understand economics. If you understand the following, simple statement, you are ahead of most economists, politicians and media writers in America: Our government, being Monetarily Sovereign, has the unlimited ability to create the dollars to pay its bills.
==============================================================================================================================================================================================

We all are aware of the euro nations’ financial problems, especially the problems of the PIIGS – Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain. We have discussed the fact that because these nations, in surrendering their Monetary Sovereignty, surrendered their control over their money supply. They are unable to create the money necessary to support their economies.

I predicted in a 1995 speech at the UMKC, “Because of the Euro, no euro nation can control its own money supply. The Euro is the worst economic idea since the recession-era, Smoot-Hawley Tariff. The economies of European nations are doomed by the euro.” However, not all European nations surrendered their Monetary Sovereignty. Among the nations choosing to remain Monetarily Sovereign are Poland, Romania, Sweden, Norway and the United Kingdom.

Here are some sample news items:

Bloomberg; 5/25/11: “Poland’s economic-growth forecast was raised to 3.9 percent from 3 percent at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

5/27/11: According to Capital Economics, a British research group, Romania’s economy will grow by 3% this year compared to a previous forecast of 1%, followed in 2012 by a 2.5% advance. The recovery will be fueled by private consumption, but also by the resumption of investments. Also the research group states that Romania has the second best potential for economic development in the region, along with Bulgaria, Poland and Russia.

OCDE:1/2/11 – Sweden is expected to continue to recover strongly from the recession as high saving, low interest rates and an improving jobs market encourage consumers to step up spending, according to the OECD’s latest Economic Survey of the country.

Bloomberg: 5/26/11: The mainland (Norway) economy will expand 3.3 percent this year and 4 percent in 2012, after growing 2.2 percent in 2010, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said yesterday.

The Monetarily Sovereign nations are doing better than the monetarily non-sovereign nations. No surprise there for those of you who have been reading this blog. The key, of course, is for a Monetarily Sovereign nation to realize it’s Monetarily Sovereign. Not all do.

Why the British economy is in very deep trouble, Financial Times, Posted by Neil Hume on May 26, 2011

Here’s something for the Chancellor and the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) to chew on: a warning from Dr Tim Morgan, the global head of research at Tullett Prebon, that the deficit reduction plan won’t work and the UK is headed for a debt disaster.

Morgan says sectors that account for nearly 60 per cent of UK economic output are critically dependent on debt (public or private) and set to contract rather than expand. This will render economic growth implausible and means the burden of public and private debt will prove too heavy for the nation to carry:

Over the past decade, the British economy has been critically dependent on private borrowing and public spending. Now that these drivers have disappeared – private borrowing has evaporated, and the era of massive public spending expansion is over – the outlook for growth is exceptionally bleak.

Sectors which depend upon either private borrowing or public spending now account for at least 58% of economic output. These sectors are now set to contract rather than expand, which renders aggregate economic growth implausible. And, without growth, there may be no way of avoiding a debt disaster.

The UK, wisely avoided surrendering its Monetary Sovereignty, then forgot why it did so. It thinks, “the era of massive public spending is over.” Why? It has no idea. It believes it’s monetarily non-sovereign.

This puts the UK in the same position as the U.S., whose politicians, media and old-time economists do not understand the implications of Monetary Sovereignty. Read any article or listen to any politician, and you will not be able to tell whether the subject is a Monetarily Sovereign nation or a monetarily non-sovereign nation. They say exactly the same things about both.

What would you think about an investment advisor who gives exactly the same advice to a wealthy, married old man with no children, as he gives to an impoverished single, young woman supporting five children? If someone says exactly the same things, makes exactly the same predictions, and offers exactly the same advice regarding two diametrically opposite monetary situations, that person is a fraud.

I have just described the debt-hawk media, politicians and old-time economists.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
http://www.rodgermitchell.com


==============================================================================================================================================================================================
No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. It’s been 40 years since the U.S. became Monetary Sovereign, , and neither Congress, nor the President, nor the Fed, nor the vast majority of economists and economics bloggers, nor the preponderance of the media, nor the most famous educational institutions, nor the Nobel committee, nor the International Monetary Fund have yet acquired even the slightest notion of what that means.

Remember that the next time you’re tempted to ask a dopey teenager, “What were you thinking?” He’s liable to respond, “Pretty much what your generation was thinking when it screwed up my future.”

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

–The China trade deficit myth

An alternative to popular faith

For years, there has been increasing concern about our growing trade deficit, especially with China. But do trade deficits really benefit us?

China creates the goods/services we want and sends them here in exchange for dollars. The goods/services are scarce to China. Time, manpower and physical resources are necessary for their creation. By contrast, dollars are not scarce to the U.S. Our government has the unlimited power and authority to produce dollars, without using any resources, whatsoever. The press of a computer key sends billions of dollars from our government to anywhere. Lately, many have gone into our economy as a stimulus.

