...Critique of Classical Theory & The Rise of Keynesian Theory Classical Economic Theory Classical theory of economics states that a free market economy is self-regulating and that with full employment, the economy would reach equilibrium. The classical theory is fundamentally based on the Say's Law which states that "Supply creates its own Demand". This also made the classical economists believe that there was nothing to prevent an economy from growing and hence attaining a state of full employment. This would be achievable as long as employees are willing to work for a wage that was no more than their productivity and in this situation, the profit-seeking businesses would want to employ everyone. According to the Classical economists, full employment of real GDP stays the same regardless of the price level. During a recession or a depression, the aggregate demand in the economy would fall and in the current price levels, consumption reduces and thus there would be an excess of goods in the market. This excess supply would result in the fall of the prices as well as wage rates and hence go back to the state of equilibrium. The Great Depression & critique on the classical economic theory But this theory was proven wrong by the Great Depression as it was seen that when output is below the full employment level, price levels did not fall because wages and resource prices did not fall as they were sticky. In order to have more employees, the employers needed to earn...
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...BUSINESS CIRCLE THEORY INTRODUCTION. The term business cycle (or economic cycle or boom-bust cycle) refers to economy-wide fluctuations in production, trade and economic activity in general over several months or years in an economy organized on free-enterprise principles. The business cycle is the upward and downward movements of levels of GDP (gross domestic product) and refers to the period of expansions and contractions in the level of economic activities (business fluctuations) around its long-term growth trend. These fluctuations occur around a long-term growth trend, and typically involve shifts over time between periods of relatively rapid economic growth (an expansion or boom), and periods of relative stagnation or decline (a contraction or recession).Business cycles are usually measured by considering the growth rate of real gross domestic product. Despite being termed cycles, these fluctuations in economic activity can prove unpredictable. History A BASIC ILLUSTRATION OF ECONOMY/BUSINESS CIRCLE. Theory The first systematic exposition of periodic economic crises, in opposition to the existing theory of economic equilibrium, was the 1819 Nouveaux Principes d'économie politique by Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi. Prior to that point classical economics had either denied the existence of business cycles, blamed them on external factors, notably war, or only studied the long term. Sismondi found vindication in the Panic of 1825, which was the first unarguably international...
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...triggered by economic turmoil in China, the US Federal Reserve has just decided to postpone raising interest rates. Indeed, China is facing the huge challenge of dealing with the risk of a global debt-deflation trap. In 1933, Irving Fisher was the first to identify the dangers of over-indebtedness and deflation, demonstrating their contribution to the Great Depression in the United States. Forty years later, Charles Kindleberger applied the theory in a global context, emphasizing the problems that arise in a world lacking coordinated and consistent monetary, fiscal, and regulatory policies, as well as an international lender of last resort. In 2011, Richard Koo used Japan’s experience to highlight the risks of a prolonged balance-sheet recession, when over-stretched debtors deleverage in order to rebuild their balance sheets. The debt-deflation cycle begins with an imbalance or displacement, which fuels excessive exuberance, over-borrowing, and speculative trading, and ends in bust, with procyclical liquidation of excess capacity and debt causing price deflation, unemployment, and economic stagnation. The result can be a deep depression. In 2000, the imbalance was America’s large current-account deficit: the world’s largest economy was borrowing heavily on international capital markets, rather than lending, as one might expect. According to then-Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the problem was that countries running large surpluses were buying so many US Treasuries that they were negating...
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...Milton Friedman started the documentary Free to Choose part-3 Anatomy of a Crisis with the genesis of the Great Depression of 1930. Friedman articulated it was the Wall Street Crash on October 29, 1929 better known as “Black Thursday” that began the trickledown effects on the United States economy. Friedman claimed that bellied up businesses and bank failures in the south and mid-west of the United States contributed to the Great Depression. Friedman believed that it was not deemed a crisis until failures reached New York. One casualty the Bank of the United States in New York, New York was in jeopardy of bank failure. Friedman express that although the Federal Reserve Bank of New York whose primary functions are to prevent and or assist banks from bank failure was unsuccessful regarding the Bank of the United States dilemma. With several attempts Federal Reserve Bank proposed that the Bank of the United States merged with other local banks. By doing so a guarantee fund for depositors would cover the Bank of the United States loss and keep it afloat. Ultimately the Bank of the United States shut down December 10, 1930 due to competition from surrounding banks and racism. Friedman goes on about how the Federal Reserve Bank and their unwillingness to create new money by purchasing government securities at a grand scale. Friedman conveyed that the bank failure of the Bank of the United States would have been handled differently and fitting during that time if a Benjamin Strong...
