I have presented to a diversity of participants at the various events we have attended in the US, UK and Europe over the last 2 weeks. One way of expressing this diversity is in terms of the type of audience. At many events, the audience has been comprised of people who would see themselves as activists on the progressive side of politics. Some have been students, others, members of Leftist political parties, local business people, and community organisations. They uniformly express concern over the state of Europe, and the Eurozone in particular. They express concern about unemployment, underemployment, precarious work, poor wages growth, welfare cuts, infrastructure degradation, and other uncertainties relating to the state of politics. I sense that some of the participants were pro-Europe and pro-euro, but, there was an overwhelming feeling that the monetary union had failed and would be difficult to retrieve. On the other hand, I have addressed events where politicians, central bankers, private bankers, finance ministry officials and the like have been the main participants. Here the message changed significantly. I heard politicians, firmly wedded to the European ideal, talk about how the Eurozone had brought unlimited benefits to the Member States and how solidarity among states and citizens enhanced by European Commission leadership was taking Europe to a new, higher level. Hello! Earth calling! It was quite an eye-opener to see how much denial there is among those who have done well from the system.

The Vice President of the European Central Bank, Vítor Constâncio, gave the opening speech – Developing models for policy analysis in central banks – at the Annual Research Conference, Frankfurt am Main, on September 25, 2017. Last time I heard Constâncio speak in person, in Florence 2015, he was in typical Europhile central bank denial. He thought the Eurozone was fine, a great success given the low inflation, inferring that the ECB’s conduct had something to do with that. He didn’t talk about the millions of people that had deliberately been rendered jobless because of the austerity obsession of the Troika, of which his institution was an integral part. Things might be changing a bit as the evidence mounts that the mainstream approach to macroeconomics and monetary theory is moribund, at best. But the changes are really just more of the same. There is no willingness to admit that the whole framework is without merit. The mainstream profession is lost in my view and clutching at anything they can to stay credible. But credibility went out the window years ago.

The United Nations Trade and Development Report 2017 was published last week and carried the sub-title “Beyond Austerity: Towards a Global New Deal”. It is amazing that 9 years after the crisis emerged we are still discussing austerity and its on-going damaging consequences. Effectively the crisis interrupted the neoliberal agenda to increase the incomes shares of the elites at the expense of the workers, with growth being a secondary consideration if at all. Austerity was the means by which the elites could resume this push and used all sorts of depoliticised arguments to make it look as though there was really no choice. They have been spectacularly successful in their quest. More shame to the rest of us who have stood by and blithely accepted the agenda and, to make matters worse, become mouthpieces of the myths that the neoliberals have constructed to give ‘authority’ to their savage attacks on public purpose. So social democratic politicians lead the austerity charge. Citizens stand around in pubs and cafes mouthing neoliberal nonsense about fiscal deficits etc without the slightest evidence that they know what they are talking about. UNCTAD report on all this in the latest Report. It is a sorry tale and requires a massive return of collective action and as they say – a “global New Deal”.