THE 2010-2015 GREEK LAWGIVERS' CRISIS, THE EURO AND CURRENCY AREAS. SHOULD THE EURO ZONE BREAK APART?

So today, editors at Forbes published yet another train-wreck of flawed thinking by Tim Worstall. In The Cause of the Eurozone Crisis Was the Euro: The Solution Is Abolition of the Euro, Worstall tries hard to call for an end to the Euro by blaming its existence for the cause of a what he calls the Eurozone Crisis, which likely he means the the Euro Banking Crisis of 2008 the Greek Lawgivers' Debt Crisis of 2010-2015.




Seriously, I don't understand why Worstall doesn't find another line of work besides trying to write about economies and economics (see more on Tim Worstall right here on Bizarro Theater),

"Even a cursory glance at the economics of this field, optimal currency areas (founded by Robert Mundell) tells us that over such disparate economies a single currency just isn’t going to work." ~ Tim Worstall

Worstall seems not to understand Mundell's Optimum Currency Area Theory at all. Mundell included his theory in a textbook titled International Economics, (1968, pp. 177-186).

Mundell's Optimum Currency Area Theory is one where an authority can stabilize employment and prices over a well-defined region. According to Mundell himself:

• "If the case for flexible exchange rates is a strong one, it is, in logic, a case for flexible exchange rates based on regional currencies, not on national currencies. The optimum currency area is the region."
• "If the world can be divided into regions within each of which there is factor mobility and between which there is factor immobility, then each of these regions should have a separate currency which fluctuates relative to all other currencies."
• "The argument works best if each nation (and currency) has internal factor mobility and external factor immobility."
• "But if regions cut across national boundaries or if countries are multiregional, then the argument for flexible exchange rates is only valid if currencies are reorganized on a regional basis."

In the work, Mundell cites two who he believes has captured the essence for defining the optimum currency area — Meade and Scitovsky.

• "In both cases [Meade's; Scitovsky's ] it is implied that an essential ingredient of a common currency, or a single currency area, is a high degree of factor mobility;"
• "...neither writer disputes that the optimum currency area is the region-defined in terms of internal factor mobility and external factor immobility-but there is an implicit difference in views on the precise degree of factor mobility required to delineate a region."

According to László Andor, European Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, in his speech titled Labour Mobility in the EU: Challenges and Perspectives for a Genuine European Labour Market, Europeans have the necessary ingredient of labor mobility.

Free movement of workers began in 1968. Today, it encompasses the labor markets of 28 Member States of the EU and every Eurozone country.

EU nationals have the right to look for work and take up employment in another Member State and to receive assistance from the employment services in the host country when looking for a job.

Countries experiencing the highest increase in labor outflows to other EU countries in 2011-12 were Greece, Spain, Ireland, Hungary and Latvia. Labor outflows went mostly to Germany, Austria and the UK.

So according to Mundell and his theory, the European Central Bank (ECB) ought to make more credit available in Germany, thus pushing up prices in Germany to remove the demand of Greeks from buying German products.  With Greek demand for German goods cut by being priced out, Greeks would then produce the alike, substitute goods on lower prices (lower wages), thus taking up unemployment slack in Greece.

But the problem has been the lawgivers in countries like Greece. As wages are prices, they have kept wages up through massive fake-work, make-work government programs, pensions and welfare. Greeks had been living through a credit bubble, a public sector credit bubble and not a private sector. When that bubble burst — Greek lawgivers couldn't borrow without bailouts — Greeks suffered at the hands of lawgivers rather than commercial bankers.

For those who doubt that Greek lawgivers haven't been the source of the problems for the Greeks, have a look at GREXIT IS NO EXIT. Nigerians export more than three times as much as the Greeks, but only import 1.34 times as much as the Greeks.

So how do the Greeks do it? How do the Greeks pay for those imports? Their lawgivers have borrowed year after year to pay for government agency workers, pensioners and welfare collectees who, in turn, take their Euro borrowings and buy imports from those of other Eurozone countries.