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...The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in 1930 and lasted until the late 1930s or middle 1940s. It was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century. In the 21st century, the Great Depression is commonly used as an example of how far the world's economy can decline. Cities all around the world were hit hard, especially those dependent on heavy industry. Construction was virtually halted in many countries. Farming and rural areas suffered as crop prices fell by approximately 60%. Facing plummeting demand with few alternate sources of jobs, areas dependent on primary sector industries such as cash cropping, mining and logging suffered the most. Some economies started to recover by the mid-1930s. In many countries, the negative effects of the Great Depression lasted until after the end of World War II. Start Economic historians usually attribute the start of the Great Depression to the sudden devastating collapse of US stock market prices on October 29, 1929, known as Black Tuesday; some dispute this conclusion, and see the stock crash as a symptom, rather than a cause, of the Great Depression. Even after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, optimism persisted for some time; John D. Rockefeller said that "These are days when many are discouraged. In the 93 years of my life, depressions have come and...
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...official Nobel website: “We're just bookish types that look at numbers and try to figure out what's going on.” But no one who'd followed Prof. Sargent's long, distinguished career would have been fooled by his attempt at modesty. He'd won for his part in developing one of economists' main models of cause and effect: How can we expect people to respond to changes in prices, for example, or interest rates? According to the laureates' theories, they'll do whatever's most beneficial to them, and they'll do it every time. They don't need governments to instruct them; they figure it out for themselves. Economists call this the “rational expectations” model. And it's not just an abstraction: Bankers and policy-makers apply these formulae in the real world, so bad models lead to bad policy. Which is perhaps why, by the end of that interview on Monday, Prof. Sargent was adopting a more realistic tone: “We experiment with our models,” he explained, “before we wreck the world.” Rational-expectations theory and its corollary, the efficient-market hypothesis, have been central to mainstream economics for more than 40 years. And while they may not have “wrecked the world,” some critics argue these models have blinded economists to reality: Certain the universe was unfolding as it should, they failed both to anticipate the financial crisis of 2008 and to chart an effective path to recovery. The economic crisis has produced a crisis in the...
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...The Great Recession and the Great Depression John Maynard Keynes wrote in the depths of the Great Depression that, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”1 This acute observation is applicable to our current Great Recession as well. In fact, the newly discredited ideas are not too different from the old, suggesting that Keynes may have overestimated the ability of people to learn from their mistakes. I discuss the parallels between these two watersheds in recent economic history in three steps. The first and most important step is the causes of the crises and their relation to economic theory. The second step is the spread of the crises as they affected the whole world. I close with the final step, recovery—at least as far as we can see it at this point. Marx said famously that history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”2 I argue that this observation also fits our current condition. Both of these dramatic and costly economic crises came from the interaction of economic imbalances in the world economy and the ruling ideology of financial decision makers who confronted these imbalances. The first imbalance came from the First World War. This paroxysm of violence brought the long economic expansion of the nineteenth century to a sudden end. Britain, the workshop of the prewar world, was exhausted by the struggle. America, the rising...
