Some are hearing fat ladies singing about the end of inflation targeting. SA usually eventually follows these fashions. COSATU won’t be unhappy.
The Death of Inflation Targeting?
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No time
Aside
No time to blog, not much time for Greece and the Euro. The slow months-long withdrawal of money from Greek banks has increased and is getting close to critical mass.
This is huge – updated
Bundesbank starts thinking about allowing higher inflation within Germany and the Eurozone to help the rebalancing of competitiveness of the periphery. This is the first sign of economic sense prevailing over popular ideology and rhetoric.
A more in-depth look at the wording suggests maybe the move is rather smaller than I first thought, although it is still a move.
Massively over-paid unskilled workers?
Mike Schussler has crunched some numbers and suggests, very strongly, that SA unskilled labour is vastly overpaid compared to international peers. My recent posts about the cause of structural unemployment in SA have mentioned the supply and demand imbalance of unskilled labour and the downwards rigidity of wages. If Schussler is right and the current wage levels are far too high to be internationally competitive then we have an even larger, even longer term problem to solve.
What Schussler doesn’t look at, which would be telling, is whether there are differences in the costs incurred by workers in SA and, to use an example that he does, India. Comparing price levels is one thing, but if a typical Indian worker lives 500m from his or her place of work and a typical South African worker lives 15km from his or her place of work, then that is an infrastructure problem that must also be solved before we can be internationally competitive.
If your model has always been wrong
Piet, a reader who comments from time to time on this blog, hasn’t enjoyed what I’ve said about the economy recently. I’ve tried really hard, entirely ineffectively it seems, to answer his points and tease out exactly where his real problems lie.
This post by Paul Krugman talks exactly to “Piet’s views” – the deep-seated emotional views and ideologies that “must” make sense without the careful thought, analysis and model-building required. The same views that have proved almost completely ineffective at predicting anything so far.
Lots of people declared that they “just couldn’t believe” that huge budget deficits wouldn’t drive up interest rates, that “printing” lots of money wouldn’t cause runaway inflation, that slashing government spending wouldn’t have a positive effect on confidence. We know how that has turned out.
Paul doesn’t talk in this post about those who then start changing the facts that don’t agree with their views. “Inflation must be high because the Fed is printing money, but inflation isn’t high, therefore the measure of inflation must be wrong.” – even though multiple independent measures suggest the same level of inflation.
How some economists feel about their impact on actual policy
Insurers dealing with regulatory change
Insurers around the world are dealing with increased regulations and increasingly nervous regulators, just waiting for the next crisis to see how insurers will cope. In South Africa, SAM presents opportunities and challenges and the potential for a great deal of expense with limited direct business benefits.
Of course, the regulations in some form or other are coming and are likely to stay. The Actuary magazine has an article on some of the lessons for insurers and regulators about how to actually get some control and understanding of macro and systematic risks within the new regulatory models.
Should South Africa import Chinese TVs?
Should South Africa import Chinese television sets? Your answer to this question depends probably on your education.
If you were university educated in South Africa, you are likely to be in the market at various times in your life for a large LED backlit LCD panel with a high refresh rate and more HDMI inputs than you will ever need. You will also quite likely have a market-oriented, Anglo-Saxon view of government’s role in industrial policy and international trade. Thus you would probably say “yes, import cheap TVs from China so I can buy a cheap TV and not pay for inefficient local firms to manufacturer expensive, inferior TVs.”
If you are a TV snob, you will still want free imports of Chinese TVs to keep the prices down of competing, but fancier Sony and LG models from Japan and Korea.
If you are a little cynical, you might say South Africa could never have the manufacturing capability and scale to produce all the components and assemble them into a modern LCD TV. That’s not actually the debate I ant to pursue now, so in that case let’s say the alternative would be to locally assemble sets made with significant local components, even if the LCD panel itself were imported. Of course, the reason South Africa doesn’t have the scale to produce the panels themselves at the moment is a function of industrial policy decisions decades go. There is no absolute reason we couldn’t have that capability. But, that debate is related but separate post. Continue reading