"We Are All Keynesians Now"

The Economist abre el debate sobre si en estos tiempos de tanto keynesianismo, todo el mundo es keynesiano. En una serie de discusiones, se pronen armar una especie de "arena" económica, donde uno de un bando, y otro del otro, dan los argumentos a favor y en contra de las ideas de JMK y su aplicación a la situación actual.

La contienda comenzó con Brad DeLong y Luigi Zingales.

El primero, a favor: "Even though Say's law is not true in general, could it possibly be true in this particular case? Could it happen that as the government starts its spending that the spending is, in Fama's words, "funded by issuing more government debt ... The added debt absorbs savings that would otherwise go to private investment ... and just moves resources from one use [private investment] to another [government purchases]"? Yes, it can happen. When government deficit spending triggers a sharp rise in interest rates, that rise in interest rates will discourage and crowd out private investment spending. But you have to have that rise in interest rates, and we don't: the ten-year Treasury rate last Friday was 3.02% per year, down from 4.01% back before Obama's election victory."

El segundo, en contra: "If Keynesian principles and education are the cause of the current depression, it is hard to imagine they can be the solution. Thus, even the third interpretation of the house statement—that we should follow Keynesian prescriptions to combat the current economic crisis—is false. I am not disputing the idea that some government intervention can alleviate the current economic conditions, I am disputing that a Keynesian economic policy can do it. With a current-account deficit that in 2008 was $614 billion, a budget deficit that was $455 billion and military expenditures of $731 billion, it is hard to argue that the government is not stimulating demand sufficiently. The current crisis is not a demand crisis, it is a trust crisis. Bad corporate governance coupled with bad government policies has destroyed the financial sector, scaring investors and freezing lending. It is as if a nuclear bomb had destroyed all roads in America and we claimed that to alleviate the economic impact of such an event we should invest in banks. It is possible that eventually the effect will trickle down. But if the problem is the roads, you want to rebuild roads, not subsidise the financial sector. And if the problem is the financial sector, you want to fix this and not build roads."


Que pase el que sigue.