Bubbles are Not Funny: The 99% Gets Blasted When They Burst

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/economic-bubbles



Paul Krugman tells us that Larry Summers joined the camp concerned about secular stagnation in his I.M.F. talk last week, something that I had not picked up from prior coverage of the session. This is good news, but I would qualify a few of the points that Krugman makes in his elaboration of Summers' remarks.

First, while the economy may presently need asset bubbles to maintain full employment (a point I made in Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy), it doesn't follow that we should not be concerned about asset bubbles. The problem with bubbles is that their inflation and inevitable deflation lead to massive redistribution of wealth.

In the case of the housing bubble in particular we saw millions of people lose much or all of their wealth from buying homes at bubble-inflated prices. The loss of housing wealth is especially devastating because housing is a highly leveraged asset even in normal times and it is an asset often held by middle and moderate income households. It was great that the bubble was able to spur growth and get the economy close to full employment, however the subsequent crash was pretty awful. It would be incredibly irresponsible to go through another round like this.

The second qualification is that it is reasonable to believe that aggregate consumption levels will depend at least in part on the distribution of income. The upward redistribution in the last three decades, from middle and lower end wage earners to the high end wage earners in the 80s and 90s, and to corporate profits in the last decade, likely had an effect in depressing consumption. The question here is whether the marginal propensity to consume out of income is higher for a retail clerk or factory worker than a doctor or CEO. I would be willing to argue that it is, which means that the upward redistribution of income over this period had a depressing effect on consumption. (As a practical matter, this depressing effect was offset by the asset bubbles in the 1990s and 2000s.)

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1. K&R

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2. Bubbles are money pumps. It's like adiabatic decompression cycles for finance.

I bet you can all guess which direction the money gets pumped.

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3. We need an isenthalpic expansion of the economy