Frenkel goes to Albania
In rapid continuity with the previous post, let's dust off our palantìr, the identity of the sectoral balances, to put the news of the day in the correct context: the price of a holiday in Albania is equal to -248% of that of a holiday in Italy. Don't believe it? Trust me! The Press and the Messenger say it:
and you will appreciate that the Messenger has internalized the main rule of "credible communication": never give rounded figures, which convey a sense of approximation. Always give the exact number: 248, not 250!
(… the Press then corrected the shot , discrediting the legion of unfortunate imbeciles who had hastened, with the zeal of the neophyte, to corroborate the imaginative thesis according to which negative prices exist – if you don't understand it, you are in good company, and I'll explain it to you later – while to this day Il Messaggero is still attested to in this bizarre position : keep in mind that these inform you about economic dynamics, and this, as we have always said to each other, explains many things …).
I would leave aside this folklore for a moment (but, I repeat, then we will have to go back to it) and then I would go and see what is happening in Albania, what is the explanation of the Albanian miracle, of this new Garden of Eden where you are paid to go. In fact, our "Lavoisier's law", as I called it in the previous post, i.e. the identity of the sectoral balances, makes us immediately understand that, for a change, it is we who pay, and, as usual, not there is certainty to review the money back.
I'd like to be able to make it short, and this graph would suffice:
but since today I'm being generous, I'll give you another graph:
Here: now the older ones should be able to explain to us what is happening in Albania. The less experienced could help themselves with this post , which (re)explains how the first graph works (and thus helps, for example, to understand why the fact that the red line exceeds the black one in the second graph is consistent with the fact that the blue is negative in the first).
I add a detail. Like all miracles, even the Albanian one can be read in different ways. I would have liked to read it as I read the Latvian one at the time , but… unfortunately Eurostat does not provide the data on wages and profits necessary to explain the distributive effects of this sweet life with other people's money. I'll look into the national stats if I have time, or you can do it. However, the dynamics of the wage share will become interesting later, when the blue line will have to return positive.
And now I'll leave you: whoever understands, explain, whoever doesn't understand, ask, let's talk about percentages again: everyone woke up and they saturate my bandwidth, I have to (fortunately) stop…
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2023/08/frenkel-goes-to-albania.html on Wed, 16 Aug 2023 07:52:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.