Saturday Quiz – February 13, 2010
Welcome to the billy blog Saturday quiz. The quiz tests whether you have been paying attention over the last seven days. See how you go with the following five questions. Your results are only known to you and no records are retained.
I am not a neo-liberal, but I only got two ansewrs correct. Your choice of verbs is confusing to me. Perhaps we are divided by a commman language?
I am from New England and we Yankees seem to have a hard time with our comman languarge.
Thank you for your blog.
Ken
I achieved a solid 1/5. But since I also struggled with the anti-spam math, that’s a result I’m pretty pleased with.
2/5 for this centrist neo-liberal
Let me think aloud to see if I get some things right.
Warren Mosler came out with a handy layman analogy in a recent CNBC appearance for issuing debt $-4-$ to match net spending : it’s like transferring funds from a checking account (the bank reserves received from net spending) to a saving accounts (bonds). The total financial assets are unchanged by this operation as they are determined by net spending in the first place.
Wait! Would one not be richer by putting money with a savings account than a checking account? The above is a consequence of funds-flow analysis it actually says little about what the intrinsic worth of financial assets. My take on this, as a rough approximation, is that
1/ The financial assets are worth in purchasing power terms in proportion to the size of the real economy
2/ The proportion of bonds relative to reserves reflects some sort of wealth transfers between some group of agents, but I’m not sure which. Anyone wants to elaborate?
One Sal… (OSO)
Are you the same OSO that post at Angry Bear? Are you starting to buy into MMT? I would occasionally post at Angry Bear hoping to open their eyes to MMT. I gave up around 2007, but did go back one time to say “told ya!”.
I suggested once before on this blog to mount an “attack” targeting popular blogs challenging mainstream economics. If anyone is interested, let me know.
I scored 1/5 correct and then proceeded to cut my own wages and lower my working conditions as I simultaneously worried about the tax burden on future generations if we don’t return the budget back to surplus.
It’s not easy.
Why don’t you have an unofficial competition for the year whereby you record the success, or otherwise, of our weekly efforts? Or do I underestimate the work involved in capturing all that stuff?
Dear apj
I actually don’t see any of the attempts on the server side. All the processing is done on the client side so only you know how you are going. I think that increases the incentives to try. It would also be a bit of coding to script a records system – I would have to re-write the entire system in fact.
best wishes
bill