by
Mervyn King
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What does it mean to be rational in a world of radical uncertainty? Once we are liberated from the view that there is a single optimising solution, rules of thumb--technically known as heuristics--are better seen as rational ways to cope with an unknowable future. A heuristic is a decision rule that deliberately ignores information. It does so not just because humans are not computers, but because it is rational to ignore information when we do not understand how the world works. [...] Heuristics are not deviations from the true optimal solution but essential parts of a toolkit to cope with the unknown.
Everyone on the island felt let down. The cult of finance had led to the contraction of a successful fishing industry. Too many talented people had been sucked into trading which, with the benefit of hindsight, was little more than a zero-sum activity generating little or not output. How could so many people have been taken in by the new world of finance?
a cute little parable about a fishing island in which everyone gets drawn into finance (betting on the fishing industry) and thus no one is left to actually fish
thought: is financialisation inevitable, because of the feedback loop? is it like a recessive gene that offers no fitness advantages and thus will eventually be selected out randomly if you wait long enough?
Eighteenth-century thinkers, such as David Hume and Adam Smith, understood the relationship between the amount of money in circulation and the prices at which goods and services were bought and sold: 'if we consider any kingdom by itself, it is evident, that the greater or less plenty of money is of no consequence, since the prices of commodities are always proportioned to the plenty of money'. In the long run, more money means higher prices. The quantity theory of money, later refined and popularised by the American economists Irving Fisher and Milton Friedman, had been born.
ignoring the trends among individual products + irrational factors but I guess yeah
[...] Prices and wages do not adjust instantaneously to clear markets whenever demand and supply are out of balance. Firms change price only irregularly in response to changes in demand; wages adjust only slowly as labour market conditions alter; and expectations are updated only slowly as new information is received. Such 'frictions' or 'rigidities' introduce time lags into the process by which changes in money lead to changes in prices. These lags in the adjustment of prices and wages to changes in demand--so-called 'nominal rigidities'--and lags in the adjustment of expectations to changes in inflation--'expectational rigidities'--generate short-run relationships between money, activity, and inflation. [...]
the folly of viewing economics as this continuous and inherently quantifiable thing (think GDP, supply and demand theory, inflation) when it is anything but, and the choice of what to measure is so incredibly qualitative (is that the right word? political?)
[...] But if the assets have genuinely lost value, then the central bank must be careful not to subsidise insolvent undertakings. [...]
this is almost a bromide but really, why does it matter if no one ever finds out? it's all built on trust anyway
(on lenders of last resort)
[...] For a society to base its financial system on alchemy is a poor advertisement for its rationality. The key to ending the alchemy is to ensure that the risks involved in money and banking are correctly identified and borne by those who enjoy the benefits from our financial system.
I think when I first read this I thought it was great and super radical, but now it just feels meaningless ... how could anyone possibly "correctly" bear the risks? you just have to reduce the possibility of gaining benefits
[...] The pretence that the illiquid real assets of an economy--the factories, capital equipment, houses and offices--can suddenly be converted into money or liquidity is the essence of the alchemy of the present system. Banks and other financial intermediaries will always try to finance illiquid assets by issuing liquid liabilities because they make profits by paying less on the latter than they earn on the former. [...]
there's a great line in a different book (forget which, maybe Yaroufakis) about banks wanting true, instant liquidity ... and yet in reality they have to cope with the short-term/long-term disparity between lending/borrowing maturation rates (I forget the term for this)
[...] each type of asset is given a risk weight, agreed by international regulators, and this is used to calculate the overall amount of equity a bank must issue. Mortgage lending, for example, was thought on the basis of past experience to be relatively safe, and was given a low risk weight. Sovereign debt was believed to be so safe that it was given a zero risk weight, meaning that banks did not have to raise any equity finance in respect of such investments and so had no additional capacity to absorb losses on them. [...]
again, this all stems from the truly stupid idea that this shit is rigorously quantifiable and not just make-believe
[...] Someone buying a meal in a restaurant might use a card, as now, but the result would not be a transfer from their bank account to that of the restaurant; instead there would be a sale of shares from the diner's portfolio and the acquisition of different shares, or other assets, to the same value by the restaurant. [...] There would be no unique role for something called money in order to buy 'stuff'.
this passage kinda boggles the mind (I say so now, but I think I felt similarly when I first read this) cus how can you imagine such a strange concept (which is really functionally equivalent) but not then take the next step of asking why such a transfer is needed at all???? it's still money??? like that startup that tried to get people to do favours for each other in exchange for virtual currency (which they called karma I believe). why is it necessary to transfer wealth in order to support production or consumption??? DRIFT i'm telling you
[...] If the government boosts spending to bring unemployment below its natural rate, then the increased demand for labour will push wages up. But to restore firms' profits, prices will also rise, and real wages will fall back to their original level. [...]
my original notes are "unless you also change policy to discourage profit-seeking ... this has real implications for the minimum wage debate" which, tbh, feels surprisingly woke for the me of 2016