Thursday, June 6, 2013

Who Predicted The Crisis-Redux

I probably should not dredge around in this further, but there has been in the last week or so a major outpouring of dicussion about "who predicted the crisis," with a lot of wrangling and some less than pleasant comments being strewn about.  I got dragged into it and should probably leave it alone, but more keeps coming, and I also think there might be a link to developments here at this blog.

Anyway, the main volley and still the main center of this discussion was set off  by Noah Smith, http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/what-does-it-mean-to-have-predicted.html .  (I have just tried this link, which is accurate, but it failed.  He laid out three conditions for having really predicted it fully, actually four.  The main three were to have called the housing bubble, then called the broader financial market collapse deriving from the collapse of the housing bubble, and then to have called that there would be deep recession with a long stagnation afterwards.  Oh, and to really qualify for him, one needed to do this with a fully specified model based on data.  He basically argued that nobody fully satisfied all these criteria, although he makes lots of favorable remarks about Dean Baker, accurately crediting him, I think, with having first called the housing bubble back in 2002, and also arguing that its collapse would lead to a recession, although not necessarily a broader financial collapse nor how deep the recession would be, and also he did not have a fully specified data-based model for his forecasts, although he did use data.  I basically agree with this.

Now most of the rest of the post, after throwing out a few other names (not including me), focused on Steve Keen, who has quite prominently claimed to have called the crisis.  Noah basically jumped all over Steve, even confessing to not liking him personally based on his tweets.  He admits that Steve had an interesting Minsky- based model in 1995, which I happen to be a fan of, but argued that it was not based on data and had various characteristics (such as lots of cyclicity) that made it not all that good for actually forecasting the crisis in the way he prescribed.  At least some of this is true, although I commented on the thread that I thought he was overdoing the harshness of his criticisms of Steve, particularly the personal ones.  I have always found Steve to be personable and lots of fun in person, even though he definitely argues hard, thereby annoying many.  I also noted that Steve has been the victim of a purge at the University of Western Sydney, although I did not fully spell it out there.  But he has.  His department was eliminated as of the end of March.  One can dump on Steve Keen all one wants, but he is currently unemployed as a result of a vendetta by orthodox types in the Australian establishment that has taken down his department, although this is part of a broader bad policy in the educational establishment of Australia.. Anyway, this is a scandal as far as I am concerned.

Anyway, this post set off a massive debate in 179 comments so far that has ranged all over the place, with many vigorously defending Steve, and others attacking him, in some cases more aggressively than did Noah.  As this wore on various other links were made and other people were brought in as suspects or possible predictors. 

One link that did this was in the original post by Noah, to a paper from June 16, 2009, by Dirk Bezemer, who himself claimed to have "called it."  He listed 12 others with how and what they said.  Some of them I know nothing about, although none of them clearly fulfilled all the criteria of Noah.  Those I know of included Dean Baker (first on the list), the late Wynne Godley, Steve Keen, Nouriel Roubini (Baker, Roubini, and Keen received an award at some point for their efforts), Peter Schiff (who also predicted massive hyperinflation and is still doing so), and Robert Shiller.  Roubini stands out from this group in like Dean Baker also calling ahead of time for the housing crash to trigger a recession, although both of them had some details of timing and how it would play out a bit off.  The Bezemer link is http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/15892 .  (Hope these links work.)

Then deep in the debate, Robert Viennau linked to a paper from a couple of years ago by Jamie Galbraith entitled, "Who Are These Economists Anyway?'  I do  not have a solid link to it, but it is linked to in another blogpost out yesterday by Lars Syll, http://rwer.wordpress.com/2013/06/04/bashing-crises-predictions .  Jamie's piece mentions another set of candidates for "who predicted it," including Marxists Patrick Bond and Robert Brennan, Keynesians such as Wynne Godly and people at the Levy Institute, Minsky non-linearians, including the late Peter Albin, me, and Ping Chen, and then "the new criminologists" who focus on insitutions and fraud, Gary Dymski and Bill Black, whom he saw as following his late father's ideas.  (I don't think he mentioned Steve, but maybe I just did not read closely enough.)