In the countries hit hardest by the Euro Banking Crisis, their problems have been caused by lawgivers borrowing to keep afloat phony economies and thus hampering price discovery. As well, by Mundell's theory, those countries within the Eurozone experiencing trade surpluses need to have their regional central bankers rediscount more and thus pump more credit into those countries, which presumably would jack up prices relative to the Eurozone trade deficit countries. By Mundell's theory, it doesn't matter if Germany and Greece are separate countries as long as the countries operate under the same exchange rate and have factor mobility.

Mundell also said, "Similarly, if factors are mobile across national boundaries, then a flexible exchange system becomes unnecessary, and may even be positively harmful, as I have suggested elsewhere." 

The Euro is a "gold" standard - one rate for an internal common market with factor mobility that requires lawgivers to adjust policy to that standard. The price of that Euro "gold" standard relative to the outside world (other banking systems' cash) fluctuates.

Mundell wrote at a time when countries had fixed exchange rates with bank cash convertible to gold while many called for floating exchange rates with irredeemable cash. Mundell proposed his theory as an attempt to explain international disequilibrium caused by balance-of-payments crises under fixed exchange rates and price fixing by legislators (rigid wage and price levels).

Mundell believed that countries with trade surpluses whose leaders capped bank credit caused unemployment for those living in trade deficit countries because leaders of trade deficit countries had to shrink their economies to restore the imbalance.

Whether one banking system shared among a few countries or countries each with their own banking systems, according to Mundell, the fix for regional disparities is for trade surplus countries to inflate (add bank credits) —

• "In a currency area comprising different countries with national currencies, the pace of employment in deficit countries is set by the willingness of surplus countries to inflate."
• "Unemployment could be avoided in the world economy if central banks agreed that the burden of international adjustment should fall on surplus countries, which would then inflate until unemployment in deficit countries is eliminated"
• "But in a currency area comprising many regions and a single currency, the pace of inflation is set by the willingness of central authorities to allow unemployment in deficit regions."

Under floating rates with irredeemable bank cash, those living in the trade deficit countries would need to pay more for foreign cash of trade surplus countries until BOP equalized. Thus, all inflation would be unneeded as is the fix for disparities between regions under the same banking system.

So, absent the will to inflate by region in the Euro zone, the Euro zone ought to break up and let floating exchange rates do their work — force prices up of foreign goods as expressed in one's own bank cash.

At the end Mundell concludes, "...the optimum currency area is the world, regardless of the number of regions of which it is composed." By that Mundell means there should be one money and balance of payments would adjust regional difference. In short, Mundell means something like gold as money would be the ideal for the world over.

Legally, Europeans have labor mobility. Culturally, whether they move or not is another matter (see: On the Move, The Economist).



Hordes of illegal aliens, many claiming to be refugees, don't seem to have a labor mobility hang up. For more on the horde invading Europe, check out 2015 EUROPEAN REFUGEE CRISIS. FLEEING THE FAILURES OF TOTALITARIANISM, BUT FAILING TO EMBRACE BETTER WAYS.

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"REAL" GDP IS FAKE, BOGUS, CRAP. AMERICANS AND SCHOOL CHILDREN HAVE BEEN HOODWINKED FOR DECADES.

The formula for "real" GDP taught in schools:

nominal GDP ÷ base year GDP × 100

This yields "real" GDP in what was called "constant dollars." Supposedly, this "real" GDP is a measure goods and services of the current year deflated to the prices of a base year GDP. Base year GDP is merely the nominal GDP of the year chosen to be the base.

You can watch Sal from the Khan Academy teach the difference between nominal and "real" GDP on YouTube and then you can watch Sal teach the Constant Dollar method to calculate supposedly "real" GDP also on YouTube.

Under logical scrutiny, the concept gets exposed as mere hokum, bunko. Think about it. The base year GDP is inflated by whatever the inflation was for that year.

