Author Archives: fanzstanbrough

Debt-Limit Negotiations; and Fay Vincent re “Why We Swear To Tell the Truth”

In a recent Wall Street Journal article (5/10/2023) titled “Why We Swear To Tell The Truth”, Fay Vincent quotes the witness’s oath.

Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God? The oath taker replies, “I do.”

There are truths (veritas) of testimony and cumulative verifications (veritas) of economic laws. Verification  rests in the isomorphism of the pattern of the mathematical expression and pattern of correlations in the data.

In the current negotiations in Congress regarding a debt limit, the swindle called “inflation” is a significant issue.

… the prime cause of inflation is ignorance.  The principles and laws of the normative macroeconomic dynamics of surplus and basic expansion, and surplus and basic incomes are not understood by academe, not formulated in establishment textbooks, not taught by academe to influential persons….. [CWL 15, 82]

Politicians must place the whole truth above personal glory; they must not make a Faustian bargain with their leaders and voters. Consider the following:

Money is a dummy invented by humans to enable divided exchange. Money is a promise of trust between people. But, simple as money’s functional purposes may seem, the determinations of how much money to create through the credit function is not well understood. There are natural limits to the supply of money, though the menace of so-called Modern Monetary Theory’s unconstrained printing of money would violate these limits and swindle the relatively vulnerable populace.

… money is an instrument invented to fulfill a definite task; it is not the ultimate master of the situation.  One has to place first human society which is served by the economic process, and second the economic process which is to be served by money.  Accordingly money has to conform to the objective exigencies of the economic process, and not vice versa. (CWL 21, 101)

Once the possibility of an unbalanced budget is established, the precedent can be invoked to persuade politicians to carry on other wars: wars on illiteracy, on poverty, on ill health, on unemployment, on insecurity.  Where the profit motive does not prove efficacious, the state must intervene. … the increasing volume of transactions requires a larger money supply, and the central bank can be persuaded to meet the demand. … it appears to be less evident that a vicious circle of ever more demands for a larger money supply with no increase in real income is inflationary … In any case there has emerged in fact if not in name the welfare state. … Its mechanism is rather strikingly similar to that of the favorable balance of foreign trade. The debt once owed by colonies to richer countries now is replaced by the national debt. … now the long overdue basic expansion is doled out to one’s fellow countrymen under the haughty name of welfare. [CWL 15, 85-86]. Continue reading 

A Perennial Source of Higher Systems

The brief excerpt below is relevant to a) the appreciation of the new science of Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics, and b) the choices of every society as to what its culture is to be.  In particular it is relevant to the achievement of liberation and ongoing freedom in currently totalitarian societies.  (Also click here   and here) Continue reading

“Where Does All The Money Go?”

On a quick drive back from the nearby hardware store, I heard some interviewer on Bloomberg Radio ask some expert “Where Does All The Money Go?”  A better query would have been “How does all the new money circulate? Into what channels might it go for immediate use and, perhaps, to cause inflation; and where might it go only to sit idle without productive purpose?” Continue reading

Recommended WSJ Interview of Paul Singer

The Saturday-Sunday Wall Street Journal of 4/8-9/ 2023 featured an Interview by James Freeman of Paul Singer, founder of Elliott Management.  P. Singer’s past predictions are notably congruent with the consequences systematically necessitated by, the deviations in policy of the executive and legislative branches from the norms of Lonergan’s Scientific Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics.

First, we quote some sections of Freeman’s interview of Singer; then we’ll quote brief sections to preview the treatment to follow.  From the Interview: (Continue reading)

Silicon Valley Bank and Burton Malkiel’s Mathematics of Bond Prices

Silicon Valley Bank could easily have avoided its mark-to-market write-down and bankruptcy.  Its managers, their outside consultants, and the steward of the banking system – the Federal Reserve Bank – should all have been required to read, understand, confirm and apply the constraints immanent in Burton Malkiel’s five theorems, especially Theorem 2, in his 1962 essay:

Malkiel, Burton, Expectations, Bond Prices, and the Term Structure of Interest Rates, Quarterly Journal of Economics Vol. LXXVI (May 1962) pp. 197-218 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press) [Malkiel, 1962]: Continue reading

