Scotland: a nation cannot be independent and use another nation’s currency or even peg to it

It is Wednesday and only a few points plus a sort of reflection on a recently departed musician. The few points really relate to the latest news from Scotland that it is thinking (once again) of seeking independence but using a foreign nation’s currency (one version) or pegging to another nation’s currency (another version. We should be clear – an independent Scotland requires its own currency, which it floats on international markets and has a central bank that sets its own interest rates (that is, determines its own monetary policy). Using a foreign currency or pegging to a foreign currency immediately voids national independence. The fact that the leading players in the independence debate don’t seem to comprehend that point is a worry. The fact that there is also strong sentiment to be part of the European Union post independence also tells me that the notion of independence is not well understood or developed in Scotland. That’s the bad news today. The good news is much more interesting – check it out.

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Australia and Scotland and the need to escape neoliberalism

Today’s blog post considers the Australian election and some issues that arose from my recent trip to Scotland – all of which bear on the progress of our work in the public debate. In Australia, we have just held a federal election and it was expected (and certainly the polls and bookies expected) that the Labor Party would win easily after 6 shocking years of conservative rule. Those 6 years have been marked by scandal, three leaders (Prime Ministers), massive internal divisions within the government, on-going climate change denial and a slowing economy. But Labor was thrashed in the election and I offer a few reasons why I think that happened. For Scotland, as they debate independence in the lead up to another referendum (as yet unscheduled) they have been struggling with the choice of currency issue and whether the new independent nation should join the EU. After initially thinking they would stick with the British currency for some time, the debate has swung heavily in favour of introducing their own currency as soon as is possible after the independence is achieved. Clearly, I have favoured that option for several years. But the overwhelming thinking is that the new nation should join the EU. That is a choice that I think would bring grief. And given the fact that the rUK will retain “continuing nation” status, a newly independent Scotland would be under significant pressure to use the euro. In other words, the currency choice and EU membership trends at present are incompatible. During my visit there I urged the activists to ditch their pretensions for EU membership and become truly independent.

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Some MMT considerations for an independent Scotland – Part 2

This is the second and final part of my series on Scotland as I prepare for a visit to Edinburgh and Glasgow this week. You can see the details from my – Events Page – and I urge interested readers to support the events that are run by activists. I will be talking about issues pertaining to the monetary arrangements that might accompany a move to Scottish independence. I have noted in the past that this is a controversial issue in itself that is also made more divisive because it has become intertwined with the vexed issue of EU membership. In Part 2 I provide a detailed critique of the so-called ‘six tests’ that the Scottish Growth Commission put forward as being determining factors as to when Scotland could move off the pound. I find the tests to be just neoliberal artifacts designed to keep Scotland on the pound indefinitely and thus curb any real independence. I also consider issues such as EU membership. And I provide some historical details of the way a monetary union might dissolve.

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Some MMT considerations for an independent Scotland – Part 1

Later this week, I will be in Britain to participate in a series of events. You can see the details from my – Events Page – and I urge interested readers to support the events that are run by activists. Two of these events will be in Scotland where we (Warren Mosler and I) will discuss, as outsiders, issues pertaining to the monetary arrangements that might accompany a move to Scottish independence. I have noted in the past that this is a controversial issue in itself that is also made more divise because it has become intertwined with the vexed issue of EU membership. I certainly don’t intend to use these presentations to lecture the Scots on what they should do. What I hope to achieve is to set out a framework based on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) principles to allow the protagonists to make their own decisions, free of the neoliberal sort of monetary myths that I think have dominated the independence debate to date. I am always cautious discussing the pro and con of situations where I have no direct material stake and a less than full understanding of specific cultural and historical influences that are at work. But the Scottish question is interesting and demonstrates many of points that nations should be cogniscant of when discussing monetary sovereignty.

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Oh Scotland, don’t you dare! – Part 2

This is Part 2 in my two-part series analysing the 354-page report from the Scottish Growth Commission – Scotland – the new case for optimism: A strategy for inter-generational economic renaissance (released May 25, 2018). In Part 1, I considered their approach to fiscal rules and concluded, that in replicating the rules that the European Commission oversees as part of the Stability and Growth Pact, the newly independent Scotland would be biasing its policy settings towards austerity and unable to counter a major negative shock without incurring elevated levels of unemployment and poverty. In Part 2, I focus specifically on the currency issue. The Growth Commission recommends that Scotland retain the British pound, thereby surrendering its independence. Moreover, while it is part of the United Kingdom, the British policy settings have to consider the situation in Scotland. Once it leaves, it will still be bound by British fiscal and monetary settings but those settings would be designed to suit the remaining British nations. So if the British government continues with its austerity obsession, Scotland would be forced to endure that end. Hardly, the basis for an independent nation with progressive aspirations.