A trade deficit is an example of one country devoting great effort to creating scarce materials for another country in exchange for something that requires no effort by the other country. In that sense, China is our servant. They work, sweat and strain and use their valuable resources to create and ship to us the things we want, while we, hardly lifting a finger, ship dollars to them. Who has the better deal?

Obviously, for any given individual, the situation is different. None of us has the unlimited ability to create dollars. We have to work hard for our dollars. Dollars are scarce to each of us. But when we talk about trade deficits, we are talking about governments, and there the situation changes. Dollars are not scarce to the U.S. government.

To satisfy our desires, China could ship us every yard of cloth and every ounce of steel in their country; they could burn all their coal and oil; they could employ every man, woman and child in dismal sweatshops; they could empty their nation of all physical resources, and still we would have plenty of dollars to send to them, simply by touching a computer key.

This may be more easily understood by looking at Saudi Arabia, with whom we also have a trade deficit. One day, the Saudis will have sent us every drop of their oil, leaving their country a hollow, empty sand dune, while we blithely will go on producing dollars. Who has the better deal?

Of course, as monetarily sovereign nations, China and Saudi Arabia are able to create as much of their own money as they wish. They don’t need to work so hard to send us their precious resources in exchange for our money. But that’s a discussion for another posting.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
http://www.rodgermitchell.com

-To: Diane Lim Rogers of Concord Coalition


An alternative to popular faith

        Here is copy of an Email sent to Diane Lim Rogers, the chief economist of the Concord Coalition. We been trying to discover what she does, other than to parrot the Concord, debt-hawk party line. We decided to ask her for some information a real economist would know and, considering her position, want to share.
        (Frankly, we didn’t expect an answer, and as of October 30th, have not received one. Instead, she removed our comments from her blog.)

October 7, 2009

“Hello Diane,
        For the past 17 years, the Concord Coalition has been “dedicated to educating the public about the causes and consequences of federal budget deficits (and) the long-term challenges facing America’s unsustainable entitlement programs.”
        By now, you must have assembled vast amounts of evidence supporting your mission. Can you share some of your evidence showing that our admittedly large and growing deficit has adverse economic consequences and cannot support entitlement programs?
        Thank you for any enlightenment you can provide.”

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
http://www.rodgermitchell.com

-Is inflation too much money chasing too few goods?


An alternative to popular faith

In the post “Do deficits cure inflation?” we saw that contrary to popular faith, deficit spending (i.e., too much money) has not caused inflation. We also saw that inflation can be cured by increasing the reward for owning money, i.e. by increasing interest rates.

Now we question another piece of popular faith: Is inflation caused by too much money chasing too few goods?

Begin with the notion of “too much money.” We already have seen that federal deficits are not related to inflation. What about another definition of money: M3? Please look at the following graph:

Clearly there is no immediate relationship between money supply and inflation. What about a subsequent relationship. Could “too much money” today, cause inflation later?

The graph indicates no such cause/effect relationship, with M3 peaks preceding inflation peaks by anywhere from 2 years to 10 years. It is difficult to imagine a graph revealing less relationship.

What about “too few goods”? If too few goods caused inflation, this would manifest itself with GDP moving opposite to CPI. Again, that does not seem to happen:

There seems to be no regular pattern, with GDP and CPI sometimes rising together and sometimes separately. In today’s international economy, it is difficult to substantiate the idea of a wide-spectrum commodity shortage when sufficient purchasing power exists.

Individual nations can experience shortages of individual commodities. Individual poor nations can experience shortages of a broad basket of commodities. But can a wealthy nation, with plenty of money to spend, suffer a shortage of a broad basket of commodities, thereby causing inflation? Has it recently happened?

Seems unlikely these days as products are made in multiple nations and shipped to multiple nations, with easy international shipping and instantaneous money convertibility. Your cotton shirt may have been grown in Egypt, woven in India, assembled in China, labeled in Italy and sold in the U.S. Clearly, a cotton shirt shortage would be rare, as any of these steps could occur in various countries, and that’s just one product. A nationwide “too-few-goods” situation, coincident with “too much money,” seems impossible.

There is however, one exception: Oil.

The graph below compares overall inflation with changes in energy prices, which are dominated by oil prices.

Oil is the one commodity that has worldwide usage, affects prices of most products and services, and can be in worldwide shortage. That is why, when oil prices rise or fall steeply, inflation rises and falls in concert.

The large oil price moves “pull” inflation in the same direction. When oil prices increased or decreased the most, inflation came along for the ride.

In summary, inflation is not caused by deficit spending or by “too much money chasing too few goods.” Inflation is caused by a combination of high oil prices and interest rates too low to counter-balance the oil prices.

The high oil prices can be caused by real shortages and/or by price manipulation.

Hyperinflation is a different beast, altogether. Every hyperinflation has been caused by shortages, most often shortages of food.

Zimbabwe, Weimar Republic, and Argentina had food shortages that created hyperinflations.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
http://www.rodgermitchell.com