Re-examing Reinhart-Rogoff

[Enki]

http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/re ... s-problems

This error is needed to get the results they published, and it would go a long way to explaining why it has been impossible for others to replicate these results. If this error turns out to be an actual mistake Reinhart-Rogoff made, well, all I can hope is that future historians note that one of the core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel.

[Azrael]

It looks like their paper is a mess. It's been having a tough time lately.

Here they found that R-R understated growth at "high debt levels", destroying the R-R result.

[Mr. Perfect]

Who is practicing austerity?

[noddy]

Who is practicing austerity?

anyone who isnt part of the tax supported entitled classes

as for the hipster smug strawman in the topic, sigh... might aswell have a "rational" discussion about catholicism vs protestentism vs atheism.

[Zack Morris]

Who is practicing austerity?

It doesn't really matter. The theory behind austerity has a logic associated with it, namely that eliminating government services will summon confidence fairies to stimulate demand by consumers who, as the theory goes, no longer have to fear long-term tax increases and debt vigilantes raiding their savings. A multi-year commitment to reducing spending in an otherwise fiscally profligate (allegedly) age was kind of a big deal but produced no shift in economic sentiment and freed up no capital. At the very least, one would expect falling government demand to be reflected in the debt markets, where money should have shifted to private enterprises competing with government debt for funding. Did it happen? Well, in the US it did to some extent, but we're not implementing European-style austerity measures.

In Japan, a very different experiment is being played out. We'll see who was right.

[Doc]

Who is practicing austerity?

It doesn't really matter. The theory behind austerity has a logic associated with it, namely that eliminating government services will summon confidence fairies to stimulate demand by consumers who, as the theory goes, no longer have to fear long-term tax increases and debt vigilantes raiding their savings. A multi-year commitment to reducing spending in an otherwise fiscally profligate (allegedly) age was kind of a big deal but produced no shift in economic sentiment and freed up no capital. At the very least, one would expect falling government demand to be reflected in the debt markets, where money should have shifted to private enterprises competing with government debt for funding. Did it happen? Well, in the US it did to some extent, but we're not implementing European-style austerity measures.

In Japan, a very different experiment is being played out. We'll see who was right.

What multi-year commitment reducing spending?

[noddy]

europe isnt doing austerity, its doing massive money transfer socialism for the status quo of bankers and power mongers.

iceland is the only country im aware of that actually did proper capitalist reset style austerity, they let the banks croak, they copped the massive devaluation of their dollar and housing and they have now recovered and are prospering.

the hardest part of these conversations is all the distortion of language thats going on when keynesians claim to be talking in austerity language and just babble a bunch of words with new meanings.

ditto when ultra capitalists talk about socialism of course, it does cut both ways.