This led me to enter the fray, talking about how I had made predictions on the old Maxspeak about the housing bubble, but that these were not available due to the archives being sealed. Although these were initially inspired by Dean Baker and later supported by data from Shiller in his Irrational Exuberance, 2nd edition, Chap. 2 (did not mention that, but is true).  I also noted that though I did not blog on it early, I gave talks about the link between the housing bubble and global financial markets, forecasting a major crash in March and December, 2007 (dates of speeches, I did not pick a time for the crash), with this  insight coming from a Sept. 2006 speech by Timothy Geithner in Hong Kong, of all  people.  I then called that the crash was coming soon in a post here that was picked up by Mark Thoma at Economistsview, http://economistsview.typepad,com/economistsview/2008/07/gradual-decline.html , which led Mark to express a hope that the crash would not happen.  (Although also accurate, this one did not work for me, so here is the original post from here, http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2008/07/falling-from-period-of-financial.html .) That was based on a model of mine with Antonio Palestrini and Mauro Gallegati, published in Macroeconomic Dynamics in 2011, although the first draft was out in 2005.  Nobody was interested in publishing an ABM of Minsky dynamics somehow prior to the crash.  It was this model that Jamie cited when he mentioned me.

That model was more specifically of the three different kinds of crashes that can come out of a bubble according to Minsky initially and picked up by Charles Kindleberger, in his classic _Manias, Panics, and Crashes_: a sudden fall from the peak, a gradual decline from the peak with no hard crash, and then one with a "period of financial distress" wherein there is a gradual decline for awhile after the peak, followed by a hard crash, which is by far the most common historical pattern according to Kindleberger.  I said in July, 2008 that the global financial markets were in such a period of distress, which had started in Summer 2007, varying slightly depending on the market, and that it looked like a hard crash was coming probably pretty soon, the Minsky Moment, which indeed happend in mid-September after the failure of Lehman Brothers.

I have since with Gallegati and Marina Rosser published a paper in 2012 in the Journal of Economic Issues noting how other bubbles of the period fit into this.  Housing looked like the gradual decline, roughly paralleling its rise, something one would expect more from real estate, particularly residential real estate, where people resist selling their homes when the price is falling, and oil, which in 2008 followed the sudden crash scenario from $147 per barrel in July to around $30 in November, with commodities often more likely to follow this scenario than the other two.  I admitted in my comment at Noah's that I did not anywhere forecast the depth of the recession or the length of the recovery.

An odd spinoff of this is that it is not out of the question that this triggered Max Sawicky to announce that he will open the old Maxspeak archives.  I suspect that he has been planning to start Maxspeak again for some time, but I have also noticed that a "Max" has commented on Noah's blog.  Maybe Max saw my whine about the archives and decided to open them up.  I confess that I was never happy about his sealing them off, but never until that comment on Noah's blog did I ever complain about it as I knew that when he stopped Maxspeak, Max was dealing with a tragic family health problem, and there was no way I was going to give him a hard time about anything then.

 This has become ridiculously long and looks like what Noah disapproves of, people "thumping their chests about having predicted it," although he says that Dean Baker should be praised for not having done so, and clearly one of the things he is annoyed with Steve Keen about is that he does it a lot, with Noah not thinking he deserves to get that much credit for it.  But I need to comment on one more item.

This would be the most recent post by Lars Syll, which on the one hand I appreciate, but on the other I think he does not quite have things right.  He bashes Noah for "bashing the predictors," and then names five people: Dean Baker, Dirk Bezemer, Nouriel Roubini, me, and Steve Keen.  Now, he certainly did bash Steve, but I do not think this characterizes what he said about the rest of us.  He simply linked to Bezemer's paper, but really did not comment on it at length other than to argue that none of those listed by Bezemer fulfilled his own criteria, even if all of them got at least parts of it right.  He is not all that unfavorable to Roubini, although thinking that his mechanism for the recession was off, involving a crash of the dollar, when just the opposite happened at the Minsky Moment, with Bernanke doing a Fed save by buying up $600 billion of eurotrash to prop up the collapsing euro, which was quietly rolled over during the next six months into MBSs (Noah did not spell out all those last details; I did).  Dean Baker he actually said good things about, mostly, even if Dean did not have a full model.  And he really did not comment on my post other than to say that Dean was one of those who did not constantly beat his own drum.  I am doing so here, although I have not done so super-duper often in the past.  As it is, I have to say that Lars overdid how hard Noah came down on all of us, although he definitely came down hard on Steve Keen big time, and promised in some comments to come down hard on Peter Schiff some other time.