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Oh Scotland, don’t you dare! – Part 1

The 354-page report from the Scottish Growth Commission – Scotland – the new case for optimism: A strategy for inter-generational economic renaissance (released May 25, 2018) – could have been published by the IMF given its adherence to the flawed neoliberal macroeconomic framework that that institution imposes on everything. It is too generous to call the Growth Commission’s work ‘analysis’ – a series of unfounded assertions with logical extrapolation from that flawed basis is more accurate. If Scotland were to create an independent nation on the basis of the ‘blueprint’ outlined in the Growth Commission’s Report then it would soon be heading into a mediocre oblivion – a future where it would be unable to effectively counteract the fluctuations of non-government sector spending and a future where fiscal policy was forced to be pro-cyclical. Scotland would end up another failed austerity state. This is Part 1 of a two-part series where I examine the Report and its implications. In Part 2, I will examine the currency issues in more detail. I hope to be in Scotland in early October as part of my next speaking tour of Europe – more details later.

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I would be voting NO in Scotland but with a lot of anger

I am fairly tied up today on the Gold Coast where I presented a Keynote address to an unemployment conference. But I was reading the news on the plane this morning from Melbourne. While in Melbourne for work last week, I stayed over and saw a great movie at the weekend at the Melbourne Film Festival – Human Capital – which I recommend. On the plane this morning I noticed our intrepid Prime Minister has taken to lecturing the Scottish about their political destiny. His exhortations are both hypocritical and reflect a failure to comprehend the options that national sovereignty would provide Scotland, which has a referendum coming up on September 18. But even if they build a bit of national solidarity in Scotland (against the foreigner), the First Minister who is pushing the YES vote is still proposing to enslave the nation to a foreign power – none other than Britain. His currency Plan A amounts to madness and would not underpin a vibrant independent Scotland. As such I would be voting NO at the referendum but feeling bad that the so-called progressive political classes in Scotland were so entranced with neo-liberalism that they forced obvious YES votes to become NO votes.

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Bonnie Scotland – ignorance or denial – either way it is fraught

There was an article in the UK Guardian (October 29, 2013) – Mainstream economics is in denial: the world has changed, which reported that the economics profession had been “stupidly cocky before the crash” and “had learned no lesson since”. It followed a – report – last week (October 25, 2013) that students at Manchester University had proposed an overhaul of orthodox teachings and economics. The latest Guardian article concludes that the economics profession is in “denial”, that is, “the high priests of economics refuse to recognise the world has changed”. I will come back to that in a moment, but evidence of this denial is swamping the debate about the upcoming Scottish decision on whether to break from Britain. So-called informed policy briefing papers have started to emerge, which will distort the choice available to the Scottish people by perpetuating basic myths about the way monetary systems operate and the choices particular currency arrangements provide government. As I’ve said before, if the medical profession offered the sort of analysis and professional opinion that my own profession offers, then they would be very few practising medics because they would have all been sent broke through malpractice lawsuits.

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Scotland should vote yes in 2014 but only if …

I am in Perth today speaking at a public service employees union congress. The talk is based on a major report we have just finished tracking the implications of public spending cutbacks in Australia on the volume and quality of public service delivery. We did several case studies – one of which was child protection – and the cutbacks will lead to increased child abuse in Australia without doubt. The story is pretty grim and I will write about it once the Report is made public by the commissioning party. But with travel (Perth is a long flight from anywhere and I have to get back to Newcastle tonight – 6 hours) and commitments I haven’t much time to wax lyrical on my blog. But I have been meaning to write about the upcoming Scottish referendum on independence from Britain and it fits a nice theme with yesterday’s blog – The demise of social democratic parties – they are all neo-liberals now – where I argued that good intentions come to naught if the economic policy paradigm used is erroneous. I would recommend the Scots vote yes at the 2014 referendum. But only if they introduce their own unpegged, floating currency and avoid any talk of joining the Eurozone. Further, the yes vote should be conditional on the government committing itself to achieving full employment on the back of their newly created currency sovereignty. Then the yes vote will improve welfare for the Scottish people. If they continue to use the British pound – then nothing will be gained.

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The Covid trade-off between health and the economy did not exist

With yesterday’s detail CPI analysis, I am transferring the news/music blog post that normally appears on a Wednesday to today. This morning, I read the newly published report from the UK-based – Institute for Public Policy Research – Health and prosperity: Introducing the Commission on Health and Prosperity (released April 27, 2022) – which provides a sobering (to say the least) evidence base for how the pandemic has impacted on Britain’s health system and labour market. As more evidence comes out from the experience of the last 2.4 years, I wonder when those who demanded nations learn to live with the virus – by basically denying its existence – will reflect on the folly of their laissez-faire positions.

