Austerity fails – its in the numbers

The latest Eurostat public finance data for Europe on July 22, 2013 – Euro area government debt up to 92.2% of GDP demonstrates the failure of the Euro policy agenda on its own terms. It is clear the indecency of the policy elites is reflected in the way they use nomenclature. Massive rises in unemployment and poverty is called modernisation or labour market reform. The argument bifurcates at that point. How can you argue with someone who thinks like that? But we all know what a financial ratio is. They are without nuance. A public debt ratio is what it is. And when the leaders say they are doing everything they can to reduce them and the cost all this “modernisation” is a price worth paying to reduce the public debt ratios we can conclude that they are failing if the debt ratios continually rise as they impose harsher austerity (sorry, increase the degree of modernisation). That is what the hard numbers are shouting. And that means that someone in Europe should just blow the whistle and call time is up and get rid of the whole swathe of policy leaders.

Read more

Australian inflation outlook – plenty of scope for a needed fiscal boost

The Australian Bureau of Statistics released the Consumer Price Index, Australia data for the June-2013 quarter today. The quarterly inflation rate was 0.4 per cent and this translated into an annual rate of 2.4 per cent, down on 2.5 per cent in the March-quarter 2013. However, if we acknowledge the inflation spike in the September-quarter 2012, and consider the annual trend, the annual inflation rate is more like 1.6 per cent, which puts it well below the lower-bound of the RBA’s inflation targetting range (2 to 3 per cent). The Reserve Bank of Australia’s preferred core inflation measures – the Weighted Median and Trimmed Mean – are now well within the inflation targetting range and are probably trending down. This suggests that the RBA will probably consider the inflation outlook to be benign or “too low” and will instead have to shift their focus to the failing labour market, which in the last month showed signs of considerable deterioration after a flat 18months.The evidence is suggesting that the economy is slowing under the weight of the federal government’s obsessive pursuit of a budget surplus. The benign inflation outlook provides plenty of room for further fiscal stimulus.

Read more

The ultimate boondoggle courtesy of slack government policy

Workers, particularly low-paid ones, are regularly sent up in comedy or satire. The 1959 British movie – I’m All Right Jack – was an acidic attack on the British trade union movement although it also parodied the stuffy upper-class British industrialists as well. In 2003, a British author Magnus Mills published the book – The Scheme for Full Employment – which is a satirical attempt to deride Keynesian full employment policies. Boondoggling and leaf-raking is the term that invokes the ultimate put down by the conservatives who laud the virtues of the private sector and accuse the public sector of creating waste and sloth every time someone proposes that the government introduce a large-scale job creation program to alleviate the dreadful damage that mass unemployment causes. Well the New York Times investigative team has discovered the ultimate boondoggle that has been made possible because of slack government policy. And, it involves our friends in the financial markets – those so-called productive, entrepreneurial free marketeers.

Read more

Balanced budgets are rarely appropriate

The Fairfax press published the latest opinion piece from one of its economics editors (Ross Gittins) over the weekend (July 20, 2013) – The budget facts that Canberra isn’t telling you. If the stated facts are what Mr Gittins thinks apply to a sovereign economy such as Australia, then it is fortunate that Canberra is staying quiet. He claims that the fiscally prudent position is for governments to run a balanced budget on average every decade. He also says that the government doesn’t really have to do anything other than let the automatic stabilisers achieve that outcome once the structural settings are in place. The problem is that these sort of mindless fiscal rules are rarely going to achieve appropriate outcomes, when the latter is expressed in terms of full employment objectives and other real outcomes. In the current context, where there are major private sector balance sheet risks and an ongoing external deficit of around 3.5 per cent, the pursuit of a balanced budget would be an act of vandalism. Further, given the non-government spending dynamics, it is likely that continuous budget deficits will be required into the indefinite future.

Read more

Saturday Quiz – July 20, 2013 – answers and discussion

Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.

Read more

Case Study – British IMF loan 1976 – Part 7

I am now using Friday’s blog space to provide draft versions of the Modern Monetary Theory textbook that I am writing with my colleague and friend Randy Wray. We expect to complete the text during 2013 (to be ready in draft form for second semester teaching). Comments are always welcome. Remember this is a textbook aimed at undergraduate students and so the writing will be different from my usual blog free-for-all. Note also that the text I post is just the work I am doing by way of the first draft so the material posted will not represent the complete text. Further it will change once the two of us have edited it.

Read more

Bias towards low-pay job creation in Australia accelerates

The other day – in this blog – The British agenda to bring workers to their knees is well advanced – I considered the recent British Trades Union Congress (TUC) report (July 12, 2013) – The UK’s Low Pay Recovery – which shows that “eighty per cent of net job creation since June 2010 has taken place in industries where the average wage is less than £7.95 an hour”. The Report also showed that the middle-pay jobs were being shed and the bifurcation in the British labour market between an increasing number of (self-employed) low-paid jobs with precarious working conditions and future and the high pay jobs, which seemingly avoided much of the negative impacts of the recession, has intensified. The middle in Britain is being hollowed out and replaced by an increasing number of low paid workers. In Australia, 84 per cent of jobs created in the last 6 months have been part-time and underemployment has risen since February 2008 (the low-point in the last cycle) from 666.3 thousand (5.9 per cent) to 908.6 thousand (7.4 per cent). The question I look at in this blog, is the wage impacts of these employment trends in Australia. Are we also seeing the same hollowing out as is clearly occurring in Britain. Of those 84 per cent of jobs, what proportion are low-paid, medium-paid and high-paid. Clearly, if most of them are at the bottom end of the wage distribution then the raw figure of 84 per cent sits on top of an increasing disaster for the prosperity of working families.

Read more

A case for public banking

I read an interesting research paper from staff at the New York Federal Reserve Bank (published March 2013) – How Much Do Bank Shocks Affect Investment? Evidence from Matched Bank-Firm Loan Data – which reported on an innovative study of the links between problems within individual banks and the investment performance of firms that deal with those banks in the context of highly concentrated banking sectors. While the study uses Japanese data, the findings are relevant for all nations, given that banking is typically highly concentrated across all advanced nations. The interesting conclusion that I draw from the study is that short of bank nationalisation, the findings provide support for the creation of public banks which utilise the currency monopoly enjoyed by government to provide a more stable environment for business firms during times of crisis in the private banking sector.

Read more

The British agenda to bring workers to their knees is well advanced

In Australia, 84 per cent of jobs created in the last 6 months have been part-time and underemployment has risen since February 2008 (the low-point in the last cycle) from 666.3 thousand (5.9 per cent) to 908.6 thousand (7.4 per cent). And this is a period that the spin doctors in government and the media told us was our once-in-a-hundred year mining boom bringing rich bountiful futures to all. The only problem is that the future workers (our 15-19 year olds) have endured an absolute contraction in employment in the 5 years since early 2008. The Government hasn’t embraced the full-on austerity that is failing Britain but has still overseen a contraction in fiscal policy which is now damaging growth and creating an increasing pool of low-paid, insecure jobs as full-time employment vanishes. In Britain, the situation is even more dire with a Government hell-bent undermining the prosperity of it citizens. The British Trades Union Congress (TUC) released an interesting report last week (July 12, 2013) – The UK’s Low Pay Recovery – which shows that “eighty per cent of net job creation since June 2010 has taken place in industries where the average wage is less than £7.95 an hour”. The British Chancellor is looking increasingly cocky lately declaring that Britain is “out of intensive care”. From the data I examine most days, nothing could be further from the truth.

Read more
Back To Top