Agora ESCUTA! Sobre a intervenção do Estado no Mercado

We’ve been going back and forth for a century

[Keynes] I want to steer markets,
[Hayek] I want them set free
There’s a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
[Hayek] Blame low interest rates.
[Keynes] No… it’s the animal spirits

[Keynes Sings:]

John Maynard Keynes, wrote the book on modern macro
The man you need when the economy’s off track, [whoa]
Depression, recession now your question’s in session
Have a seat and I’ll school you in one simple lesson

BOOM, 1929 the big crash
We didn’t bounce back—economy’s in the trash
Persistent unemployment, the result of sticky wages
Waiting for recovery? Seriously? That’s outrageous!

I had a real plan any fool can understand
The advice, real simple—boost aggregate demand!
C, I, G, all together gets to Y
Make sure the total’s growing, watch the economy fly

We’ve been going back and forth for a century
[Keynes] I want to steer markets,
[Hayek] I want them set free
There’s a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
[Hayek] Blame low interest rates.
[Keynes] No… it’s the animal spirits

You see it’s all about spending, hear the register cha-ching
Circular flow, the dough is everything
So if that flow is getting low, doesn’t matter the reason
We need more government spending, now it’s stimulus season

So forget about saving, get it straight out of your head
Like I said, in the long run—we’re all dead
Savings is destruction, that’s the paradox of thrift
Don’t keep money in your pocket, or that growth will never lift…

because…

Business is driven by the animal spirits
The bull and the bear, and there’s reason to fear its
Effects on capital investment, income and growth
That’s why the state should fill the gap with stimulus both…

The monetary and the fiscal, they’re equally correct
Public works, digging ditches, war has the same effect
Even a broken window helps the glass man have some wealth
The multiplier driving higher the economy’s health

And if the Central Bank’s interest rate policy tanks
A liquidity trap, that new money’s stuck in the banks!
Deficits could be the cure, you been looking for
Let the spending soar, now that you know the score

My General Theory’s made quite an impression
[a revolution] I transformed the econ profession
You know me, modesty, still I’m taking a bow
Say it loud, say it proud, we’re all Keynesians now

We’ve been goin’ back n forth for a century
[Keynes] I want to steer markets,
[Hayek] I want them set free
There’s a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
[Keynes] I made my case, Freddie H
Listen up , Can you hear it?

Hayek sings:

I’ll begin in broad strokes, just like my friend Keynes
His theory conceals the mechanics of change,
That simple equation, too much aggregation
Ignores human action and motivation

And yet it continues as a justification
For bailouts and payoffs by pols with machinations
You provide them with cover to sell us a free lunch
Then all that we’re left with is debt, and a bunch

If you’re living high on that cheap credit hog
Don’t look for cure from the hair of the dog
Real savings come first if you want to invest
The market coordinates time with interest

Your focus on spending is pushing on thread
In the long run, my friend, it’s your theory that’s dead
So sorry there, buddy, if that sounds like invective
Prepared to get schooled in my Austrian perspective

We’ve been going back and forth for a century
[Keynes] I want to steer markets,
[Hayek] I want them set free
There’s a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
[Hayek] Blame low interest rates.
[Keynes] No… it’s the animal spirits

The place you should study isn’t the bust
It’s the boom that should make you feel leery, that’s the thrust
Of my theory, the capital structure is key.
Malinvestments wreck the economy

The boom gets started with an expansion of credit
The Fed sets rates low, are you starting to get it?
That new money is confused for real loanable funds
But it’s just inflation that’s driving the ones

Who invest in new projects like housing construction
The boom plants the seeds for its future destruction
The savings aren’t real, consumption’s up too
And the grasping for resources reveals there’s too few

So the boom turns to bust as the interest rates rise
With the costs of production, price signals were lies
The boom was a binge that’s a matter of fact
Now its devalued capital that makes up the slack.

Whether it’s the late twenties or two thousand and five
Booming bad investments, seems like they’d thrive
You must save to invest, don’t use the printing press
Or a bust will surely follow, an economy depressed

Your so-called “stimulus” will make things even worse
It’s just more of the same, more incentives perversed
And that credit crunch ain’t a liquidity trap
Just a broke banking system, I’m done, that’s a wrap.

We’ve been goin’ back n forth for a century
[Keynes] I want to steer markets,
[Hayek] I want them set free
There’s a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
[Hayek] Blame low interest rates.
[Keynes] No it’s the animal spirits

Broken Windows

:)

Apesar de não confirmado, parece-me óbvio que esta é uma charge do Quino.

Watch the Watchmen videogame

Play the Watchmen here. Old school style videgame, of course! (:

Came to me thanks to Hero Complex.

