martes, 10 de marzo de 2009

¿Reformular la Macroeconomía?

Advierto que este post es más académico (wonkish como dicen los americanos).
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Me parece importante como macroeconomista darle seguimiento y dejar consatncia del debate teórico académico que se viene dando desde hace varios meses respecto al cuerpo teórico de la macroeconomía, porque creo será una referencia en el futuro. no olvidemos que la revolución Nueva Clásica en la macro se produce en la década de los setentes, precisamente en condiciones económicas muy adversas en el mundo industrializado, y que condujo a un cuestionamiento fundamental de los modelos neo keynesianos o la sintésis neoclásica ampliamente utilizados. No se que resultará del debate actual, pero dado el entorno de éste, seguramente ntendrá un impacto en nuestra subdiciplina.
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El siguiente es un artículo de Willem Buiter, The unfortunate uselessness of most ’state of the art’ academic monetary economics, que recomiendo revisar, no porque coincida con absolutamente todos los argumentos, pero creo que no hay que echarlos en saco roto....
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Standard macroeconomic theory did not help foresee the crisis, nor has it helped understand it or craft solutions. This columns argues that both the New Classical and New Keynesian complete markets macroeconomic theories not only did not allow the key questions about insolvency and illiquidity to be answered. They did not allow such questions to be asked. A new paradigm is needed.
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Conclusion
Charles Goodhart, who was fortunate enough not to encounter complete markets macroeconomics and monetary economics during his impressionable, formative years, but only after he had acquired some intellectual immunity, once said of the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium approach which for a while was the staple of central banks’ internal modelling: “It excludes everything I am interested in”. He was right. It excludes everything relevant to the pursuit of financial stability.
The Bank of England in 2007 faced the onset of the credit crunch with too much Robert Lucas, Michael Woodford and Robert Merton in its intellectual cupboard. A drastic but chaotic re-education took place and is continuing.
I believe that the Bank has by now shed the conventional wisdom of the typical macroeconomics training of the past few decades. In its place is an intellectual potpourri of factoids, partial theories, empirical regularities without firm theoretical foundations, hunches, intuitions and half-developed insights. It is not much, but knowing that you know nothing is the beginning of wisdom.

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