Its a hard road

As one dead-end traps the mainstream deficit terrorists’ relentless “hyperinflation is coming”, “the deficits are large and unsustainable” campaign another road is opened. New ways are found of pushing the same boring message. I read several papers and article today that all try to come up with a new tack – a new way of scaring the bjesus out of us and steer our minds towards what they assert is misguided government policy. They actually just don’t like any government claim on real resources because they think there is less for them then. Even when they don’t want to create jobs for the unemployed they resent government employing these people because it would just be a “waste of resources”. Its got worse as I read on. I tell you keeping up with all this stuff is surely going to be “a hard road till I die”.

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What causes mass unemployment?

Today we consider the causes of mass unemployment of the sort that most nations are enduring at present. This also involves the consideration of the relationship between wages and employment. This is an area in economics that has been hotly contested across paradigm lines for years. Mainstream economic commentators still claim that the employment situation can be improved if wages are cut. They are wrong. Modern monetary theory (MMT) is clear – mass unemployment arises when the budget deficit is too low. To reduce unemployment you have to increase aggregate demand. If private spending growth declines then net public spending has to fill the gap. In engaging this debate, we also have to be careful about using experience in one sector to make generalisations about the overall macroeconomic outcomes that might accompany a policy change.

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Those bad Keynesians are to blame

Today I have been working on a new book and have been deeply emeshed in paradigmic debates. The practical relevance, other than the work gives me another day’s pay to maintain my part in keeping aggregate demand growth moving, is that two Nobel prize winners (Phelps and Krugman) have had a recent paradigmic dispute about similar themes. One attack was implicit (Phelps on Keynesians), the other very direct and personal (Krugman on Phelps). Neither understand modern monetary theory (MMT) although Krugman is closer than Phelps. Phelps’s work, in my view, has been used by neo-liberals for years to undermine the employment prospects of millions of workers. It is also a primary IMF tool for keep less developing countries poor. Sounds like a topic to be discussed.

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Whatever .. its a macroeconomic problem

In the Financial Times this morning there was a thought provoking article by Mort Zuckerman entitled The free market is not up to the job of creating work which is in stark contrast to another article – Goodbye, Macroeconomics, which appeared last week in the FT and was written by Eli Noam. The former seems to understand the depth of the problem and has the right priorities but doesn’t come up with the right policies. The latter raises some interesting points but just misunderstands the nature of macroeconomics.

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Friend of the state, Friend of the people award

Earlier this week my professional association (which I decline to join) – the Economics Society (ACT Branch) awarded its inaugural Enemy of the State/Friend of the People award to a microeconomist for advocacy in defence of economics and its application to public policy. The stunt reflects the major historical revisionism that is now a daily occurrence and appears worse than anything that occurred in the communist states. Those who think they have an entitlement to make huge profits (helped by government guarantees) yet return to behaviour that brought the world economy unstuck are now in attack mode. There is denial, outright deception, constant hectoring. To redress this issue, I am now calling for nominations for the Modern Monetary Theory’s (MMT) Friend of the state, Friend of the people award. It will be awarded to all persons (we believe in collectives) who understand how our monetary system operates and how it can be managed via fiscal policy to serve public purpose and advance the welfare of the most disadvantaged.

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The IMF fall into a loanable funds black hole … again

Household saving ratios (saving as a percentage of disposable income) have risen significantly in most countries since the onset of the recession. In many countries this has come after a period of increasing indebtedness as national governments pursued budget surpluses. As a result, the macroeconomic concept of the paradox of thrift has been resurrected in the popular press as a discussion point. There are fears that the end of the “consumer boom” will lead to stagnancy. A recently published IMF paper addresses this point but just cannot let themselves address the elephant in the room. They present a new way version of deficit hysteria.

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The rising future burden on our kids

The public debate is constantly distorted by claims that cannot be substantiated. One such claim is that the current period of budget deficits is building a stock of future claims on the well-being of the future generation – our kids. Accordingly, the neo-liberal deficit terrorists claim that the best thing we can do for the future generation is to avoid running deficits. My view is that we have been imposing a huge future burden on our children but this would be larger if we tried to run surpluses now. In fact, the years of surpluses exacted a huge toll on our children’s prospects that they will have to endure for years to come.

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Would the Job Guarantee be coercive?

I was a speaker at the Sydney Greens Forum yesterday and today I am on a panel with Bob Brown at the Greens National Conference in Adelaide. Regular readers will know that in the past months we have been engaging with the Greens after I wrote – Neo-liberals invade the Greens. The initial reaction towards me was hostility but that soon gave way to a more reasoned engagement which I have found to be extremely beneficial. That is why I accepted invitations to speak at their functions. While there is a long way to go in fully articulating a modern monetary paradigm within the context of the generally sophisticated social and environment policy that The Greens have already developed I think the possibilities are now there. One issue that does emerge in my discussions is that of whether a person should have to work under a Job Guarantee approach to full employment. That is, should the Job Guarantee be compulsory?

