US labour market recovery stalling

Last Friday (September 3, 2021), the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released their latest labour market data – Employment Situation Summary – August 2021 – which reported a total payroll employment rise of only 235,000 jobs in August and a 0.2 points decline in the official unemployment rate to 5.2 per cent. The results suggest that the labour market recovery has slowed quite significantly. The US labour market is still 5,333 thousand jobs short from where it was at the end of February 2020, which helps to explain why there are no fundamental wage pressures emerging.

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The Weekend Quiz – September 4-5, 2021 – answers and discussion

Here are the answers with discussion for this Weekend’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.

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The Bank of Goldman Sachs at Threadneedle Street

As I provided a detailed analysis of the National Accounts release yesterday, today, I am writing less via the blog and am shifting the Wednesday music feature to Thursday. That makes sense. Today, I am bemoaning the creation of the Bank of Goldman Sachs, formerly known as the Bank of England. Groupthink seems to plague this institution. And then, to restore equanimity, we have a music tribute to Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry who died in Jamaica this week.

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Australian national accounts – growth 3 months ago but no guide to current situation

Time series data is somewhat difficult to use at present because of the dramatic impact the pandemic (and the lockdowns) has had on behaviour. It is difficult to conduct precise statistical work that spans this period and in the future, econometricians like me will have to use special techniques to isolate these observations if we are to get anything meaningful from the data over longer horizons into the future. National accounts data is also fraught at the best of times because of the lags in collection and publication. It tells us where we were three months ago and three months before that. So while today’s data release from the Australian Bureau of Statistics of the – Australian National Accounts: National Income, Expenditure and Product, June 2021 (released September 1, 2021) – shows that the Australian economy grew by 0.7 per cent in the March-quarter after growing by 1.9 per cent in the March-quarter 2021. The annual growth rate of 9.6 per cent is relatively meaningless given the base effect noted above. Household consumption growth is positive but subdued. Business investment while positive has tapered somewhat. The external sector undermined growth as exports fell sharply. The public sector contributed 0.7 points to growth, which means that without that fiscal support (at both federal and state level), there would have been zero growth. With the NSW and Victorian economies now enduring a long lockdowns the next quarter will record negative growth and there is clearly a need for increased fiscal support.

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The dying embers of New Keynesian reasoning

Lawrence Summers is a New Keynesian economist. That means something. While there are nuances that exist between members of that school of thought, mostly to do with policy sensitivities and speeds of adjustment, the New Keynesian paradigm has demonstrated clearly that it is incapable of capturing the macroeconomic dynamics in any consistent manner, despite it being the dominant approach in the profession. So, it is no wonder when Summers provides opinions the underlying logic he demonstrates is similarly flawed. Unfortunately, he keeps getting important platforms to express these opinions, which continues to blight the public policy debate. He was at it again when he started lecturing the US Federal Reserve Bank on the conduct of its asset-purchasing program.

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Brexit is delivering better pay for British workers (on average)

I find it amusing when some self-styled ‘progressive’ commentator, usually writing in the UK Guardian newspaper, bemoans Brexit and points to claims by business that there is a shortage of workers. The ‘shortage’, of course, is results from not being able to access unlimited supplies of cheap foreign workers as easily as before. When I see a shortage of workers, I celebrate, because it means employers will have to break out of their keep wages growth low mentality to attract labour; that they will have to offer adequate skills training to ensure the workers can do the work required; and, that unemployment will be driven as low as can be. What is not good about that? Brexit has done a lot of things, one of them being to provide the British working class to arrest the degradation in their labour market conditions that neoliberalism has wrought in a context of plenty of low wage labour always being in surplus. A similar thing will come from the pandemic in Australia where our external border has been shut for nearly 18 months now.

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The Weekend Quiz – August 28-29, 2021 – answers and discussion

Here are the answers with discussion for this Weekend’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.

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ECB nearly comes clean – higher fiscal deficits, higher QE

Last year, the US Federal Reserve dropped a bombshell on mainstream macroeconomics by abandoning the consensus approach to monetary policy, which prioritised fighting inflation over maintaining low levels of unemployment, and, increasing interest rates well before any defined inflationary pressures were realised – the so-called forward guidance approach. It has also been buying massive quantities of US government debt and controlling bond yields in the markets as a result. Attention has been on the ECB to see where it would pivot too and whether it was going to abandon its own massive government bond buying program any time soon, which has been effectively funding the fiscal deficits of the 19 Member-States of the Eurozone. Recent statements have indicated the QE programs in Europe will not be ending any time soon. And an ECB Board member all but tied the scale of the purchasing programs to the size of the fiscal deficits as a guide to how long and how large the QE interventions would be.

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