Thread by @gbponz

Thread: This phrase should be sculpted on the #ECB building and both #EU and national parliament. However, it's only partially correct. @jeuasommenulle @nglinsman @dlacalle_IA @bondstrategist @bondstrategist @AlessandroPonz4 @jeuasommenulle @DiMartinoBooth

https://twitter.com/michaelxpettis/status/1378206085476126724

First, it must be said clearly that while Economist use math, it's a humanistic discipline and not a "science" when taken as a whole, no matter how much you stuff the syllabus with difficult scientific courses.(/)

Anyone involved in the Banking regulation, while quite probably won't admit it under physical torture, would admit that the more "improved" according to "innovation" it got the more difficult it has been to ward off the system from collapsing.(/)

If I remember correctly #BIS 1 was around 30 pages and given the raw numbers you would give a 10 year old a number of banks to calculate the BIS ratios off to keep him off tv for an hour. Try now.(/)

It could also be surmised that, like the couples of Black Holes spiraling around one another that #LIGO looks for, that caused central banks to tailor policy to bank regulation instead of main street.(/)

Alas, in what is in my opinion a mistake, Central banks are involved in financial market regulation, and it shows: the "level playing field" for investor classes was in fact destroyed in the process(/)

Anyway, a side effect has been that the main employers of the output of economic faculties have shifted more and more to the financial sector... where a kind of "orthodoxy from above" dictates the doctrine(/)

So, it's not that economists don't grok debt levels: it's that those who don't might as well pack up and go home, and they do. Now, in less regulated and capital intensive sectors, competition sees that away. You live by the mainframe, two needs in a garage roll you(/)

But no flurry of paper researches @nntaleb idea about the right level of government debt (hint: zero), or why Japan never got out of #QE. SO, I surmise that even if 50% of economists had a firm grasp if debt, the 50% who couldn't would get long term employment.

Oh, I almost forgot. There were credible avenues of employment for "unsavoury" economists and researchers. Work for mainstream, return oriented investors, but, remember #QE?(/)

The reasons was to fight "speculators" from imperiling the #EUR, and it succeded. My present Premier got his game out of it. HOWEVER, there is one small thing that nags my mind, and @michaelxpettis is ideal to dispel my doubt(/)

Once upon a time Chairman Mao declared war on a class abusing the crops: Birds, who ate seeds. Was he wrong in principle? No.
Will someone tell how it ended? And how was it different from fighting "speculators"? @BaldingsWorld @Halsrethink @ELuttwak