Australian labour market – stronger as working age population flattens out

Today (June 17, 2021), the Australian Bureau of Statistics put out the latest – Labour Force, Australia – for May 2021. The data shows that employment increased by 115,200 (which is strong), monthly hours worked increased by 1.4 per cent, unemployment fell by 53,000 (which is excellent), the unemployment rate fell 0.4 points to 5.1 per cent, the participation rate rose 0.3 points (good) and underemployment fell by 0.4 points to 7.4 per cent (excellent). It is hard not to see all these results in a positive light. More jobs are being created, more people are coming back into the labour force and fewer people are being underutilised relative to their desired work intentions. This reverses to some extent the backward step the labour market took last month. The labour market is still 237.1 thousand jobs of where it would have been if employment had continued to grow according to the average growth rate between 2015 and February 2020.

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Announcing the Instituto de Finanças Funcionais para o Desenvolvimento

Today is Wednesday and I have to travel most of the day and present to a large financial markets gathering in Sydney tonight. My theme tonight will be ‘What the Hell is Going On’, as a challenge to the mainstream who haven’t a clue about what is happening and summarise their lack of awareness and the dissonance that is creating for them by screaming about inflation. The mainstream macroeconomists are so far off the mark these days that they must be like the flat earth theorists who watched ships successfully sail off the edge of the globe only to come back around the other side. They are lost and can only interpret the current events in terms of ‘duh, central banks buying bonds, too much money in the system, duh, must be inflationary’. Anyway, today some jazz and a video to watch.

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Krugman’s cockroach views on Brazil and hyperinflation

Today, I am publishing a special guest post from four authors working in the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) tradition about inflation in Brazil. They are examining recent claims by Paul Krugman that the Brazilian experience ratifies basic Monetarist theory that links excessive monetary expansion with inflation (and hyperinflation). It turns out that the reality is quite different which is no surprise when it comes to confronting Krugman’s assertions with facts. Over to Daniel and co …

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My blog is on holiday today

It is a public holiday today on the East coast of Australia and given I am part of the public I have decided it will be a blog holiday too. The truth is that I am travelling a lot today and will drop into the football in Sydney on the way. I will be back tomorrow.

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The Weekend Quiz – June 12-13, 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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MMT and Power – Part 2

This is Part 2 of a series that is developing here on the topic of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and power. I often read that Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is defective because it has no theory of power relations. Some critics link this in their narrative to their claim that MMT also has no theory of inflation. They then proceed to attack concepts such as employment buffers, on the grounds, that MMT cannot propose a solution to inflation if it has no understanding of how power relations cause inflation. These criticisms don’t come from the conservative side of the policy debate but rather from the so-called Left, although I wonder just how ‘left’ some of the commentators who cast these aspersions actually are. The problem with these criticisms is that they have clearly adopted a partial approach to their understanding of what MMT is, presumably through not reading the literature widely enough, but also because of the way, some MMT proponents choose to represent our work. In Part 1, I examined how the economics discipline evolved from political economy to a narrow focus on the ‘economy’ as if it existed in a void of power. I also disabused readers of the notion that MMT ignores the link between money and the real econoy, which is a regular claim offered by critics from the Left. I also questioned critics who seem to want MMT to be a theory of everything. As I regularly point out MMT cannot predict who wins the football this week, but that isn’t a criticism. In Part 2, I am going to complicate things a little by expanding on the MMT is the MMT is a lens narrative as if we can neatly separate values from facts. I will also explain how power enters into the dominant theory of inflation in MMT.

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Price rises should be short-lived – so let’s not resurrect inflation as a bogeyman

It’s Wednesday and I am somewhat besieged. So just a few reflections today before we delve into our latest music offering. I had an Op Ed published in the UK Guardian today (my time) which analysed the latest inflation scares that have been dominating the popular media. More and more mainstream macroeconomists are coming out and asserting that economies will overheat. The usual gold bugs have been delighted by this shift in the narrative back to the obsessions and manias that keep them occupied on a daily basis. What was interesting to me was the responses of the commentators to the Guardian Op Ed. If the sentiments expressed represent the state of macroeconomic knowledge (presumably mostly in the UK) then we have a long way to go before Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and the sensible policies that it might inform gain any serious traction. Given the GFC, the stagnation in the aftermath, 30 years of Japanese history, the pandemic, which have all combined to demonstrate why the mainstream approach is dysfunctional and provides no guidance to what might happen in the real world, the commentators continued to rehearse these failed ideas about inflation, interest rates, bond markets etc. Quite dispiriting.

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The monetary and fiscal normality of Wolfgang Schäuble – stagnation and entrenched unemployment

I have been working on an article that will come out in the press soon on inflationary pressures. It is obvious that characters like Larry Summers and Olivier Blanchard are trying to stay at the centre of the debate by issuing various lurid threats about the likelihood of an inflation outbreak in the US and elsewhere. Last week, the Financial Times published an article (June 3, 2021) by the former German Finance Minister and now President of the Bundestag, Wolfgang Schäuble – Europe’s social peace requires a return to fiscal discipline. I was initially confronted with the juxtaposition of this author, who bullied all and sundry during to the GFC to ensure an austerity mindset was maintained at great cost to the millions who were deliberately forced to endure unemployment, with the photo of John Maynard Keynes under the title of the article. The title didn’t seem to match the picture. My first impressions were correct. Lessons have not been learned.

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US labour market recovery continues but still 7,629 thousand jobs short from February 2020

Last Friday (June 4, 2021), the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released their latest labour market data – Employment Situation Summary – May 2021 – which showed that the recovery since the catastrophic labour market collapse in March and April 2020, continues after a moderate month in April 2021. Payroll employment rose by 559,000 in May 2021 after rising by only 266 thousand last month. The slight rise in unemployment last month gave way to a fall in the unemployment rate by 0.3 percentage points to 5.8 per cent. edged up slightly to 6.1 per cent. The broader labour wastage captured by the BLS U6 measure fell by 0.2 points to 10.2 per cent. The US labour market is still 7,629 thousand jobs short from where it was at the end of February 2020.

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