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The financial markets should be kept away from the climate crisis solution

It’s Wednesday and today, apart from presenting some great music, I am commenting on the ridiculous notion, that even progressive greenies propagate that we need to harness the financial resources of the markets (Wall street types) to help governments decarbonise their societies. The narrative that has emerged – that the financial CEOs with “trillions in assets” (all at COP26 because they could smell lucre) are a key to solving the climate challenge – is as ridiculous as progressives saying we need to tax them to fund schools and hospitals. Both narratives reflect the dominance of mainstream macroeconomics which has convinced us that currency-issuing governments are like big households and can ‘run out of money’. That is fiction but is part of the reason we have a climate crisis. Read on.

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When ‘new’ is really old and doesn’t get us very far – latest BIS paper

It takes a while for the mainstream organisations in economics, banking and finance to start to realise that the framework they use cannot explain the actual events in the real world, without serious revision. The problem though, is that the overall framework is flawed and the typical ‘response to anomaly’ approach, which changes a few assumptions to get ‘novel results’ is inadequate because it leaves one blind to all the possible policy solutions. The latest example is the Bank of International Settlements paper – Indebted Demand (released October 19, 2021) – which was written by three economists from Princeton, Harvard and Chicago Booth, respectively. They now recognise that rising inequality and massive household debt is a major problem for economic growth and macroeconomic stability. But, in maintaining ‘conventional’ assumptions about the government sector, they miss the vital linkages in the story, that Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) economists have been providing for the last 25 or so years. Whether these responses to anomaly represent progress or different variations in a flawed ‘chess’ strategy is a matter of opinion. My thought is they are a largely a waste of time, although marginally, they demonstrate that elements of mainstream macro theory that were considered core elements a decade ago are no longer sustainable.

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No justification for public sector wage freezes during the pandemic

I provide a lot of research support for trade unions in wage determination cases in Australia, where wage agreements are uniquely decided in judicial processes. The cases are onerous and highly contested and as an expert witness I am often grilled for lengthy periods by the employers’ barristers in the evidential phase. One of the things that has been relevant in the last year or so has been the wage caps and freezes that government employers are placing on their workforce as a way of ‘saving money’. Prior to the pandemic they were forcing real wage cuts or zero real wages growth on workers under their wage cap strategies as part of their pursuit of fiscal surpluses. Now they are imposing freezes to reduce the size of their deficits. And, the same is happening in other jurisdictions such as the UK. Not only were the wage caps in the public sector damaging the well-being of public workers, in some cases, the lowest paid (cleaners etc), but they were also providing ‘wage guidance’ to the private sector, at a time when household debt is at record levels and consumption growth wage faltering. At a time when consumers are already wary and saving higher proportions of their disposable income, freezing wages is not a responsible thing to do in a pandemic. The UK government, for example, does not need to ‘save money’. But as part of the recovery from the pandemic, the government will benefit from households having been able to pay down debt while saving more and from the maintenance of their real purchasing power. There are no grounds for freezing wages – public or private.

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ABCD, social capital and all the rest of the neoliberal narratives to undermine progress

I was in a meeting the other day and one of the attendees announced that they were sick of government and were looking at other solutions such as social capital and community empowerment to solve the deep problems of welfare dependency that they were concerned about. The person said that all the bureaucrats had done was to force citizens onto welfare with no way out. It had just made them passive and undermined their free will. It was a meeting of progressive people. I shuddered. This is one of those narratives that signal surrender. That put up the white flag in the face of the advancing neoliberal army intent on destroying everything in its way. The ultimate surrender – individualise and privatise national problems of poverty, inequality, exclusion, unemployment – and propose solutions that empower the individuals trapped in ‘le marasme économique’ created by states imbued with neoliberal ideology. The point is that the Asset-Based-Community-Development (ABCD) mob, the social capital gang, the new regionalists, the social entrepreneurs are just reinforcing the approach that creates the problems they claim they are concerned about. The point is that it is not the ‘state’ that is at fault but the ideologues that have taken command of the state machinery and reconfigured it to serve their own agenda, which just happen to run counter to what produces general well-being. That is why I shuddered and took a deep breath.

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British legislation must be able to override EU law – that is what independence means

Piety has no bounds it seems. The Sunday Times ran an Op Ed at the weekend (September 12, 2020) – John Major and Tony Blair: Johnson must drop shameful no-deal Brexit bill or be forced to by MPs (paywall) – which told us how angry former British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and John Major are with Boris Johnson about the Government’s intention to introduce the Internal Market Bill to ensure the so-called Withdrawal Agreement is compatible with national law. They started by appealing to the international treaty status of the Withdrawal Agreement, which outlined Britain’s terms of exit from the EU. The Op Ed called the decision by government as “shocking”. The Remainers are jumping on the ‘breach of international law’ bandwagon like there is no tomorrow. Of course, they never highlight the fact that they want to be part of an arrangement, which is created by international law and which regularly violates that law to serve its own political and elite interests. And those breaches, which include gross human rights abuses and deliberately undermining the prosperity of its own citizens through mass unemployment and more, have had severe consequences for humanity. The fact that the British government is now declaring national law will no longer be subjugated and subservient to international agreements is not in the same ball park of international violations.