I shall close this by noting some quotes that Lars pulled from the end of Jamie's paper, that he had written in 2000, doing his own "claiming," I suppose, :-).  Just a few, and I think he is right on this.  He speaks of "a kind of Politburo of correct economic thinking" that rules the profession.  "They predict disaster where none occurs.  They deny the possibility of events that then happen."  But, "No one of  them loses face, in the club, for having been wrong.  No one is disinvited from presenting papers at later annual meetings.  And still less is anyone from the outside invited in."  And this remains pretty much true to this day.

Barkley Rosser


32 comments:

Sandwichman said...

Enough about predicting the past, already. What about the future?

Back in October 2009, the Sandwichman predicted that there was no workable "exit strategy" from the fiscal stimulus and monetary easing policies. Austerity was not an exit strategy, it's a cost shifting strategy to make the poor pay.

Three and a half years later and I still don't see an exit strategy. Fed tapering? Don't make me laugh.

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

Could get rough. Both Schiff and Roubini are predicting full scale meltdown "perfect storm" crises this year based on all this. I remain a bit more pollyannaish, probably because of the improving housing market situation, but there are all kinds of problems out there, and interest rates have risen sharply very recently.

I guess I focus on housing because that was what took us down in the first place, and it is only really now starting back up again. We may see major market declines and so on (and I think the negative effects from the sequester are finally hitting), but I also do not see housing going back down, even if it slows down.

Noah Smith said...

Yeah, in what way did I "come down" on you?? I don't get that. I know a lot of people want to turn everything and anything into a battle between the good "heterodox" and the evil "neoclassicals", but that just seems like silly kid stuff to me. Sheesh.

Anyway, I really agree with this:

He speaks of "a kind of Politburo of correct economic thinking" that rules the profession. "They predict disaster where none occurs. They deny the possibility of events that then happen." But, "No one of them loses face, in the club, for having been wrong. No one is disinvited from presenting papers at later annual meetings. And still less is anyone from the outside invited in." And this remains pretty much true to this day.

Now let's think very carefully about how to bring down that monopoly...

Unknown said...

"No no, Nanette!" ???? Huh???

Here's what I said -- simply that I *hoped* the predictions of the model wouldn't come true,and that you could provide more intutition:

Barkley Rosser says the period after the peak of a speculative bubble can often be broken into two periods, the first characterized by a gradual decline, i.e. a period of "financial distress," and a second where there is a massive panic and crash. He also says he has a model that can explain how this happens, though I trust he will understand if I hope that the second stage prediction of the model does not come true for the present financial crisis, or that a key condition necessary for the second stage to occur fails to be realized (I'm hoping Barkley will have the time to give the intuition behind the transition between stages, and how certain he is that the critical linkages are in place)





Sandwichman said...

"Full-scale meltdown perfect storm" sounds like wishful thinking to me. My guess is a stagnating, swindling whimper not a bang.

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

Oh dear, I seem to have several people upset and misinterpreting.

First, Noah, I hope that you saw that I was defending you against the charge by Syll of having come down on me, indeed of having come down much at all on any of those mentioned by him, aside from Steve Keen. I hope that this is clear.

And I am glad we both agree with the wisely observant Jamie Galbraith.

Mark Thoma,

Yes, what you write here is indeed what I was trying to convey. Maybe our memories of old silent movies are different, but I always thought of the the "No no Nanette" line as referring to a situation where she was being tied to a railroad track with a train coming, although maybe I have it all wrong. I was indeed referring to your hope that the crash would not happen, and I apologize if it appears to mean something different, particularly anything silly or ridiculous. I meant to describe your views as you have stated them here.

S-man,

We are probably not too far off. I think the chance is good that we shall go back into recession for a couple of quarters, but probably that mild dip that many were forecasting at the beginning of the year due to the tax hike and the sequestration, now added to by all the huffing and puffing about the Fed. I do not see a full meltdown due to housing, which I see as providing a strong floor at this point. There may be a couple of markets (Phoenix, SF) that are slightly bubbly, but this is no 2006.

