Evans-Pritchard versus la Fed

Evans-Pritchard versus la Fed

Notre lecteur “Bilbo”, à qui revient le mérite de la trouvaille, nous signale une chronique furieuse, voire déchaînée, de Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, le distingué commentateur économique du Daily Telegraph, du 29 juin 2010. Evans-Pritchard est piqué au vif par une intervention d’un économiste, conseiller de la Federal Reserve à Richmond, Virginie, le Dr. Kartik Athreya. Ce dernier attaque et condamne les commentateurs économistes indépendants et autres, sur les blogs et dans les colonnes des journaux divers, qui ne peuvent arguer d’un doctorat d’économiste, comme “chroniquement stupides” et comme “une menace pour l’ordre public”.

Riposte de Evans-Pritchard, commençant par un exposé sarcastique des motifs…

«Like a mad aunt, the Fed is slowly losing its marbles.

»Kartik Athreya, senior economist for the Richmond Fed, has written a paper condemning economic bloggers as chronically stupid and a threat to public order.

»Matters of economic policy should be reserved to a priesthood with the correct post-doctoral credentials, which would of course have excluded David Hume, Adam Smith, and arguably John Maynard Keynes (a mathematics graduate, with a tripos foray in moral sciences).

» “Writers who have not taken a year of PhD coursework in a decent economics department (and passed their PhD qualifying exams), cannot meaningfully advance the discussion on economic policy.”

»Don’t you just love that throw-away line “decent”? Dr Athreya hails from the University of Iowa.

»“The response of the untrained to the crisis has been startling. The real issue is that there is an extremely low likelihood that the speculations of the untrained, on a topic almost pathologically riddled by dynamic considerations and feedback effects, will offer anything new. Moreover, there is a substantial likelihood that it will instead offer something incoherent or misleading.”»

La riposte de Evans-Pritchard, face au Dr. Athreya, qui ne veut plus entendre parler de “these clowns” (les chroniqueurs indépendants), vaut son pesant de katch-up. Le distingué chroniqueur londonien perd son flegme, ce qui nous vaut une diatribe où nous apprenons enfin, sans fard ni pincettes, ce que Evans-Pritchard pense de l’action de la Fed…

«However, Dr Athreya’s assertions cannot be allowed to pass. The current generation of economists have led the world into a catastrophic cul de sac. And if they think we are safely on the road to recovery, they still fail to understand what they did.

»Central banks were the ultimate authors of the credit crisis since it is they who set the price of credit too low, throwing the whole incentive structure of the capitalist system out of kilter, and more or less forcing banks to chase yield and engage in destructive behaviour.

»They ran ever-lower real interests with each cycle, allowed asset bubbles to run unchecked (Ben Bernanke was the cheerleader of that particular folly), blamed Anglo-Saxon over-consumption on excess Asian savings (half true, but still the silliest cop-out of all time), and believed in the neanderthal doctrine of “inflation targeting”. Have they all forgotten Keynes’s cautionary words on the “tyranny of the general price level” in the early 1930s? Yes they have.

»They allowed the M3 money supply to surge at double-digit rates (16pc in the US and 11pc in euroland), and are now allowing it to collapse (minus 5.5pc in the US over the last year). Have they all forgotten the Friedman-Schwartz lessons on the quantity theory of money? Yes, they have. Have they forgotten Irving Fisher’s “Debt Deflation causes of Great Depressions”? Yes, most of them have. And of course, they completely failed to see the 2007-2009 crisis coming, or to respond to it fast enough when it occurred.

»The Fed has since made a hash of quantitative easing, largely due to Bernanke’s ideological infatuation with “creditism”. QE has been large enough to horrify everybody (especially the Chinese) by its sheer size – lifting the balance sheet to $2.4 trillion – but it has been carried out in such a way that it does not gain full traction. This is the worst of both worlds. So much geo-political capital wasted to such modest and distorting effect…»

“Bilbo” (avec dedefensa.org)