There is a feeling that the wisdom of monetarism has vanished during the last decade. Exceptional interventions of the Federal Reserve (FED) and the European Central Bank (ECB) have barely avoided deflation and have achieved delayed and modest growth. The absence of a solid monetarist explanation has been notorious. Moreover, after the formidable impact of lockdowns, many economists are now predicting a prolonged recession followed by a protracted deflation Japanese style, even when a much larger FED intervention is underway. Where is monetary policy headed to?

In the last three decades average inflation rates have declined around the world. Since 1995 the number of countries with inflation rates below 10% a year increased from 98 (54% of the total) to an average of 178 in 2015-2019 (90% of the total). In the aftermath of the 2008 Global  Financial Crisis (GFC), inflation in the US has averaged 1.8% a year despite an unprecedented monetary expansion, and more recently, a drop in the unemployment rate to historical lows.

El presente trabajo de investigación persigue tres propósitos. El primero caracterizar al Sistema Financiero Argentino, desde la introducción a su funcionamiento, así como referenciar los principales indicadores de su solvencia y liquidez. En segundo lugar, presentar los marcos regulatorios sobre los que el sistema se desenvuelve, desde la Carta Orgánica del Banco Central de la República Argentina (BCRA) a la Ley de Entidades Financieras.

En dos de sus libros –El autoritarismo y la improductividad y Por qué crecen los países– José Ignacio García Hamilton (1943-2009) resaltó la influencia que la cultura y las creencias predominantes de la sociedad argentina tuvieron sobre su evolución institucional en el siglo XX y su decadencia económica. Desde hace décadas los académicos de las ciencias sociales debaten sobre la importancia relativa de la cultura y las instituciones como factores determinantes de la prosperidad (o decadencia) de un país.

Para recordar a Manuel Belgrano, en el 250 aniversario de su nacimiento, y 200 de su fallecimiento, la Academia Nacional de Ciencias Económicas había preparado un panel, que yo iba a integrar. El coronavirus le jugó una mala pasada al creador de la bandera, pero no impide que publique la versión escrita de lo que pensaba decir. 

After being dormant for decades, in the last two decades, right-wing populism resurfaced strongly in Europe and the US channeling a reaction against globalization. This resurgence has prompted economists to pay increasing attention to populist economics. Current versions of right wing populism share many elements with early fascism, particularly the type that developed by the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in the UK under the leadership of Sir Oswald Mosley.

Before Hugo Chavez burst into the political scene in Venezuela, Argentina’s Juan Perón (18951974) was considered the quintessential Latin American populist leader. He ruled Argentina from mid 1943 until September 1955 and between 1973 and 1974 and his political party has been in power two thirds of the time since the reestablishment of democracy in 1983. Perón’s economic policies between 1946 and 1949 are also considered archetypical.

After being dormant for several decades, populism has resurfaced in Europe and North America. Since the beginning of the 21st century Europe’s populist parties have tripled their vote and were able to put their leaders into government posts in eleven countries, which has increased thirteen fold the population living under populist regimes. The virus has even contaminated Anglo-Saxon countries, which were considered immune. This new strain of populism seems different from the one that infected Latin America for most of the second half of the 20th century.

Esta nota retoma el trabajo de Gasparini y Sosa Escudero (2001), en el cual se calcula el bienestar en la Argentina partiendo de distintas funciones de bienestar social de 1980 a 1998.

We present a Simple SIR Macro Model to study the economic impact of an epidemic in a model were agent types are unobservable. We solve for the decentralized economy equilibrium and for optimal solution (subject to the constraint that the planner cannot differentiate between agent types). We find that decentralized economy produces an endogenous lockdown in which economic activity decreases.