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Travelling all day today …

There will be no blog post today as I am travelling for the next 24 hours or so to Europe via LA. I have a detective novel to read – well 79 in fact, I have just started the complete Maigret series written by Belgian author Georges Simenon – so in the spirit of that great song from the Who – I hope I get finished with the series before I get old! And regular transmission will probably resume from Paris on Tuesday. While I am flying I will not be attending to comments that need moderation. So it might be some time before you see your comment published (or not). I hope to see many MMT people at one or more of the events where I will be speaking in the next two weeks – the details are overleaf.

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On visiting Japan and engaging with conservative politicians

It is my Wednesday blog post and my relative ‘blog day off’. But there has been an issue I want to write briefly about that has come up recently and has become a recurring theme. I am writing today to put the matter on the public record so that spurious claims that arise elsewhere have no traction. As our Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) work gains popularity, all manner of critics have started coming out of the woodwork. There is now, quite a diversity of these characters, reflecting both ends of the ideological spectrum and places in-between. The mainstream economists and those who profess to be ‘free marketeers’ bring out their big guns pretty quickly – inflation and socialism/Stalinism. Standard stuff that any progressive proposal to use government fiscal policy gets bombarded with since time immemorial. Easily dismissed. More recently, those who claim to be on the ‘progressive’ side of the debate have become more vociferous in their attacks, sensing, I suspect, that MMT have supplanted their relevance as the defenders of the anti-neoliberal wisdom. These characters resort to all sorts of snide-type attacks ranging from accusations of anti-Semitism (which I have covered previously), siding with Wall Street, ‘America-first corporatist sycophants’ (latest ridiculous book from G. Epstein as an example), giving succour to fascists and the Alt-Right, and that sort of stuff. Today, I want to address that last claim, which recently has been raised by a number of so-called progressive critics.

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‘Sound finance’ prevents available climate solution with massive jobs potential

When the governments in the advanced nations abandoned full employment as an overarching macroeconomic objective, and instead, starting pursuing what I have called full employability, they stopped seeing unemployment as a policy target (to be minimised) and began using it as a policy tool to suppress inflation. As mass unemployment rose, the politics were massaged by the mainstream of my profession who claimed that the level of unemployment that constituted full employment had risen (this was the NAIRU era) and so there was really no problem. Governments adopted the neoliberal line that they ‘didn’t create jobs’ and had to target fiscal surpluses to ensure their position was ‘sustainable’. The costs in lost income and human suffering have been enormous – most people would not have any idea of the massive scale of these losses that accumulate day after day. Now, it seems, the ‘sound finance’ school is going a step further. We are probably facing an environmental emergency in the coming period (years, decades) but the question commentators keep asking is not what we can do about it but ‘how can we pay for it’? So ‘sound finance’ has already destroyed the lives of millions of people around the world as a result of mass unemployment and poverty, now it is turning its focus on the rest of us. Madness. Paradigm change has to come sooner rather than later.

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Being anti-European Union and pro-Brexit does not make one a nationalist

The European Parliament elections start today and finish at the weekend (May 23-26). The Europe Elects site provides updated information about the opinion polls and seat projections, although given the disastrous showing of the polls in last Saturday’s Australian federal election, one should not take the polling results too seriously. But it is clear that there is an upsurge in the so-called populist parties of the Right at the expense of the traditional core political movements (centre-right and centre-left). It is also easy to dismiss this as a revival of ‘nationalism’ based around concepts of ethnicity and exclusivity and dismiss the legitimacy of these movements along those lines. However, that strategy is failing because the ‘populist’ parties have become more sophisticated and extended their remit to appeal more broadly and make it difficult to relate them to fascist ideologies. The fact that the progressive (particularly Europhile variety) continue to invoke the pejorative ‘nationalist’ whenever anyone begs to differ on Europe and question why they would support a cabal which has embedded neoliberalism and corporatism in its very legal existence (the Treaties) is testament to why the traditional Left parties are showing up so badly in the polls these days. The British Labour Party, for example, should be light years ahead of the Tories, given how appalling the latter have become. But they are not a certainty if a general election was called and the reason is they have not understood the anxieties of the British people and too many of their politicians are happy to dismiss dissent as being motivated by racism. The Brexit outcome so far is a good case study in that folly.

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Travelling today …

I am in transit for most of today on my way to Scotland for the first of the presentations in my current speaking tour. You can find details of all the activity during this tour on my – Events page. The blog will resurface on Thursday. But don’t despair – overleaf is a movie, some audio and some great guitar playing to while away the hours. Or there are plenty of past blog posts to re-read and think about.

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