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Balance sheet recessions and democracy

A regular reader sent me a recent financial market report written by Tokyo-based economist Richard Koo which raises some interesting issues about the association between prolonged recessions and democracy. Koo has achieved some notoriety in the last decade or more by coining the term “balance sheet recession” to describe what happened to Japan during its so-called “lost decade”. He also applies the analysis to the present global economic crisis. While he is not a modern monetary theorist, he recognises the need for considerable fiscal intervention and the futility of quantitative easing. So this blog is about all of that.

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Social inclusion principles – another failed vision

The Australian Government has now released its so-called Social inclusion principles which are apparently intended “to guide individuals, business and community organisations, and government on how to take a socially inclusive approach to their activities”. I couldn’t find a commitment to full employment among the principles. Pity about that. Another strategy that is rich in rhetoric but squibs the essential nature of the problem. My advice: scrap the plan and start again.

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The unemployed cannot find jobs that are not there!

The unemployed cannot find jobs that are not there! I have written about that topic extensively. So today I have been examining what vacancy data is telling us about the labour market. The relationship between unfilled job vacancies and unemployment (the so-called UV ratio) is well entrenched in economics. The UV ratio is a good indicator of the state of the labour market because it tells us (approximately) how many people there are for each unfilled job. Of-course, it understates the degree of slack because it fails to include underemployment. Anyway, you can also determine whether there are significant supply-side issues going on which would require supply-side policies. As you will see in the following graphs – it is all demand side! Which tells us, yet again, that job creation is required.

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More political interference from the central bank – oh but its independent!

At last week’s National Cabinet meeting (August 21, 2020), the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia continued to play a political role in the economic debate despite hiding behind the veil of ‘independence’ from such matters. A few weeks ago, the federal government claimed the state and territory governments were not doing enough by way of fiscal stimulus to reduce the job losses associated with the pandemic. The Federal government is essentially trying to force the political consequences of its own failure to increase its net spending by enough and the resulting real economic damage that has resulted onto the states and territories. The RBA governor seems to be playing along with this agenda. Last Friday, he called for the states and territories to double their fiscal stimulus outlays (by $A40 billion) and stop fussing about credit ratings. The problem is that if they did that, the conservatives would immediately start claiming the debt was unsustainable and would damage the states’ credit ratings. Just as they regularly do to advance their political agendas to cut the size of state governments. While the mainstream economists urge ‘fiscal decentralisation’ they do so because they know states are not currency issuers and will then be open to attacks about tax burdens etc, which then bias the political debate towards cutting services etc. In general, the spending responsibilities should be at the level of the currency-issuer. And, the RBA governor should get back to fulfilling the legal charter of the RBA – to ensure there is full employment and price stability. His institution is achieving neither – with negative inflation and massive labour underutilisation. If he really wanted to increase job creation he could signal that the RBA would purchase any debt issued by governments at all levels who announced, and, made operational, large scale job creation programs. That would work.

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Subsidiarity – a European Union smokescreen to justify failure

One of the various smokescreens that were erected by the European Commission and the bevy of economists that it either paid or were ideologically aligned to justify the design of the monetary union around the time of the Maastricht process was the concept of subsidiarity. In 1993, the Centre for Economic Policy Research (a European-based research confederation) published its Annual Report – Making Sense of Subsidiarity: How Much Centralization for Europe? – which attempted to justify (ex post) the decisions imported from the 1989 Delors Report into the Maastricht Treaty that eschewed the creation of a federal fiscal capacity. It was one of many reports at the time by pro-Maastricht economists that influenced the political process and pushed the European nations on their inevitable journey to the edge of the ‘plank’ – teetering on the edge of destruction and being saved only because the European Central Bank has violated the spirit of the restrictions that a misapplication of the subsidiarity principle had created. It is interesting to reflect on these earlier reports. We find that the important issues they ignored remain the central issues today and predicate against the monetary union ever being a success.

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Australia – the Fourth Intergenerational Myth Report

The Australian government will release the Fourth Intergenerational Report today with much fanfare, scaremongering and lies. Our boofhead Treasurer has been doing the rounds of the media outlets giving his evangelical sales pitch on how scary the future is unless we cut the fiscal deficit now and get the balance back in surplus as soon as possible. These intergenerational reports are really a confection of lies, half-truths interspersed with irrelevancies and sometimes some interesting facts. There is very little economics in these reports. What parades as economic analysis is just the usual neo-liberal mainstream nonsense that currency-issuing governments have run out of money and fiscal deficits are dangerous. The Treasurer is selling the Report on the grounds of “intergenerational theft” (the classic anti-fiscal deficit argument about mortgaging our future grand children’s future). Apparently, this justifies large cuts to the fiscal deficit now in order to turn it into a surplus so that our future generations are left with no debt. The real intergenerational theft though is embodied in a current fiscal strategy that leaves around 45 per cent of our teenagers unemployed, underemployed or NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) and hacks into public infrastructure provision as a strategy to create fiscal surpluses now. With private spending subdued at present and the external sector also draining expenditure from the economy relative to its income, trying to impose fiscal austerity now in the name of defending future prosperity is a grand lie and will ensure that the future prosperity is undermined.