Noah Smith said...

Barkley,

I was neither upset nor misinterpreting. I was merely lamenting the fact of fractious tribalism among opponents of the mainstream "Politburo".

Best,
Noah

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

I note that the references to "No no Nanette!" have been removed from the post, with Mark T. now simply reported on as not wanting the crash to happen.

I googled it, and I was mistaken. "No no Nanette" was 1924 Broadway musical about three couples having a wild old time in Atlantic City, made into several movie versions, the first in 1930, starring Zasu Pitts. The most famous number from it is "Tea for Two."

I guess I was thinking of "Perils of Pauline," but she had so many perils that it would have been silly to substitute it in an effort to retain "color" in the post, so I have simply reverted to simple statements of fact.

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

Noah,

OK. Fine.

john c. halasz said...

Pardon me for infringing on the professional narcissism of economists, but I think both Bill McBride and Yves Smith deserve honorable mention here, though the former, while linking the housing bubble and the CA deficit together in an early post, predicted a mild (Less than 8% UE) recession and Smith, though clearly very worried, was more an observer than a prognosticator of the expected crisis. Though, with regard to Ms. Smith, I'm rather amazed at how far removed academic economists are from knowing the actual details of business practices and specific markets, especially the all important financial ones, with the shenanigans that were rampant there. Smith was frequently dissed by economists like DeLong, only to be proved right, at least insofar as she knew what she was talking about much better than they did.

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

John,

Bill McBride is one of the most widely read econobloggers holding out at Calculated Risk and is one of the most accurate and acute observers of the housing market, even now, although I do not think he was ahead of Dean Baker in identifying the market as having gotten into bubble condition.

I do not how you define "academic ecnoomist." Is this someone with a PhD or someone at a university or college? Dean has a PhD but is not at a uni or college, hanging out at his own think tank in DC. I do not know what Bill's credentials are.

I confess to knowing nothing about Yves Smith, although I would note that in French, "Yves" is usually a masculine name, as in Yves Saint-Laurent or Yves Montand. Have never heard of a woman named "Yves" before, but this may be a woman and may well also have been well informed about what was going on.

BTW, of course there were traders at Goldman Sachs in particular who made lots of money calling the market moves as they happened, although they were certainly not making public statements about their predictions.

john c. halasz said...

Yves Smith is a pseudonym, chosen deliberately for it's androgeny, as well as anonymity, (since she belongs to the first wave of corporate women, Harvard MBA, and is sensitive to such discrimination, as well as having a consulting business to run), but it eventually emerged with her rising profile that her real name is Susan Weber. By "academic I suppose I mean theoretical rather than practical, or otherwise put, not directly working day to day for a business organization. Yves" peculiar contribution BTW was uncovering the Magnetar Synthetic CDOs shorting the MBS market, which she contends prolonged the MBS bubble beyond its "natural" life and increased the eventual damage. I've never seen anyone else take up and try to quantitatively assess her claim.

Not Trampis said...

Thisblog has a number of articles which i have highlighted for the week.

Please keep it up and keep on publicising them and the intersting comments!

brad said...

Why do you say "Steve Keen argues hard" rather than "Steve Keen argues stupid"?

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/03/steve-keen-krugman-doesnt-understand-is-lm-part-i.html

Brad DeLong

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

John and Homer, Thanks.

Brad,

I know that you and Paul K. have had major disputes with Steve K. about ISLM and he has come on very hard. I am not going to get into that one specifically, but I shall note that I do not agree with everything Steve says or writes. Indeed, when I was Book Review of JEBO, I assigned a reviewer of his Debunking Economics who took him apart pretty roughly on certain ideas, and I largely agreed. Steve was quite upset about it and complained, but we got over it personally. He argues hard, mate, that is all there is to it, but he is not stupid, even if he is wrong sometimes.

Oh, and I never answered Mark's other question, although this is something I have written on quite a bit dating back to 1991 in my book _From Catastrophe to Chaos: A General Theory of Economic Discontinuities_ (crashes of bubbles being among the most dramatic of those).

