Contra Keynes e o Keynesianismo moderno

"... Robert Barro, Harvard University, said of the Obama fiscal stimulus proposal: "This is probably the worst bill that has been put forward since the 1930s. I don't know what to say. I mean it's wasting a tremendous amount of money. It has some simplistic theory that I don't think will work ... I don't think it will expand the economy ... It's more along the lines of throwing money at people ... I think it's garbage." (Barro seems to be talking about any and all stimulus bills). John Cochrane, University of Chicago, said: "It's not part of what anybody has taught graduate students since the 1960s … They are fairy tales that have been proved false. It is very comforting in times of stress to go back to the fairy tales we heard as children but it doesn't make them less false." To borrow money to pay for the spending, the government will issue bonds, which means investors will be buying US Treasuries instead of investing in equities or products, negating the stimulative effect, Cochrane added. Edward Prescott, Arizona State University, who won a Nobel prize for economics in 2004 for his study on business cycles, made this contribution: "Massive government spending likely lengthened the economic struggles each time. Economists in the field are deeply divided on the issue of federal stimulus … I don't know why Obama said all economists agree on this. They don't. If you go down to the third-tier schools, yes, but they're not the people advancing the science." Eugene Fama, University of Chicago, stated: "Bail-outs and stimulus plans are funded by issuing more government debt. (The money must come from somewhere!) The added debt absorbs savings that would otherwise go to private investment. In the end, despite the existence of idle resources, bail-outs and stimulus plans do not add to current resources in use. They just move resources from one use to another." The argument that Messrs Fama, Prescott, Cochrane, Barro, Poole and company are making is what economists call Say's law. It is the claim that decisions to increase spending—whether they come from the government or anybody else—cannot spur the economy and raise employment and production because demand must be created by supply. If the government spends, somebody else must cut back on their spending. Anyone who uses his or her eyes can determine that Say's law is in general false. Recall 2003-06, when capital inflows from Asia, easy money provided by the Federal Reserve and promises that financial engineering would cheaply diversify risk spurred homebuilders to spend money building houses. The American unemployment rate fell from 6.0% to 4.8%. Recall 1996-2000, when the assembled investors of America discovered the internet and in response businesses spent money like water on computers and telephones. The American unemployment rate fell 5.6% to 4.3%. In general, spending works to spur the economy, and the government's money when spent is as good as anybody else's. 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. Milton Friedman had some very harsh things to say about the Great Depression predecessors of Fama, Prescott, Cochrane, Barro, Poole and company when he contrasted his vision of Chicago-school monetary economics with theirs: "Chicago was one of the few academic centers at which the quantity theory continued to be ... central and vigorous ... throughout the 1930s and 1940s, where students continued to study monetary theory and to write theses on monetary problems. The quantity theory that retained this role differed sharply from the atrophied and rigid caricature that is so frequently described by the proponents of the new Keynesian income-expenditure approach—and with some justice, to judge by much of the literature on policy that was spawned by old quantity theorists." ... -- http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/276