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Friday lay day – neo-liberalism has compromised the concept of a citizen

Its my Friday lay day – which means I don’t write as much as I usually do and perhaps focus on different issues to my normal considerations. Remember back to 2007. In March 2007, an Australian citizen named David Hicks pleaded guilty to charges that he intentionally provided material support or resources to an international terrorist organisation engaged in hostilities against the United States. It set in place his return to Australia after he was illegally detained by the US, tortured and incarcerated at the Guantanamo Bay gulag without trial for more than five years, and deprived of his rights as an Australian citizen by the very government that is entrusted with defending our rights – our own Federal government. Upon his return to Australia he was incarcerated for a period of 9 months before being finally released. Today, the ABC news report (January 23, 2015) – US agrees David Hicks is innocent, lawyer says – reported that the US government has admitted that David Hicks was not guilty of any crime and a full pardon will be forthcoming. Why is this important?

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The Looters and Moochers are apparently back in Australia

Last week (June 11, 2014), the Australian Treasurer gave a speech at the right-wing Sydney Institute entitled – A Budget For Opportunity. The Treasurer was attempting to spin the impossible – that the May Fiscal Statement was fair (equitable) in that all Australians would be contributing to the deficit reduction. That is patently false. It is clear that the largest burden arising from the fiscal reduction will be borne by those with least income, including those reliant on public income support to scratch out the barest of existences. But in trying to make this impossible case, Hockey also invoked the classic divide and conquer strategy that conservatives use to segment and coopt certain sections of the population into agreeing with policy changes that will not only undermine their own prosperity but devastate the prosperity of other ‘segments’ who they manage to vilify. And while that is going on, the high income earners and wealthy, who are more likely to support the conservative political parties sit back sipping on their gins laughing their smug heads off. What a world it is.

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Options for Europe – Part 32

The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014.

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Lies and deception – a central banker’s view of the world

The St Louis branch of the Federal Reserve Bank offers – FRED2 – which is an excellent repository of US statistics as well as a nifty graphical analysis tool. I use it regularly and even though it is just a collection of data available elsewhere it is very convenient. The same organisation also publishes what it calls its – PAGE ONE Economics Newsletter – (the so-called “back story on front page economics”) which is designed to be used by students as a means of educating them in economics. Any reasonable assessment of the material presented in these newsletter is that they are unadulterated nonsense. The most recent edition (published January 13, 2012) – “Choices Are Everywhere: Why Can’t We Just Have It All? – exemplifies how these major institutions choose to mislead those they seek to elucidate.

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Monetary policy cannot carry the counter-cyclical weight

In his – Introductory Statement – at the Press Conference last week (November 8, 2012) announcing the decision of the ECB Governing Council, ECB Boss Mario Draghi provided us with all the evidence we need that the conduct of macroeconomic policy is being based on false premises, which makes it unsurprising that the world economy is enduring slow to negative growth and millions are unemployed. The ECB decision was to keep interest rates unchanged. But that isn’t the point of this blog. We all look to monetary policy to solve the crisis when it is ill-equipped to do so. The reliance on monetary policy and the hostility towards fiscal policy is all part of the same ideological baggage that caused the crisis in the first place. Dr Draghi’s promise that the ECB would buy unlimited quantities of government bonds was held out as part of the solution but in fact only confines the central bank to maintaining solvency, which is intrinsic to any currency-issuing government anyway. But the main Eurozone problem is a lack of aggregate demand. The ECBs action do nothing to resolve that problem. Similarly, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and all the rest of the central banks do not have the tools to ensure that the main problem is addressed. The crisis has confirmed that yet so deep has been the indoctrination that we (the collective) still hang on to the idea that fiscal policy is bad and monetary policy has to carry the counter-cyclical weight. The fact is that it cannot.

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The best way to eradicate poverty is to create jobs

In their rush to create justifications for reducing the footprint of government on the economy (and society), economists have invented a number of new “approaches” to economic development, unemployment and poverty which rely on an increased private sector presence. Concepts such as social entrepreneurship and new regionalism emerged as the governments embraced the so-called Third Way – neither free market (right) or government regulation (left) – as a way to resolve unemployment and regional disadvantage. Microcredit was another version and the 2006 Nobel Prize was awarded to the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and its founder. The media held microcredit out in various positive ways but gave the impression that it was another solution. Insiders knew it wasn’t but the I have always argued that the best solution for poverty is to initially create decent paying jobs. I have also argued for many years that only the national government has the capacity to really intervene in this way. For it is was “profitable” in the free market sense, the private sector would have already done it.

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