So, the essence historically and in the mathematical models I have worked with then and more recently involve heterogeneous agents. Think of the Mississippi Bubble, overseen by John Law. Smart insiders, whom Law called "Mississippians," bought at the beginning ("low") based on information from Law. They sold at the peak in December, 1719, at which point they began putting their money into the freshly rising South Sea Bubble across the Channel, Richard Cantillon being among them. Those who bought near the peak were the less well-informed and experienced outsiders, the widows and orphans and ministers and retirees and others who really could not afford it, but put all their savings and then hoped the price would start back up again. From Dec. 1719 to April 1720, the Mississippi Bubble had its period of distress, gradually declining, with Law complaining about how his Mississippians had abandoned him and engaging in various schemes and publicity stunts to try to entice them back, but Cantillon and the smartest, having already bought low and sold high were shorting the stock. One day after he held a huge parade showing off things from Mississippi (really New Orleans, which was founded by vagrants picked up off the streets by French government officials and sent there as part of Law's scheme, the market crashed. The outsider suckers finally panicked and ran and it crashed. Curiously, that crash coincided with the peak of the South Sea Bubble, which in turn suffered its own period of distress until September, when it too finally crashed. Of course, Cantillon got out of both of them in time, one of the insiders.

Christiaan said...

As for the broken link, the blog is called NoahPinion, not NoahOpinion.

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

Thanks, Christiaan. Fixed.

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

It has also been made clear to me by people who would know that the elimination of Steve Keen's department was not specifically directed at him, so I have removed that claim from the main post.

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

To Brad DeLong,

On ISLM, after some thinking I shall say the following.

1) It is theoretically incoherent.

2) However, if done in strictly nominal terms, it does a pretty good job representing nominal AD.

3) Those relying on it heavily failed to predict the crisis in any serious way. This has been recognized by Paul Krugman one of its most prominent defenders, who has admitted that there are good reasons why he is not on anybody's list for "those who predicted the crisis."

4) However, especially given the low and stable rate of inflation, using it to predict AD since the crash has been very good at predicting the outcome of various standard macro policy approaches even in real terms, as both you and Krugman have emphasized repeatedly and justifiably.

Wallfly said...

From the JEBO review of Debunking Economics:

"Mrs. Thatcher's courageous attempt to follow the most solid economics theory of her time deserves much respect."

!?!?

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

Wallfly,

I do not agree with that passage, but it has nothing to do with the substantive critiques of Steve's arguments in the essay. It was a long review essay, not your garden variety book review. A good editor does not fuss over political statements by people reviewing books, even if he disagrees with them.

I probably should not have brought up Steve's best known book. I do not want to comment on it here. Some of it is right and some of it is not, in my view, and I do not wish to get into which part of it is what, which is really a sideshow from the main issues involved in this thread.

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

Just for the record, when I edited JEBO I published papers by people expressing views ranging from Marxist to anarcho-capitalist. I never edited anybody, and never will in my new role as Founding Editor-oin-Chief of the Review of Behavioral Economics (ROBE), on the basis of their political or ideological perspectives.

Anonymous said...

The reason that the cited link did not work is that it contains a ",com/" rather than the correct ".com/"

That is hard to see in a small font.

I then called that the crash was coming soon in a post here that was picked up by Mark Thoma at Economistsview, http://economistsview.typepad,com/economistsview/2008/07/gradual-decline.html , which led Mark to express a hope that the crash would not happen. (Although also accurate, this one did not work for me, ....

Anonymous said...

I probably should not have brought up Steve's best known book. I do not want to comment on it here. Some of it is right and some of it is not, in my view, and I do not wish to get into which part of it is what, .....

I for one would like to hear your views on what part(s) of Debunking Economics does not seem correct to you. Future post?

Wallfly said...

rosserjb,
Apologies, I knew it was off-topic but I was finding it hard to get a bead on the reviewer's pov and that line just jumped out.

I am not acquainted with Keen but since my background is more math than econ, it would be interesting hear your views in a future post.
-W

Barry DeCicco said...

Every so often Noah makes me think that he's worried about not being seen as a 'Serious Person' in economic academia; he is living through a period of the discrediting of one school and the resurgence of another (highly modified) school, but he loves to play 'both sides say'.

For example, he had another post comparing economics to pre-scientific medicine, which totally ignores the fact that factions of economics have been far more right than others.

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