Category Archives: Interest Rates

The Cycle of Basic Income

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We ask all serious graduate students and professors of macroeconomics, government economists, conscientious politicians, poorly educated journalists, and financial-talk-show “pundits” to please read Bernard Lonergan’s Macroeconomic Dynamics, (CWL 15), Section 26, “The Cycle of Basic Income”.  That section addresses several important economic issues:

  • the adjustment of the  rate of saving to the phases of the pure cycle of expansion in the economic process
  • the complementary mechanism of changing prices
  • the significance of a relative and an absolute rise or fall of monetary prices
  • the difficulty with the theory of manipulating interest rates in that a)  it lumps together a number of quite different things, and b) overlooks the order of magnitude of the fundamental problem
  • the ineptitude of the procedure of manipulating interest rates.

Then, after the first reading, please read that section a second time.

Thank you.

[CWL 15] Lonergan, Bernard (1999), Macroeconomic Dynamics: An Essay in Circulation Analysis, ed. Frederick G. Lawrence, Patrick H. Byrne, and Charles Hefling, Jr., vol 15 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press)

The Principle of Concomitance: The Foundation of Equilibrium and Continuity

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Concomitance is, I would claim, the key word in Lonergan’s economic thinking. [Philip McShane, [Fusion 1, page 4 ftnt 10]

Recall that the subtitle of CWL 15 is “An Essay in Circulation Analysis”.  It is by virtue of concomitance that continuity and equilibrium are achieved so as to constitute an orderly process of circulations.  (Continue reading)

A Burley Sampler

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In our Thanks section we have emphasized our debt to Professor Peter Burley.  With a PhD in physics (Adelaide, 1965) and a PhD in Economics (Princeton, 1968) he was well qualified to understand the revolutionary nature of Lonergan’s Macroeconomic Field Theory. (Continue reading)

Lilley and Rogoff Recommending Negative Interest Rates

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We are commenting with respect to Andrew Lilley and Kenneth Rogoff’s “conference draft” discussing the advisability of a FRB policy of negative interest rates:

 Lilley, Andrew and Kenneth Rogoff, April 24, 2019: “The Case for Implementing Effective Negative Interest Rate Policy” (Conference draft for presentation at Strategies For Monetary Policy: A Policy Conference, the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, May 4, 2019, 9:15 am PST) [Lilley and Rogoff, 2019]     (Continue reading)

Harvard Magazine’s Podcast, “Ask a Harvard Professor”

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Harvard Magazine’s podcast, “Ask a Harvard Professor,” recently featured an interview of professors Doug Elmendorf and Karen Dynan – two good people – under the title Doug Elmendorf and Karen Dynan: How Much Can the Federal Budget and the Deficit Continue to Grow? (Click here for video and print versions of the interview)

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Notes Re Reading The Images and Graphs In CWL 15, pp. 121-25

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In the graphs of CWL 15, pages 121-25, it is easy to become disoriented by the symbols on the vertical axes and by the titles and annotations.  In particular, one might tend mistakenly to view Q as a symbol for an absolute quantity or an accumulation rather than for a rate of flow of a quantity.  Recall:

In Lonergan’s circulation analysis, the basic terms are rates – rates of productive activities and rates of payments.  The objective of the analysis is to discover the underlying intelligible and dynamic (accelerative) network of functional, mutually conditioning, and interdependent relationships of these rates to one another.  [CWL 15  26-27  ftnt 27]

Lonergan never used terms for magnitudes, only for rates and their accelerations (‘rates of rates’) in the Essay in Circulation Analysis.  [CWL 15, 182]

But if the ultimate product qi is related by a double summation to the contributions of factors of production qijk, then the total flow of ultimate products Qi is also related by a double summation to the rates of the contributions of the factors of production Qijk, where both Qiand Qijk are instances of the form ‘so much or so many every so often.’  (CWL 15, 30)

In the graphs superscripts identify basic (‘) or surplus (“) elements.  Absence of superscripts here indicates “in any case.”

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