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...THE ENDLESS CRISIS REPORT Introduction The Endless Crisis was written by John Bellamy Foster, the editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon collaborating with Robert W. McChesney. The article came originally from the introduction of the book called The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the United States to China. The Great Financial Crisis and the Great Recession began in the United States in 2007 and quickly spread across the globe, which appear to be the turning point of the world history. The recovery plan was set to two year, however the world economy five years after crisis is still in the sluggishness. The Traid – United States, Europe, and Japan remain caught in a slow growth condition, financial instability, and high unemployment rate. As a consequence, the effects spread globally. Despite the slowdown of the global economy, China is the only country found out to be a bright spot as its economy is still expanding. Different views on the Stagnation In the United States, the focus of financial crisis shifted to the idea of economic stagnation. The idea of stagnation was introduced by authorities and published books as follow. Firstly, Ben Bernanke, chairman of Federal Reserve Board said on his speech in 2011 that the stagnation was not affects only the United States, but the global economy as a whole. He moreover stressed that he do not expect the long-run potential growth...
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...regard to both economic theory and the politics of governance. Today, the global economy is struggling with the fall-out from the financial crash of 2008 and the Great Recession of 2007–2009. The economic crisis that these events have generated, combined with the failure of the mainstream economics profession, has again put the question of change on the table. The economics profession stands significantly discredited owing to its failure to foresee the recession and the financial crash, its repeated over-optimistic forecasts of rapid recovery, and the lack of plausibility surrounding its attempts to explain events. Reasonable people do not expect economists to predict the daily movements of the stock market, but they do expect them to anticipate and explain major imminent economic developments. On that score, the profession failed catastrophically, revealing fundamental theoretical inadequacies. This intellectual failure has prompted us to launch the Review of Keynesian Economics. At a time of journal proliferation, some may wonder about the need for another journal. We would respond there is a proliferation of journals, but that proliferation is essentially within one intellectual paradigm. As such, it obscures the fact that the range of theoretical inquiry is actually very narrow. A journal devoted to Keynesian economics is therefore needed, both to correct this narrowness and because events have once again confirmed the profound relevance of Keynesian theory. Reflection upon the...
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...| The Abuse of Keynes’ Theory of Government Spending | And Why Government Spending Needs to Stop | | Chase Cooper | 12/13/2012 | Political Economy Dr.Ramos Abstract: The goal of my research paper is to analyze and present how John Maynard Keynes’ theory on government spending is being abused by the American government insofar that the American government is not following the guidelines and foundations that premised Keynes’ theory, and instead are picking the parts of the theory that allow them to spend at unsustainable levels, creating problems that, one way or another, eventually have to be resolved. My research will prove how the American government is conducting fiscal policy in a way that abuses Keynes’ theory on government spending, and, as a result, why Keynes would not support the American government in their spending endeavors, despite using his theory as their justification. I will be critiquing the application of Keynes’ theory from the Austrian, specifically the works of Friedrich A. Hayek, and Monetarist perspectives, supported by arguments given by Milton Friedman. Section 1: Keynes’ Theory on Government Spending John Maynard Keynes published his famous work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, in 1936, during the Great Depression. Economies all over the world were suffering severely from the Great Depression, and there was little hope of economic recovery in the near future. Keynes agreed with the classical economist’s notion...
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...Wilson 1 Milton Friedman is considered to be one of the most prominent and influential economists of the twentieth century. Friedman’s ideas have changed economic theories as a result of his beliefs in free-market capitalism, competition in education and less government control. He received worldwide recognition for contributing to the balancing and solving of economic issues. He has been recognized by creditable universities and international governments. Friedman developed economic theories that could possibly be studied forever. His theories on economics have contributed excessive cash flow to the world over an extended period of time (Ebenstein). Friedman was born in 1912 and died in 2006. He was an economist, an educator and a leading proponent of monetarism. He received degrees from Rutgers University, University of Chicago and finally a Ph.D. from Columbia University. In 1976 he received the Nobel Prize for economics. Friedman felt that the understandings of economics enabled one to understand how the real world worked (Ebenstein). Friedman studied income and wealth distribution along with distribution of personal finances. His career included working for the National resource Committee on Consumer Budget Studies in 1935, the National Bureau of Economic Research in 1937, the Department of Treasury Division of Tax Research during World War II and he also taught at the University of Chicago. He advised President Nixon and President Reagan on Wilson 2 ...
