There was an article in this morning’s Melbourne Age (September 26, 2012) by former Australian Federal Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner, which talked about the structural decline of social democratic parties around the world. Recently I was in the Netherlands for the Dutch national election and the Labor Party could not gain office and is likely to go into coalition with the Conservatives (what?) – the common bond – their support for the Euro and fiscal austerity. What set of circumstances would see what should be polar opposite political forces in coalition? And then there are the LDP and the Tories in the UK. And the debate in the US is not about a deficit versus a surplus but how quickly to get into surplus. The same goes in Australia. The policy debate is marked by claims from both major parties that they will generate bigger budget surpluses quicker than their opponents. The social democratic political tradition is fading because the parties have become indistinguishable from the conservatives in economic policy. They are all neo-liberals now and that is an ugly option for those with a progressive bent who have traditionally supported the social democratic parties.

The scaremongering about inflation and higher interest rates continues to flood out of the mainstream economics community. The conversation has become a little more sophisticated since the claims in the early stages of the crisis that the fiscal and monetary policy innovations introduced by governments would be inflationary. Now we are hearing stories about longer lags – channelling Milton Friedman who also fell foul of the evidence more often than not. So inflation is just around the corner rather than coming tomorrow. As in the past, the mainstream macroeconomics has a serious credibility problem. It is no wonder it keeps making erroneous predictions. It begins with an erroneous construction of reality. It is all downhill for them after that.

I am now back on Terra Firma and have been greeted with beautiful Spring weather. Among the headlines I read when I returned to my office today were those predicting that the Greek economy will have shrunk by 25 per cent by 2013 and the Troika are demanding more cuts. What I learned from being in the lands of austerity over the last few weeks is that there is no coherent plan to salvage economic growth. Rather, the same economic policies that caused the crisis remain dominant. In saying that, I discount the trends in monetary policy including quantitative easing, which are crisis-specific, because they really don’t make much difference. What is apparent is that one of the pillars of social stability is now under threat. I refer to the deteriorating position of the middle class in the advanced nations. The latest data from the US supports the view that the inequality in income distributions continues to worsen. There is a hollowing out of the middle class continuing at a pace. This rising inequality demonstrates we haven’t learned much and are continuing to repeat the errors in policy that created the crisis and is preventing nations from leaving it behind.

Somehow research gets published which contradicts the basic propositions of mainstream monetary theory yet it just gets buried and the commentariat continue on as before sprouting the myths that now occupy us on a daily basis. In February 2010, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) published a working paper (No. 297)- The Bank Lending Channel Revisited – which falls into this category. It argues categorically that the mainstream propositions about money and banking are incorrect and uninformative. Its essential insights confirm the fundamental propositions of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) – which when translated into the policy space – would suggest that monetary policy is not the ideal tool to resolve a major collapse in private aggregate spending and that fiscal policy will not drive up interest rates and crowd out private spending. Why these papers are suppressed in the public domain by the commentators makes for interesting speculation – all of which impugns the motives of those who hold themselves out as experts but, in fact, just peddle lies. The problem for all of us – but more so the unemployed and poor – is that they are influential lies.

I don’t have much time today. But over the weekend the talk has been of a return to the gold standard. Conservatives hark back to the gold standard as some sort of golden age when all was well with the world. They still think that prosperity is within the grasp of a society if it anchors its currency to the price of gold. It seems the US Republican party is toying with the idea again – presumably as a pitch to rope in the real conservatives (Ron Paul supporters). They couldn’t be serious though. It would be a disaster if the world attempted to go back to a system that failed when it operated and it would lead to the further immiserisation of the poor if implemented. The salient point is that it didn’t work when it was in operation. It didn’t produce lower price variability and lower inflation rates nor did it prevent bank crises and financial panics. It was abandoned because it was politically unsustainable such was the entrenched unemployment that accompanied it.

My university office is far from clean so next week when I get back there I suspect I will find some more old insightful articles in the boxes remaining to be sorted to comment on. I haven’t much time today as I am in transit. But there are two interesting developments in Australia that are worth commenting on while the iron is hot. The first is that one of Australia’s fat cat banksters, fresh from enjoying the benefits of the federal government’s loan guarantees is now advocating cuts in the unemployment benefits to make the unemployed more desperate for work. The benefit is already well below Australia’s poverty line and there are 3.6 odd unemployed for every vacancy not to mention the 8 per cent of workers who are underemployed. The bankster thinks that by pushing them further into poverty they might up house, pack their cars and travel across the other side of the continent to work in the mining sector. Little does he know. The second piece of news was that two major mining projects have been shelved by BHP as the outlook for the sector deteriorates.