Coppola Comment

 The UK is running a trade surplus. No, really, I am not joking. This is from the ONS's latest trade statistics release : The UK total trade surplus, excluding non-monetary gold and other precious metals, increased £3.8 billion to £7.7 billion in the three months to August 2020, as exports grew by £21.4 billion and imports grew by a lesser £17.5 billion It's the first time the UK has run a trade surplus since the late 1990s:  And if you were thinking this was because of the lockdown, you would be wrong. The UK has been running a trade surplus since the beginning of 2020: Admittedly, the trade surplus widened under lockdown. But the UK economy reopened to some degree from June to August - and yet the trade surplus continues to widen. This is no doubt music to the ears of balance of payments obsessives. Could the UK at last be pivoting away from a consumption-led growth model to an export-led one?  At first sight, it appears so. Exports have increased more than imports. And the s

When the banks fell over, they knocked the stuffing out of the British economy. The UK’s productivity has been dismal ever since. Unemployment has fallen to historic lows and wages are rising, but productivity growth remains near zero. This “productivity puzzle,” as it is known, has had economists scratching their heads for best part of a decade. But UK productivity is a tale of two halves. Experimental statistics recently released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reveal widely varying productivity levels across the UK. “Productivity grew in half of the 12 regions and countries of the UK in 2018,” says the ONS, “with output per hour increasing in both Scotland and the East Midlands by more than 2%; in contrast, output per hour fell in Yorkshire and The Humber and in Northern Ireland by at least 2%.”  It would be easy to ascribe this stark divergence in productivity growth to the dominance of financial services and decline of manufacturing. Financial services are cen

The world is saving like crazy. Corporations are building up cash mountains that they can’t or won’t invest in expanding their businesses. Individuals are building up pensions and precautionary savings. Governments, especially in developing countries, are building up FX reserves. The “ savings glut ,” as former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke dubbed it, shows no signs of dissipating. It is sloshing around the world looking for a productive home. But there isn’t one - or at least, not one that offers the safety that fearful investors desperately crave. That, fundamentally, is what is driving down the returns on assets. It is also the primary cause of the wide US trade deficit. The President likes to think that the reason for the US’s persistent trade deficits is unfair trade practices and currency manipulation. And for some countries, these are undoubtedly contributing factors. But the biggest reason by far is the global dominance of the dollar, and above all, the pre-eminence of dollar

Sectoral balances can tell us so much about what is going on in an economy. Especially when they are expressed as a time series, as in this remarkable chart from the ECB : Although it is a time series, this is not a rate-of-change chart. The y axis is in billions of Euros, not in percentage growth rates. But the chart nevertheless shows that Eurozone net saving has risen steadily since the financial crisis, except during the Eurozone crisis of 2011-12 when it dipped slightly. What do we mean by "net saving"? The legend appears to conflate saving with investment, and the brief explanation at the bottom of the chart doesn't really help. So here's some simple algebra to sort it out. In national accounting, "saving" is the excess of income over desired consumption. For the private sector, it looks like this: S p = Y - T - C where Y is the net income of the private sector from all sources, T is tax payments, and C is all other consumption. Thus, &q;

In a recent article for the New Statesman , the economics commentator Grace Blakeley makes an extraordinary claim. Writing about the origins of the IMF, she says: Seventy-five years have passed since these international financial institutions were created in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944. Back then, delegates sought to tame the power of international finance, the growth of which helped to cause the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the ensuing Great Depression. JM Keynes – who led the British delegation – arrived at Bretton Woods with the aim of “euthanising” a financial elite he viewed as parasitic on productive economic activity. I thought that Bretton Woods was about free trade and economic cooperation, not "taming the power of international finance." But I can be wrong. So I checked it out. According to the U.S. State Department , Bretton Woods was indeed born from the U.S.'s dreadful experience in the worldwide depression of the early 1930s. But it was no

In my last post , I said that the fact that a government can buy anything that is for sale in its own currency is not sufficient to confer monetary sovereignty. A country which is dependent on essential imports, such as foodstuffs and oil, for which it must pay in dollars is not monetarily sovereign. Some people disputed this on the grounds that such a country could earn the dollars it needs through exports. So I thought I would write a post discussing how realistic this is in practice. Strictly speaking, the only country in the world that can always pay for everything it needs in its own currency is the United States. However, most developed  countries that issue their own currencies have deep and liquid FX markets that enable them to exchange their currencies freely for other currencies; many also have swap lines with the Federal Reserve. Eurozone countries don't issue their own currencies, but the bloc as a whole issues the world's second reserve currency. It is not go

How many countries can really claim to have full monetary sovereignty? The simplistic answer is "any country which issues its own currency, has free movement of capital and a floating exchange rate." I have seen this trotted out MANY times, particularly by non-economists of the MMT persuasion. It is, unfortunately, wrong .  This is a more complex definition from a prominent MMT economist: 1. Issues its own currency exclusively 2. Requires all taxes and related obligations to be extinguished in that currency 3. Can purchase anything that is for sale in that currency at any time it chooses, without financial constraints. That includes all idle labour 4. Its central bank sets the interest rate 5. The currency floats 6. The Government does not borrow in any currency other than its own. This appears solid. But in fact, it too is wrong.   The big hole in this is the external borrowing constraint - item 6 in the list. If a government genuinely could purchase

Sometimes I despair at the naivety of politicians. Theresa May's humiliation in Salzburg was an inevitable consequence of her belief that the EU would be willing to compromise its "four freedoms" to keep her in power. To be fair, press reports since the Chequers plan have suggested that the last thing the EU wants is a change of leadership in the UK. But it was a mistake to interpret this as meaning the EU was willing to become Theresa's poodle. Nothing could be further from the truth. The EU has said many times that the four freedoms are not up for negotiation, and proposals that tried to keep some of them while rejecting others have all been flatly rejected. Theresa's prized Chequers deal was weighed in the balance and found wanting the moment it hit Michel Barnier's desk. All the European Council did was confirm what everyone already knew. Except our Theresa, that is, who apparently thought that "this is not going to work" meant that the