23.4.10

Palabras de JEP, Premio Cervantes 2009


"Para volver al plano de la realidad irreal o de la irrealidad real en que los personajes del Quijote pueden ser al mismo tiempo lectores del Quijote, me gustaría que el Premio Cervantes hubiera sido para Cervantes. Cómo hubiera aliviado sus últimos años el recibirlo. Se sabe que el inmenso éxito de su libro en poco o nada remedió su penuria."

20.4.10

JEP


La palabra greed gruñe.
La palabra codicia tiene garras, tentáculos.
La palabra ambición
va suelta por el mundo con las fauces abiertas.


14.4.10

"If you want to succed, rise your error rate"


In fact, industrial policy never went out of fashion. Economists enamored of the neo-liberal Washington Consensus may have written it off, but successful economies have always relied on government policies that promote growth by accelerating structural transformation.

13.4.10

Economic Policy: Lessons from History

At the 43rd Annual Alexander Hamilton Awards Dinner, where was honoring with the Hamilton Award, Ben Bernanke drew four relevant lessons from the financial collapse of the 1930s:
1) Economic prosperity depends on financial stability

2) Policymakers must respond forcefully, creatively, and decisively to severe financial crises - e.g. SCAP

3) International crises require and international response

4) History is never perfect guide – "History does not repeat itself, but it can rhyme"

12.4.10

The Field of Economic History

En El Placer de Disentir encontré la postura de Rogoff sobre "The Field of Economic History"





Sobre el mismo tema hace unos meses DeLong escribió en Project-Syndicate "The Anti-History Boys"

"If you asked a modern economic historian like me why the world is currently in the grips of a financial crisis and a deep economic downturn, I would tell you that this is the latest episode in a long history of similar bubbles, crashes, crises, and recessions that date back at least to the canal-building bubble of the early 1820's, the 1825-1826 failure of Pole, Thornton & Co, and the subsequent first industrial recession in Britain. We have seen this process at work in many other historical episodes as well – in 1870, 1890, 1929, and 2000."

"But if you ask the same question of a modern macroeconomist – for example, the extremely bright Narayana Kocherlakota of the University of Minnesota – you will find that he says that he does not know, and that macroeconomic models attribute economic downturns to various causes. Most, he points out, “rely on some form of large quarterly movements in the technological frontier. Some have collective shocks to the marginal utility of leisure. Other models have large quarterly shocks to the depreciation rate in the capital stock (in order to generate high asset price volatilities)..."