{
  "title": "The Bank of Finland Challenged the Government | Jussi Ahokas | Neuvottelija 197",
  "titleOriginal": "Suomen Pankki haastoi hallituksen | Jussi Ahokas | Neuvottelija 197",
  "episodeNumber": "197",
  "guest": "Jussi Ahokas",
  "publishedAt": "2023-06-19",
  "duration": "31:47",
  "durationIso": "PT31M47S",
  "youtube": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF6Qa_vnnus",
  "fiCanonical": "https://www.neuvottelija.fi/fi/episodes/289-suomen-pankki-haastoi-hallituksen-jussi-ahokas-neuvottelija",
  "originalLanguage": "fi",
  "format": "full",
  "topics": [
    "finnish_economy_policy",
    "investing_markets"
  ],
  "description": "Jussi Ahokas, economist at the BIOS research unit and the Finnish translator of Joan Robinson's Introduction to the Theory of Employment, goes through the Bank of Finland's letter to prime-minister-designate Petteri Orpo sentence by sentence with Sami Miettinen. The letter, sent on 17 June 2023, a day after the government programme was agreed, called section 9.1 problematic for central bank independence. The episode's single piece of news is that the Bank of Finland now confirms in its own blog what Willem Buiter told Miettinen in London a decade earlier: a central bank can operate with negative equity, because once the reserve fund is exhausted a loss may be left uncovered and recovered from later years' profits. Ahokas grades the three entries differently. The financing risk entry he reads both ways: a government worried about fiscal consequences landing on its own desk may legitimately say so, but a central bank can equally read it as pressure to change its own choices, which is why the letter went out so sharply. The no-bailout entry he finds pointless, because losses in the purchase programmes were kept national from the outset and the basic Maastricht rule already covers the ground. The systemic risk entry he accepts as the most sensible of the three. Along the way the Bank of Finland's exceptional buffers are contrasted with euro-area peers that have none left, the constitution's surviving spirit of parliamentary supervision is set against the unambiguous independence in the Bank of Finland Act, and the 2010 Greek arrangement under the Securities Markets Programme is used to test an Italian scenario. The closing forecast is that a soft landing is more likely than it looks, because monetary tightening has been offset by fiscal loosening — and that Finland's own stance, once the debt-financed three billion rail package is counted against the spending cuts, is close to neutral.",
  "chapters": [
    {
      "t": "00:00",
      "title": "Jussi Ahokas and his translation of Joan Robinson's Introduction to the Theory of Employment (Vastapaino 2023). Keynes's theory in simplified form",
      "seconds": 0
    },
    {
      "t": "01:20",
      "title": "The previous episode on the dispute between Nalle Wahlroos and Olli Rehn over the nature of inflation, and the current one between Petteri Orpo and the Bank of Finland",
      "seconds": 80
    },
    {
      "t": "02:20",
      "title": "The first government crisis? Olli Rehn's letter of 17 June on the problems in section 9.1 of the programme",
      "seconds": 140
    },
    {
      "t": "03:00",
      "title": "“The government monitors and seeks to manage the financing risk arising for the state through the ECB and the Bank of Finland.” Central bank losses and equity against the state's financing risk",
      "seconds": 180
    },
    {
      "t": "04:54",
      "title": "The Bank of Finland's strong balance sheet and billions in reserves against other euro central banks' weak ones",
      "seconds": 294
    },
    {
      "t": "05:30",
      "title": "“Finland will push for the no-bailout rule at ECB level too.” The South Park headless chicken sketch. Whose bailout — the central bank's, the state's, or both?",
      "seconds": 330
    },
    {
      "t": "07:07",
      "title": "The misconception finally corrected officially. Yes, a central bank can operate with negative capital in the euro area too. It always could. The Bank of Finland and the BIS confirm it",
      "seconds": 427
    },
    {
      "t": "08:53",
      "title": "A light tinfoil hat — is the eurosystem preparing for recapitalisation, and does it therefore want to contain public debate?",
      "seconds": 533
    },
    {
      "t": "10:42",
      "title": "The Bank of Finland has been a good dividend payer in the euro era — over three billion. That is now in question",
      "seconds": 642
    },
    {
      "t": "12:04",
      "title": "A government programme is not a statute book, so criticising it this strongly is odd. “Finland will push for measures limiting systemic risk in the eurosystem” is a sensible entry",
      "seconds": 724
    },
    {
      "t": "14:20",
      "title": "The purpose of the 9.1 entries is probably a return to austerity and to Maastricht",
      "seconds": 860
    },
    {
      "t": "16:40",
      "title": "What the constitution says about the Bank of Finland. The eurosystem is not in its final form",
      "seconds": 1000
    },
    {
      "t": "19:40",
      "title": "Changes in fiscal policy in the EU and under the right-wing government",
      "seconds": 1180
    },
    {
      "t": "20:20",
      "title": "Could the bailout of Greece and its central bank repeat in the euro area, for example in Italy?",
      "seconds": 1220
    },
    {
      "t": "22:05",
      "title": "A return to low rates, inflation easing and property risks unwinding? The US against Europe",
      "seconds": 1325
    },
    {
      "t": "26:12",
      "title": "Is the Finnish right-wing government's fiscal policy tightening? Or is it neutral after all?",
      "seconds": 1572
    },
    {
      "t": "29:38",
      "title": "Expectations of the consequences — will this become the first government crisis, or will the programme be amended?",
      "seconds": 1778
    },
    {
      "t": "30:15",
      "title": "Sanna Marin's tweet on the objectives of monetary policy",
      "seconds": 1815
    },
    {
      "t": "30:50",
      "title": "Could the row spread internationally? An invitation to Olli Rehn, Petteri Orpo and Riikka Purra",
      "seconds": 1850
    }
  ],
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  "provenance": "Owner page assembled from YouTube metadata, the neuvottelija.fi episode record and a MacWhisper transcription of the Finnish audio. The chapter marks are the publisher's own list as released with the video, each verified to fall within ten seconds of a real transcript cue and translated into English here. No English caption track was produced, so no transcript is published here. The transcription contains no gaps and carries no speaker labels, but with a single guest the speakers are reliably distinguishable. The cleaned Finnish cue file corrects proper names and technical terms the automatic transcription mangled, including the ECB's Securities Markets Programme, which had been transcribed as \"S&P\"; a figure given for the book's age was garbled and is not repeated here.",
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