Before 1996, the BEA used the school method. From 1996, the U.S. Department of Commerce has used the chained-dollar method (see: BEA's Chain Indexes, Time Series, and Measures of Long-Term Economic Growth).

The BEA method for real GDP, though complicated, is hardly much different that school-method GDP. The new method uses the average of two successive periods of GDP. So year two of a chained-dollar average becomes the year one of the next chained-dollar average. The minions at the BEA believe this removes distortion that any year might cause owing to changes in composition of goods and services.

The math looks something like this:

"real" GDP = nominal GDP ÷ implicit price deflator

where the implicit price deflator = (current-dollar ÷ chained-dollar) × 100

and a chained-dollar = base period current-dollar measure × (chained-type quantity index number current period - chained-type quantity index number base period)


Anyway, chained-dollar "real" GDP is still as bogus as the chain consists of an averaged succession of already inflated GDP as the basis to deflate current dollar GDP.



Could you measure a length of a distance with a ruler that changes in size the farther you go? That is what academicians and the minions at the BEA claim you can do with their bogus method.

And today, that academician economists can't see this plain truth reveals how stupid they are, how weak their intellects are, how indoctrinated they are. Worse are the millions of idiot-like parroters who parrot the false belief of "real" GDP when they report on it.

Men were much smarter about money and banking from the years of the late 1870s through the 1920s. One such man was Edwin Walter Kemmerer who was known as "the money doctor." This is what Kemmerer had to say about inflation:

 

Kemmerer goes on to say:

Anyway, there is a method to deflate away inflation, which uses a metaphorical measuring stick kept at a constant length. That method is my method — the True Dollars™ method. It is the only real, true, legitimate method.

Both the constant-dollar method or the chained-dollar method rely on prices. Prices are an effect and not a cause. It's impossible for an effect to be its own cause.

It's impossible to deflate prices with past inflated prices.


Economists are idiots to believe otherwise. And guess what? They believe otherwise.

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AUSTRALIAN ECONOMIST STEVE KEEN CONFUSES CASH WITH MONEY. NO ONE SHOULD LISTEN TO ACADEMICIAN ECONOMISTS AND THEIR FALSE DOCTRINES.

Today, I read this silly work published by Forbes and written by Ph.D. economist from Australia, Steve Keen, who seems to have become a darling among anti-banking conspiracy theorists in the blogosphere. Keen claims that a recent-dead Italian economist Augusto Graziani is the only guy ever who figured out what money is.

Graziani’s own words reveals he had no idea what money is. Graziani revealed himself to be wrong on the subject of money, thoroughly.

Graziani mixed up bank credit with money and in so doing, confused himself, embarrassingly so. Stupidly, Graziani said, “So money is fundamentally the promise of a bank to its customer, and a monetary payment is the transfer of that promise from one customer to another.”

For the entire history of commercial banking, every banker worth his salt would call that credit. Never in the history of commercial banking by anyone who engages in banking and commerce would anyone confuse credit with money as Graziani has.

Money is coined metal by weight and fineness. There is no other definition of money. The Romans said so. It's their word.

It's easy to know what could be money and what isn't money. Money can exist without banking and without legislators.

Cash, which is evidence of deposits circulating in perpetuity, requires banking. Without banking there can be no cash. 

Legal tender is anything legislators deem legal to settle taxation and debt to legislators. Without legislators and their agencies of enforcement, there can be no legal tender.

It should be clear that legal tender cash, which is all that anyone has these days, couldn't be money because it requires both banking and government and it fails to settle debt. Cash is liability of bankers, the same as deposits.

Money, if it were to exist, could discharge debt in payment fully. Contemporary cash cannot do this precisely because it is irredeemable. That means, you cannot demand money (coined metal by weight and fineness) from a banker. There is reason why the technical phrase, demand deposit, exists in commercial banking.

Graziani and Keen get wrong the concept of currency as well. Currency means that which has bearer negotiability. It has never meant anything else. So if a thief buys milk from a grocer using stolen cash, the grocer gets to keep the cash by currency.