The Einsteinian Context: Curvature and Relativity

Albert Einstein, Steven Weinberg, Lillian Lieber, Douglas Giancoli, Raymond A. Serway, Bernard Lonergan, Philip McShane, Peter Burley,

.1. Introductory

Graduate students seeking a thesis topic may expand this treatment of the Einsteinian context of Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics.  It should be of special interest to those having a strong background in theoretical physics and, thus, able to appreciate the analogies from physics.  “Similars are similarly understood.” (CWL 3, 288/313)

Philip McShane alerted us to the resemblances between Lonergan’s context of general macroeconomic dynamics and Einstein’s context of general relativity.

(Part Two entitled Fragments) belongs almost entirely in what I call the Einsteinian context of Part Three, in contrast to the Newtonian achievement of Part One; … [CWL 21, Index, 325]

A new science has emerged.  Lonergan has elevated conventional macrostatics to a macrodynamics explaining economic accelerations. (Continue reading)

Significant Passages on this Website

The important excerpts herein are quoted often and at greater length elsewhere on this website. (Click here and here).  Here is another arrangement:

Our aim is to prescind from human psychology that, in the first place, we may define the objective situation with which man has to deal, and, in the second place, define the psychological attitude that has to be adopted if man is to deal successfully with economic problems.  Thus something of a Copernican revolution is attempted: instead of taking man as he is or as he may be thought to be and from that deducing what economic phenomena are going to be, we take the exchange process in its greatest generality and attempt to deduce the human adaptations necessary for survival. [CWL 21,42- 43] Continue reading

The Notion of Organic Unity; Macroeconomic Field theory as a Unified, Systematic Whole

.1. Introduction

Lonergan’s treatment of the intelligibility of the plane circle provides to us a clue.  In the basic insight defining the plane circle, – that all radii are equal – all the interrelated concepts tumble out together in an intelligible unity.  The all-together intelligibility points to a template for explanation in the macroeconomic field; it fore-casts a singular unified intelligibility of the dynamic, organic economic process.  In the sweeping comprehensive act of understanding, all the abstract explanatory conjugates explaining the dynamic economic process are “yoked” together by their functional relations to one another.  The interdependencies of the flows which constitutethe whole dynamic system are grasped in a solidary whole.  And the patterns of the formulation are isomorphic with the patterns in the objective, unitary economic process.  The principle of unity and wholeness is a single, comprehensive intelligibility. (Continue reading)

To and For Economists, Investment Analysts, and Commentators on Bloomberg Surveillance, Squawk Box, and Mornings with Maria

To Tom Keene, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Maria Bartiromo, Lisa Abramowicz, Becky Quick, Francine Lacqua, Dagen McDowell, Joe Kernen, Jonathan Ferro, Larry Kudlow, Charles Payne, Neil Cavuto, Stuart Varney, Jim Cramer, Henrietta Treyz, Larry Summers, David Weston, Courtney Donohoe, Romaine Bostick, Hallinda Amin, Dani Burger, Gina Cervetti, Margaret Collins, Manus Cranny, Abigail Doolittle, Scarlet Fu, June Grasso, Kriti Gupta, Ritika Gupta, Morgan Brennan, David Faber, Steve Liesmann, Carl Quintanilla, Kate Rooney, Rick Santelli, Michael Santoli, Liz Claman, Gerry Baker, Taylor Riggs, Anastasia Amoroso, Jackie DeAngelis, Brian Brenberg.

Lonergan’s Preface to his seminal work Insight, A Study of Human Understanding, begins …

In the ideal detective story the reader is given all the clues yet fails to spot the criminal.  He may advert to each clue as it arises.  He needs no further clues to solve the mystery.  Yet he can remain in the dark for the simple reason that reaching the solution is not the mere apprehension of any clue, not the mere memory of all, but a quite distinct activity of organizing intelligence that places the full set of clues in a unique explanatory perspective. (CWL 3, Preface ix)

Paraphrasing the above (CWL 3, Preface, ix): Continue reading