Everything can happen in this world…

Specially when Paradox entities intend to punish Entropy magick…

From FAIL Blog.

Neil Gaiman’s Interview fot the Hero Complex

I have not finished reading it. It’s great, but it’s a long three part conversation, and I’m reading it at work. So it’s kinda of hard to read it all and… do my job! I’m finishing the part two, and on this part Neil Gaiman and Geoff Boucher talks about the British Invasion – both the original musical invasion and the comics one. Have at you:

GB: One of the great things about “The Sandman” and, before that, your work on “Black Orchid” was the approach of taking existing and familiar characters from the comics and adding new layers of complexity to their stories as well as more nuanced explanations of their motivations and origins. Along with Alan Moore‘s work on “Swamp Thing,” it seems to me that your character revival approach on “The Sandman” really created a template for a whole generation of comics writers.

NG: One of the things I had in common with Alan Moore and a whole generation of comics writers around us — certainly Grant Morrison – was a love and respect for what had gone before but also a healthy interest in seeing where we could go with it. It was a combination of those the two impulses. We were in a period then in mainstream American comics that things had gotten a bit hidebound. Comics read very much like a mixture of what had come before. And I think at the time you had this wonderful little transatlantic thing that happened, this mini-British Invasion. Looking back on it, the analogy of what happened to pop music in the 1960s was probably pretty accurate. Alan Moore got to be the Beatles and, along with Grant Morrison, I was Gerry and the Pacemakers.

GB: Well, don’t sell yourself short. What about the Kinks or the Stones?

NG: Right, maybe the Kinks or the Stones. But maybe I was Herman’s Hermits. …

GB: I’ve got it: the Animals. Then you can have a spooky Eric Burdon, “House of the Rising Sun” kind of thing going on.

NG: The Animals, yes. That would be cool. But yeah, the idea that you had Brits listening to this [American] stuff and fell in love with it and for all the right reasons, and then realized they could do something new with it, something with different cultural impulses. The British Invasion did that in music, and in a way, we did it in comics.

I’ve omitted some references… I just got tired, and I gotta work!!

Batman: the Dark Knight, The Joker and the Oscar

Weeks after I watched this movie, I was looking at a person and wondering: “where do I know this guy? He is so familiar! He must be a friend from old times at anime clubs or something like that.” I was worried, I was certain that I knew the guy, and so he would talk to me if he would have seen me. Since him finished his make up, I realized that, instead of knowing THE GUY, I knew his COSPLAY. It was a Joker Cosplay.

This situation just convinced me: Heath Ledger for best supporting actor.

See ya!

How market works

An old one. But, you know, somethings are cyclical…

Hint: Consensus of economists

A 2006 Mankiw’s post in his blog, that he revisited these days. Interesting.

Elections, Lula, Obama and stock markets

Mankiw has posted in his blog the following statements:

According to the efficient markets hypothesis, financial markets are forward-looking. If so, you would expect the entire impact of a candidate’s election on the market to occur on election day, or maybe even during the days leading up to the election, as the market learns about the party of the next administration.  

As it happened here in Brazil, with our president Lula, right? So the elections can interfere in the stock market. Then, why has he speaked in his blog as if they don’t?

Wish I could ask him, but his blog is closed for comments. So I ask to the entire blogosphere!

(:

Pessoas respondem a incentivos

Você pode até discodar…

But people do. And that’s a curious thing. Throughout history, whenever human beings have tried to imagine the best of all possible worlds, they’ve pictured some version of paradise: a place of abundance and ease. Not too long ago, people insisted the Internet was just such an environment, with its effortlessly reproducible wealth of data and light-speed transcendence of geography and time. In the emerging online universe, it was said, scarcity had no place. And what’s not to like about that?

Yet scarcity has turned out to be a feature, not a bug. Sure, people like the big, graphics-based chat arenas such as the Palace, where talk was the only real commodity, and that commodity was, as usual, cheap. But the worlds they actually want to be in – bad enough to pay an entrance fee – are the ones that make the digital goods hard to get to and even harder to copy. The addictive appeal of online role-playing games suggests that people will choose the constraining and challenging world over the one that sets them free.

…mas um ambiente onde tudo é possível, as pessoas vão acabar descobrindo formas de serem únicas. Não sei se “únicas” seria a palavra mais adequada, mas o ponto é que as pessoas fazem juízo de valor de tudo naturalmente, e com isso mesmo em um mundo fantástico em que você poderia fazer tudo, alguns bens ainda continuariam escassos: criatividade, estilo, carisma, inteligência, feitos… e a partir de então as pessoas começariam a buscar estes bens para elas, seja produzindo, seja comprando.

Outras economias são possíveis, mas dificilmente elas sairão deste “dogma”.

…..E eu estou bem ocupado! Até!