Academicians like Steve Keen and Antonio Graziani live in a fantasy land of false definition and fanciful bogus theory that fails to comport with reality. They preach a false doctrine, economics, which is quite pseudo-science.

If academicians like Keen only knew about trade, commercial banking and the jurisprudence with respect to trade, they wouldn't accept false theory such as the one perpetrated by a rather clueless Graziani.

Keen errs in the worst way that anyone could when he foolishly claims, "Banks create money by issuing a loan to a borrower; they record the loan as an asset, and the money they deposit in the borrower’s account as a liability." Heed my words: Bankers never, ever create money nor do bankers lend money.

First, no one has money. All anyone has is either cash or deposits, which can be traded through negotiable instruments like personal checks and ATM cards. Even if there were money, through the entire history of commercial banking, no banker ever lent money.

In the days of money, a banker was a merchant who bought money and debt and sold bank credits. Today, a banker is a merchant who buys cash and debt and sells bank credit. All loans are merely advances of bank credits.

About the only bit Keen gets right is his claim that “banks must be part of your economic analysis.” Of course, all regular readers of Bizarro Theater who have read The Theory of Trading Property for Profit know this.

It turns out that Keen once bet Rory Robertson, who worked as banker for Macquarie Bank. Keen bet Robertson that Australian house prices would collapse. Unsurprisingly, Keen lost.

The terms of the bet had Keen walk from Canberra to Mt. Kosciuszko — 224 kilometres — wearing a T-shirt that read: “I was hopelessly wrong on house prices”.

Long ago, beginning in the mid-1850s, the brilliant banking lawyer Henry Dunning MacLeod worked out the principles of money, credit, currency and the like. MacLeod could do so because as a lawyer and not a university theoretician, he understood property (the right of ownership) and the effects upon property through trade. MacLeod wrote excellent works debunking academician economists with their silly false theories like JS Mill and even Adam Smith.

Here is a later edition of MacLeod's Theory of Credit (1893), which many in America can read free.

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GENIUS OF THE PAST SHINES A LANTERN ON TODAY'S DECEPTION. LESSONS ON THE SOCIALISM OF OBAMACARE, PURPORTED FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS AND SOCIALIST REVIVALISM OF GREECE AND EUROPE

Yesterday, in , CONTEMPORARY ECONOMICS. ITS TRUE ORIGINS AND WHY IT IS FAKE, I gave you the first part of an essay, On the Science of Economics and Its Relation to Free Exchange and Socialism, written by the brilliant Henry Dunning MacLeod, an eminent banking lawyer of his day and a man who knew more about trade and reality than all those who have since lived and died who have called themselves "economists".



Today, I give you the second part of the essay, itself in two parts. In the first part, MacLeod is gives a lesson on free trade. This lesson holds true whether such trade is insular or foreign. In the second part, MacLeod is gives a lesson on the foolishness of socialism.

When reading this lesson you could apply his lesson upon Obamacare, an example of regulated insular trade, or any so-called contemporary "free trade agreements," which, long ago, all thinking men recognized as treaties of reciprocity designed to promote particular interests.



Here MacLeod begins to lay down his argument that while free trade is inherently right, any force that interferes in free trade between two is little more than robbery by another name.



And here MacLeod lays down what libertarians would recognize as the non-aggression principle long before 20th century libertarians existed.



And then MacLeod reveals how the interference by legislators in the trade of property to the benefit of favored parties amounts to robbery by other means.



To help the reader understand, MacLeod provides an example.



From here, MacLeod dives into his argument.




Though in other writing, MacLeod finds fault with Adam Smith and his many confused, false beliefs, MacLeod praises Smith for his work on free trade.



MacLeod then describes the rise of the dangerous and harmful doctrine of socialism in France.



MacLeod then reveals how “reciprocity” and “fair trade” are merely protectionism under different names.



MacLeod further exposes socialism.



MacLeod reveals the true meaning of value. It's a ratio.



