Letture domenicali.

Un po' di letture per una domenica oziosa in spiaggia (o in attesa della prova generale, per i senesi in città):

• per fortuna che c'è la Germania! L'analisi del New York Times dei dati economici pubblicati venerdì scorso: Statistics released Fridaybuttress Germany’s view that it had the formula right all along. The government on Friday announced quarter-on-quarter economic growth of 2.2 percent, Germany’s best performance since reunification 20 years ago — and equivalent to a nearly 9 percent annual rate if growth were that robust all year. The strong growth figures will also bolster the conviction here that German workers and companies in recent years made the short-term sacrifices necessary for long-term success that Germany’s European partners did not. And it will reinforce the widespread conviction among policy makers that they handled the financial crisis and the painful recession that followed it far better than the United States, which, they never hesitate to remind, brought the world into this crisis. A vast expansion of a program paying to keep workers employed, rather than dealing with them once they lost their jobs, was the most direct step taken in the heat of the crisis. But the roots of Germany’s export-driven success reach back to the painful restructuring under the previous government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. By paring unemployment benefits, easing rules for hiring and firing, and management and labor’s working together to keep a lid on wages, Germany ensured that it could again export its way to growth with competitive, nimble companies producing the cars and machine tools the world’s economies — emerging and developed alike — demanded.
• Il mercato degli ETF negli USA è talmente sviluppato che le società si fanno causa per poter scegliere i ticker più attraenti. Perchè? E' semplice: siccome siamo tutti agenti razionali....Researchers have shown that U.S. stocks with catchy tickers like BID or LUV perform better than those with unpronounceable trading symbols—at least in the short run. In Italia potremmo suggerire ETF con tickers come FIGO.MI oppure SGHEI.MI....Per andare corti che ne pensate di SOLA.MI?
• L'indebolimento dell'euro negli ultimi due-tre giorni viene imputato da alcuni alla faticosa asta dei BTP con scadenze lunghe. Ma la domanda più interessante è un'altra: l'austerità dei bilanci degli stati dell'eurozona ucciderà la ripresa economica? Secondo il Wall Street Journal A fiscal multiplier above one implies a dollar of government spending generates more than a dollar of GDP; a fiscal multiplier below one implies that it is less effective. A working paper from the European Central Bank estimates that fiscal policy in the euro area has become less effective over time, with an increase in government spending of 1% of GDP generating a response of just over 0.5%, down from over 1% in the late 1980s. A fiscal multiplier below one doesn't automatically mean government-stimulus efforts are wasted, since the boost to GDP could still be important to counteract falling private demand. But the ECB paper argues that the decline in effectiveness is due to rising government debt; as private-sector concerns about the sustainability of public finances increase, individuals and companies rein back spending amid fears of future tax increases. With the euro-zone bond-market crisis, this process may have reached its logical conclusion. Not all government spending is equal: Multipliers on capital investment are reckoned to be much higher, for instance, than on government consumption or tax cuts. But if the fiscal multiplier overall is less than one, then tightening shouldn't be self-defeating: Public finances can improve even with weak growth.Better public finances should also reduce the risk premiums investors demand on government bonds; this, in turn, should make risk assets more attractive, providing companies with better financing conditions. Indeed, sometimes fiscal tightening appears to drive economic growth. A study of OECD countries from 1970 to 2007 by Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna shows that of 107 episodes in which severe fiscal tightening took place, growth accelerated significantly relative to the G-7 average on 26 occasions, or 24%. Remarkably, this is slightly higher than the 22% of periods when very loose fiscal policy drove better growth. A vital question is whether private-sector confidence is boosted by austerity. If it is, and growth picks up, then the really important debate about tightening still lies ahead—and in the realm of monetary, rather than fiscal, policy. Io sono un matematico di professione, non un esperto di statistica. Tuttavia trarre delle conclusioni da un confronto del 24% rispetto al 22% su un campione di 107 casi mi sembra un esempio eccellente di cattivo giornalismo. 
• E' sempre più dura trovare un lavoro per gli immigrati, ovunque nei paesi sviluppati, tranne che in Ungheria.