Links. Deflation; IMF wants private debt write downs; Piketty; declining population; oil spill. But Greek employment is up, a little.

1) Thanks to the rebound of tourism Greek employment is up. But the working age population is shrinking at a rate of about 0,5% – 0,8% a year

2) Retail prices (a subset of all consumer prices) in Greece are down with 3,2%, YoY. In Ireland: -2,5%. Volumes are up in both countries, but the increase seems to have run our of steam.

3) Piketty, in an interview:

I do not believe in the basic neoclassical model. But I think it is a language that is important to use in order to respond to those who believe that if the world worked that way everything would be fine. And one of the messages of my book is, first, it does not work that way, and second, even if it did, things would still be almost as bad … As I make clear in my book, there are many other explanations … One is the increase in the bargaining power of capital: globalization, the decline of labor unions, etc. The general increase in the bargaining power of capital has certainly contributed to the rise of the capital share. Next, one of the big differences between the neoclassical model and the real world is that the real world is better described by a multidimensional capital model, where at the same time we have a real estate sector, energy sector, many different sectors with different capital intensities; and at this stage real estate and energy are much more important than robots in terms of capital intensity. Maybe at some point in the future robots will be important, but for now in order to understand the rising capital share in recent decades one has to look at real estate prices, the evolution of rental income, etc.

4) An underreported oil spill in Sundarbans (on of the large mangrove forests of the world, between India and Bangladesh)

5) The obituary of Clarence Ayres, institutional economists.

6. Debt: “One of the few things that can be said with any certainty regarding the recent European debt crisis is that there is much distance between the popular narrative and the narrative of the numbers.”

7) Housing market: the IMF wants “more efficient restructuring of distressed debt” in Ireland, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands, i.e. debt write downs