Low interest rates have hugely lifted assets largely owned by the very rich, and inflation in these areas is clearly apparent. Stocks have tripled and real estate prices in the major cities where the wealthy live have been soaring, as have the prices of artwork and the conspicuous consumption of luxury goods.
.. Similarly, older adults and those on fixed incomes are getting next to nothing on their savings. In a typical bank today, $1 million astonishingly yields only about $2,000 a year. As interest income has fallen for seniors, their spending has understandably moderated. Thus consumer spending, which would have otherwise expanded the broad economy, has been sluggish.
John Gray: The Friedrich Hayek I knew, and what he got right – and wrong
the 1980s, when F A Hayek was one of the intellectual icons of the New Right, some of the more doctrinaire members of that complicated and fractious movement used to say that for him a minimal government was one that provided three things: national defence, law and order, and a state opera. It was an observation made only partly in jest.
.. The destruction of this order after the Great War by the forces of nationalism – which the US president Woodrow Wilson inflamed by insisting that Europe could be rebuilt only on the basis of popular self-determination – framed a dilemma with which Hayek struggled for the rest of his long life (he died in 1992).
.. How could liberal values be renewed in a time of political tribalism? It was a question Hayek could not answer.
.. A major reason for Hayek’s shift into social philosophy was that he believed – correctly – that he had lost the debate with John Maynard Keynes about the causes of the Great Depression.
.. The fundamental reason for the failures of central economic planning is that economic knowledge cannot be centralised. More than the love of power or the inevitability of corruption, it is the limitations of human knowledge that make socialist planning an impossible dream. Here Hayek’s argument was unanswerable.
.. Because no central authority could grasp the shifting pattern of relative scarcities and prices, only the market could determine the right allocation. Accordingly, believing that misguided investments had to be liquidated, Hayek argued in the 1930s for policies that were more contractionary than those that were actually pursued. The task of government was to get out of the way and let the process of adjustment run its course.
.. If they had been adopted while the crash was under way, Hayek’s prescriptions would have made the Depression even worse than it proved to be – a fact he later admitted.
.. at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Keynes had been horrified at the punitive conditions imposed by the Allies, which he forecast would destroy the German economy and lead to an upheaval that would “submerge civilisation itself”.
.. “Why I am not a Conservative”, in which Hayek explains that he rejects conservatism because it lacks a vision of human progress.
..What he failed to understand is that these values cannot be renewed by applying any formula or doctrine, or by trying to construct an ideal liberal regime in which freedom is insulated from the contingencies of politics.
Crash-Test Dummies as Republican Candidates for President
Then there’s Donald Trump, who likes to take an occasional break from his anti-immigrant diatribes to complain that China is taking advantage of America’s weak leadership. You might think that a swooning Chinese economy would fit awkwardly into that worldview. But no, he simply declared that U.S. markets seem troubled because Mr. Obama has let China “dictate the agenda.” What does that mean? I haven’t a clue — but neither does he.
.. To understand why, you need to go back to the politics of 2009, when the new Obama administration was trying to cope with the most terrifying crisis since the 1930s. The outgoing Bush administration had already engineered a bank bailout, but the Obama team reinforced this effort with a temporary program of deficit spending, while the Federal Reserve sought to bolster the economy by buying lots of assets.
And Republicans, across the board, predicted disaster. Deficit spending, they insisted, would cause soaring interest rates and bankruptcy; the Fed’s efforts would “debase the dollar” and produce runaway inflation.
None of it happened. Interest rates stayed very low, as did inflation. But the G.O.P. never acknowledged, after six full years of being wrong about everything, that the bad things it predicted failed to take place, or showed any willingness to rethink the doctrines that led to those bad predictions. Instead, the party’s leading figures kept talking, year after year, as if the disasters they had predicted were actually happening.
The Global Saving Glut and the U.S. Current Account Deficit
Why is the United States, with the world’s largest economy, borrowing heavily on international capital markets–rather than lending, as would seem more natural? What implications do the U.S. current account deficit and our consequent reliance on foreign credit have for economic performance in the United States and in our trading partners? What policies, if any, should be used to address this situation? In my remarks today I will offer some tentative answers to these questions. My answers will be somewhat unconventional in that I will take issue with the common view that the recent deterioration in the U.S. current account primarily reflects economic policies and other economic developments within the United States itself.
.. To be more specific, I will argue that over the past decade a combination of diverse forces has created a significant increase in the global supply of saving–a global saving glut–which helps to explain both the increase in the U.S. current account deficit and the relatively low level of long-term real interest rates in the world today. The prospect of dramatic increases in the ratio of retirees to workers in a number of major industrial economies is one important reason for the high level of global saving. However, as I will discuss, a particularly interesting aspect of the global saving glut has been a remarkable reversal in the flows of credit to developing and emerging-market economies, a shift that has transformed those economies from borrowers on international capital markets to large net lenders.