Live Stream on Currencies footage – Helsinki, October 2, 2021

It is a public holiday today celebrating – Labour Day – which recognises the struggles to successfully gain an 8-hour working day for workers. The first of the many marches in this struggle occurred in my hometown of Melbourne on April 21, 1856, and history shows that this march was successful in achieving the first 8-hour day decision in the world, without loss of pay. So today we think of that. If workers unite they have the capacity to achieve great things. What follows is a brief report and footage from a debate I participated in on October 2, 2021, which was organised by some groups in Helsinki, Finland.

I have several deadlines at present so I am using the Labour Day holiday to advance those while taking a day from blog posting other than what follows.

Event – Currency Arrangements, Helsinki, October 2, 2021

The Finish-based group Talousdemokratia together with the University of Helsinki organised a public debate on Saturday, October 2, 2021, which was streamed live via YouTube.

The topic was “The eurozone and other currency arrangements in a global economy” and I joined Professor Heikki Patomäki, one of my colleagues at the University of Helsinki in an interesting discussion about history, politics and economics.

The topics I addressed were as follows:

1. The capacities of a currency issuer and the consequences of using a foreign currency.

2. The dysfunctional architecture of the EMU – deliberately chosen to reinforce neoliberal ideological principles.

3. The reality that any crisis will always be worse in the EMU because of the monetary choices the architects made. A specific reference to the pandemic etc.

4. What are the options for reform? Federal Europe, etc

5. What are the chances of reform? Not good.

If you follow the whole stream you will see where Heikki and I agree and disagree.

Thanks to Niina, Ari and Konsta for their work in organising this.

The program was:

1. Introductions – to 8:32 minutes.

2. My talk (we were allocated maximum 30 minutes)- 8:40 to 38:00

3. Questions to me – 38:00 to 42:50

4. Heikki’s talk – 44:50 to 1:18:55

5. Panel discussion – 1:19:00 to 2:06:00

6. Some questions from audience followed to 2:22:00

Here is the full proceedings:

That is enough for today!

(c) Copyright 2021 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. “..we left the flat earth theory of geography because ships came back around the other side..”

    “It’s a paradigm that’s derived from microeconomic optimising principles, that then stumbled to have anything to say about the aggregate – which is the macro level – to overcome that they introduce a representative agent”…”and they make assumptions…”

    “When they have to talk about macro they can’t possibly apply the optimised micro founded model, because it doesn’t work!
    “Once they get in to the empirical domain they add”…”all sorts of things that are optimisation exercise – could never produce that form – and in other words are non knowledge. In my view, Keynesian economics is non knowledge and therefore doesn’t belong in a pluralistic agenda.”

    “…in our textbook [Macroeconomics] we teach what we call mainstream economics as history of economic thought, and I think that’s the appropriate pedagogy. It’s been an important part of our intellectual tradition, and students should understand that in a historical sense – but not in an analytical sense.”

    A great learned man once unveiled the mystical and is still transforming our lives hundreds of years later. We are blessed to be able to experience such a great mind in our life time!

    Nietzsche: God is dead!
    We have killed him!

    Bill: Neo-liberalism is dead.
    There is no return for that failed ideology!
    Reject that myth!

    #No place to teach fiction as knowledge
    #EconomicJesus
    #spreadtheword

  2. I enjoyed this. I think the discussion of pluralism and its limits was very well put.

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