MacLeod reveals that property known as wealth becomes wealth precisely because of trade and by no other means. Said another way, nothing in itself has value but a value arises from the trade rate as expressed by the ratio of one thing traded for another.



MacLeod reveals how the otherwise smart John Locke blew it when it came to economics.



And then MacLeod reveals the errors of Adam Smith, errors that David Ricardo would repeat and from which Karl Marx derived his entire erroneous theory.



MacLeod shows how David Ricardo erred much like Adam Smith. Ricardo's errors provided the basis for Karl Marx's beliefs.



And here MacLeod connects the Socialists with the fallacies of Adam Smith and David Ricardo.




MacLeod shows how the existence of credit exposes the foolishness of socialist belief.



MacLeod sums up his thoughts here.

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CONTEMPORARY ECONOMICS. ITS TRUE ORIGINS AND WHY IT IS FAKE.

Today, few if any Ph.D.s of economics know the history of their field. If they know a history, likely it is one produced of propaganda to support their current false paradigm, a paradigm that fails to describe the reality of trade. Trade, of course, is the purchase and sale of property in pursuit of profit, is the only activity that gives rise to an economy.

It's unlikely that Ph.D.s like Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen much less your local university department staffers would know the connection of Jacob Vanderlint, Dudley North, Aristotle and Socrates to trade if you were to mention those names to them.

In an essay titled, On the Science of Economics and Its Relation to Free Exchange and Socialism, the brilliant banking lawyer Henry Dunning MacLeod gave a brief on the history of the academic field of economics, which all who care to reason about and discuss their lives and their government should know.





MacLeod begins to take down the myth of Adam Smith.



MacLeod reveals the Physiocrats as the founders of modern economics.




MacLeod connects liberty, which is freedom, or that realm where politicians are content to leave alone anyone. Said another way, liberty is the absence of law in the presence of government. And of course, where politicians make no law, there are no right and no corresponding duty.



Here, MacLeod reveals the connection between property, which always means the right of ownership and not what is owned, with liberty, which always means the absence of law in the presence of government.




MacLeod examines the doctrines of the Physiocrats.



MacLeod reveals what the ancients already knew.



MacLeod discusses the strange fallacy of money (coined metal by weight and fineness) as the only wealth.



MacLeod discusses what the Physiocrats had wrong.



MacLeod discusses the rise of Adam Smith.



MacLeod discusses the confusion Adam Smith expressed in his work.



MacLeod discusses the foolishness of J.B. Say, an early hero to those who claim to be adherents of the Austrian School of Neoclassical Economics, which was once known as the Psychology School, but as a school of neoclassical economics, its adherent fail to understand the reality of trade.




MacLeod exposes the foolishness of John Stuart Mill.

 


Suffice to say, in his day, academicians loathed Henry Dunning MacLeod precisely because the man revealed many expressed fallacies from which academicians of economics espoused their theories.

Today's academicians of economics have compounded their errors by building upon the cherry-picked false foundation of the Physiocrats, Smith, Ricardo, Say, Mill and others who came after and made more mistakes like Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes, Paul Samuelson, and cast of other 20th century clowns. These days, jokers like Paul Krugman and Thomas Piketty preach the false doctrines of economics.

The basis of the academic field of economics is the pseudo-scientific concept of utility, a faux psychological phenomenon never proven. Thus, the entire field as it stands is bogus.

As I explained in WHY IS THE ECONOMY SO HORRIBLE? BECAUSE ACADEMIA ECONOMICS IS FAKE, the entirety of trade, or commerce, or real economics ties up with two words — property and profit. Without profit from effort, anyone would lack buying power to buy anything else. Without property, no one can trade.

Trade, or commerce, or real economics is about acquisition of rights to own stuff. No one can derive satisfaction until that one owns. All talk about pleasure, pain, satiation, utility and the like is irrelevant until acquisition.

All should reject contemporary economics. It's fake. All of its priests, ministers, and preachers are little better than self-deluded con men.

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