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...erudite History, and thereby failing to complete a long-planned work of economic analysis. Thomas McCraw’s splendid new book brilliantly illuminates this Schumpeterian paradox, and the many others that made Schumpeter, as Phillip Mirowski put it, “a living, breathing contradiction” (1994: 5). Prophet of Innovation is not just a beautifully drawn portrait of Schumpeter’s life and times, it is also a distinguished business historian’s meditation on the two opposed cultures of political economy post-1870: history and theory. The Prophet of Innovation, among its other accomplishments, tells the story of how a great and productive intellect wrestled with the two-cultures problem in political economy. In the work of Schumpeter, McCraw finds the very personification of political economy’s struggle between history and theory. Just as Schumpeter’s work personifies the roles for history and theory in economics, so too does McCraw make Schumpeter’s turbulent life and times a metaphor for Schumpeter’s great subject, capitalism. Schumpeter was four when his father died. An exile, he moved his household 23 times in his lifetime, living in five different...
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...as bad as the problem” (1975). His extensive collection of books, articles, and lectures echoed his theory of free markets and a reduction in the size of government’s role in them. Whether the topic was public education, government spending or regulation, economic stability, or monetary policy, Milton Friedman viewed government control and regulation as the source of many of the nation’s woes. His works focus on the disadvantages that an extensive, controlling federal government asserts on its citizens. After all, "The strongest argument for free enterprise is that it prevents anybody from having too much power” (1980). Milton knew that “The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit” (1980). He advocated that a free market economy (with very minimal government intervention) was the cause and effect to the U.S.’s historical economical booms and depressions throughout the years. He even went on to propose that Hong Kong’s government was an ideal example of a free market economy and that the U.S. could learn from it and improve our nation’s economic standing and health. Milton saw mass unemployment (and the ensuing depressions) as a result of this government oversight. This could have been avoided by adopting a free market economy void of unchecked government rule. He insisted “The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than...
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...Agriculture, services and manufacturing industries play a vital role in the development of the Indian economy. The IT outsourcing, software and call center/ BPO industries, in particular, have helped skyrocket India’s economic development in recent years. Economic development in India still depends on the various sectors that constitute the Indian economy – agriculture, services and manufacturing industries. India is rated as one of the top economies in the world in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP) of the gross domestic product (GDP) by leading financial entities of the world, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the CIA (as referenced in the CIA World Factbook). As far as agriculture is concerned, India is the second largest in volume of output. Certain related sectors of agriculture have played a major role in the development of the Indian economy by providing employment to a number of people in the forestry, fishing and logging industries. In 2009, the agricultural sector contributed 17.5% to the entire GDP, and more than 50% of the total labor force working in India is employed in the agricultural sector. Production volume has gone up in Indian agriculture at a consistent rate since the 1950s. Much of this improvement can be attributed to the five-year plans that were established for the development of Indian agriculture. Developments in irrigation processes, as well as various modern technologies used have contributed to the...
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...spending during times of recessions. In contrast, Hayek believed that you must save money so that you could later invest the money wisely. He felt time would multiply your interest. He felt that time did not matter. He believed the same principles of the economy that applied in the 1920 still applied in 2005. The solution was not to print more money, but to invest the money the money saved. (3) During Great Depression, Keynes concluded in his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money that government action was needed to stimulate aggregate demand to promote consumption so that the economy could achieve its potential and thereby reduce unemployment. Since 1930, there were two major successes based on Keynesian theory: massive government spending during World War II propelled the United States out of the Depression and the 1964 tax cut stimulated the economy during a period of slow growth. Both public spending and tax cuts promoted consumption and a multiplier effect meant that for every dollar of spending or tax cut, consumers spent even more. In 1971, Keynes’s economic theory was in full ascendency when President Nixon declared in The New York Times “I am now a Keynesian in economics”. Then the world changed and our political system proved incapable of the kind macroeconomic fine-tuning envisioned by Keynes and his followers. In fact, we experienced a series major policy and economic miscalculations. (4) Hayek as “an opponent of financial excess” From 1971 through the...
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