There are loads of things I could point to in my office right now that would be counted as assets on our balance sheet that we're never going to sell or charge people for.

Or if you disagree with that quantification just add up all the natural resources on or under all the publicly owned land in the country. That's already an amazing debt to asset ratio even before we get to the fact that the government has a de jure right to collect money off any property in the country (what would the monetary value of that be?)

I'm in agreement with all of this apart from private vs public spending stuff because of chronic under performance of southern European economies + France vs US/Japan/UK (lots of factors could explain this but the main difference are labour market rigidity and higher public spending) since the 70s. The failure of communist models also show that there is a point at which a high % of public spending can become completely unproductive. I think people act too much as if those experiments hadn't failed and liberalisation reforms in China hadn't been the start of the great economic development of the country.

Also I would say that (and this was my master thesis' subject so I'm just being a nit) depending on how specific countries choose to account for liabilities in a balance sheet approach (which I agree is a better way to think about the public finances of a country) and especially pensions and contingent liabilities + the fact that all states have unfortunately because of past actions a built in quasi obligation to bail out a lot of private sectors of the economy (banking, private pension schemes, car industry..), their liabilities can be very understated.

Still here -

You're actually saying you have to top up the water butt when it's a drought because you didn't do it when it was last rained heavily.

Wouldn't it make more sense to buy some water on credit and help the grass grow now? Then next time it pisses it down make sure to top up the butt?
We can pay back what we borrowed by selling the extra grass that grew.
There is also a correlation between our grass production and the likelihood of rain.

Do you have a view on Abenomics?
If so please share.

my books!



she's at some poncy conference in italy for Very Clever People right now so the final report will have to wait a bit

This is a fair point but also a Laffer curve type argument. How do we know where we are on the Demaine curve (tm) of the productivity of public investments?


Agreed. Definitely should be considered.

But you do use those things to help produce your company's income, right?

Yeah, you can add up the natural resources, minus the cost of harvesting them, I don't have a problem with that.

For the third time in this thread: it's a huge economic experiment, it's a gamble and the juries out on whether it's worked - opinion seems to flip flop on how it's going but seems positive at the moment.

Nice.

Could you link me to the two other times you've given your view on Abenomics please.
Presumably you brought it up because you believe it has some relevance to the UK and specifically austerity?

Who's entitled now? You didn't have any problem clicking view all my posts when you were stalking me.

Post 9087 and post 9012. I didn't bring it up initially, someone else pointed out Japan's debt to GDP ratio and I questioned whether they should put that up as an example on why our debt ratio is fine.

I asked nicely.

When you asked for my view presumably you brought it up because you believe it has some relevance to the UK and specifically austerity?

Noticed you've skipped over my posts commenting on your argument for austerity ( if that's what it was - please clarify) and your terrible analogy. Also skipped over the posts of others asking where you'd made your case.
Any reason for that?

It was your analogy, I commented on how terrible it was - now its my analogy?

My case was quoted correctly, and you pointed out where I clarified myself. You then compared to the US and the numbers backed up my point.

Like I said I'm done engaging with you, unless you want to circle back to the where I asked for why you misrepresented numbers and where I asked at what point we should look to decrease the debt to GDP ratio.

Happy to have a debate, but with you its just poisonous and you're just trolling at this point.

Is there any evidence for crowding out.

The accusation of Jecross is that they spent to much in a boom, do I even need to point out how this frustrates theories of crowding out?

I will though, if the government is borrowing too much, then crowding out would suggest a credit fueled boom that led to 2008 debacle would be impossible. Yet it happened.

Please elaborate on that, you've lost me.

It seems pretty self explanatory, not sure I can simplify it anymore.

Maybe go back and read the post on crowding out.

Ill try tho:

Crowding out = if banks lend to much to Guberment, they wont want to lend to private industry.

But, if the Labour government was borrowing too much in the boom, this would suggest crowding out as an concept is false, as how do you have a private sector borrowing binge like you did in the run upto 2008, if the government is borrowing too much?

I don't think you understand what crowding out is, how companies and the government borrow money, or what caused the financial crisis.

My understanding is:

Crowding out: Government borrowing more (by issuing more government bonds - may or may not be bought by banks) raises interest rates. As credit spreads (the difference between gilt yields and corporate bonds) reflect the difference in credit worthiness between companies and the government these stay relatively static (assuming the government is no less credit worthy) and therefore companies have to issue bonds at higher yields to get people to buy them. They therefore pay more interest and this reduces the profit on the project they were financing, so they decide not to bother.

Financial crisis - was caused by repackaging and leveraging of sub prime mortgage debt that wasn't correctly credit rated and was worthless once higher yields caused people to default.

You might want to check the massive unprecedented leveraging of private companies and private individuals in the run up to 2008.

The crash was tipped over by subprime, but what caused the massive retrenchment in our and others economies was massive deleveraging by private companies. That is what actual effected the real economy and not just stock prices and is why interest rates have been so a historically low since 2008.

I was keeping it simple for you, so to try and come back with a technical response and fail so massively is pretty lol.

Simply amazing.

Sorry this going to be very long.

I mean, it is very tough to find useful data for crowding out because you want to study situations where the spending happens in an economy that is not in a recession and historically that's where a lot of spending happens so you're never sure of hat you're seeing or if the data is lying to you. But I've found this:

https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/7269.html

I haven't read past the abstract yet which notably states:

(emphasis mine)

Crowding out is not only for when public spending is financed by borrowing, I found this but I've only read the intro and it's only tangentially related to our question but it might help:

http://www.people.hbs.edu/cmalloy/pdffiles/envaloy.pdf

They use situations where there is higher spending in a given state in the US (which correlates very well with a change of chairman in a Senate committee with lots of increases of spending in the state of the chair man woman which btw how confident does that make you about the success of large public spending?) to look at how the private sector reacts:

Here's the kicker:

But crowding out doesn't only necessarily work the way I thought it did because:

Unfortunately your totally predictable nothing handwave of a response is not amazing.

You were the guy who couldn't add up policy costs and wouldnt admit your mistake, and now you decided to be patronising when I corrected you. There's little to be gained from carrying this on.

In my experience, if the hypothesis to explain a social or economic phenomenon is strong or robust, the evidence likewise will be much more strong and robust than that posted above, which is incredibly thin.

Your feeble attempts to use an old discussion in which you could not correctly parse my posts as some kind of get out of jail card is obvious to everyone.

Also, there was no correcting by you of me, I was not patronising you, I was nakedly laughing at your ignorance.

Big differance.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-40556732

Joint statement from dup/pup.

Bigots at the heart of government.

--

http://www.irishnews.com/news/northe...11/news/racist

The culture they hold dear.

Scumbags.

Again, simply amazing