Welcome to The Weekend Quiz, which used to be known as the Saturday Quiz! The quiz tests whether you have been paying attention over the last seven days. See how you go with the following questions. Your results are only known to you and no records are retained.
So several investment funds based on real estate in the UK have suspended trading to stop people withdrawing their funds. Who would have thought that in a vastly overvalued UK property market that people would start to reassess the value of these investments, especially after working out (gosh!) that the mismatch in maturities in these type of funds was more or less extreme? And so the Leave vote is now being blamed on crashing a market when all that is happening is that the real estate market is starting to correct back to something less ridiculous. And talking about ridiculous. The Italian government is now coming headlong into conflict with the, now ridiculous, European Commission on the impending crash of its zombie banking sector. You might have thought we were still back in 2008 or something. No folks, this is 2016 and the Eurozone problems just keep on going. The Italian banking crisis was always going to happen – it was just a matter of when. Why? Simply because the single currency experiment has failed and the policy making process and the institutional machinery is so detached from reality – as in all cases of Groupthink – that it can no longer respond in an effective way to changing circumstances. The Eurozone is still crippled by its flawed monetary design and in more recent years the migrant issue has come over the top to reinforce this malaise. The Brexit vote outcome reflects the consequences of this dysfunction and demonstrates that a world contrived by the elites to benefit themselves is not the world of reality where things have a habit of turning sour if the rest of us are suppressed.
I am in the final stages of completing the manuscript for my next book (this one with co-author, Italian journalist Thomas Fazi) which traces the way the Left fell prey to what we call the globalisation myth and started to believe that the state had withered and was powerless in the face of the transnational movements of goods and services and capital flows. Accordingly, social democratic politicians frequently opine that national economic policy must be acceptable to the global financial markets and compromise the well-being of their citizens as a result. In Part 3 of the book, which we are now working on, we aim to present a ‘Progressive Manifesto’ to guide policy design and policy choices for progressive governments. We also hope that the ‘Manifesto’ will empower community groups by demonstrating that the TINA mantra, where these alleged goals of the amorphous global financial markets are prioritised over real goals like full employment, renewable energy and revitalised manufacturing sectors is bereft and a range of policy options, now taboo in this neo-liberal world, are available. Today, I discuss capital controls.
Last week, I reported on some claims by Australian private sector economists that the Australian government was deplete of policy tools (“run out of ammunition” was the cute term used among these self-serving characters) and would not be able to handle the Brexit fallout – see When journalists allow dangerous economic myths to pervade. It was obvious that the statements were nonsensical and only reflected the dangerous neo-liberal ideology that discretionary fiscal policy should be constrained to the point of being not used! In the last week, some major central bankers around the world have given speeches which suggest they also understand that fiscal policy has come to the fore and provide some certainty to the world economy. The latest estimates from the ECB of the Eurozone output gap certainly provide the evidence base to justify a major expansion of fiscal deficits across the Eurozone. The research is suggesting that there is a significant output gap which is evidence of insufficient aggregate spending rather than any structural shifts in potential GDP. I guess they are warming the Member States for more expansionary action although the message is very clear – the European Commission has to abandon its austerity mindset and provide some old-fashioned deficit stimulus – quick smart!
Less than two weeks ago, Britain sent a bombshell into the conservative, neo-liberal policy agenda and the narrative that supports it. I have read a lot of comments that the Referendum result was a reflection of racist attitudes towards minority immigrants. While it is no doubt that the open borders policy that allows firms to batter down wages growth and keep a constant excess supply of labour as a threat was an important part of the debate and vote, that in itself, was a reflection of the underlying tension that people and their communities have with the neo-liberal policy agenda. There would be much less concern about migration if there was full employment. The same sort of tensions that pushed the majority of British voters to support the Leave campaign have been apparent in the Australian Federal election which was held on Saturday (July 2, 2016). Australian voters have rejected a first-term conservative government. It is a rare event for us to reject any first-term regime of either persuasion. The conservatives in Australia are now in tatters without credibility and the unstable situation that has arisen as a result of the political uncertainty provides a great opportunity for the Australian Labor Party, who did very well in the poll on Saturday, to refresh their outlook and reject their neo-liberal tendencies to reflect the big shift in sentiment in the Australian electorate. A similar opportunity exists in Britain and I hope Jeremy Corbyn takes it and expunges the Blairites from his own Party.
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.
Welcome to The Weekend Quiz, which used to be known as the Saturday Quiz! The quiz tests whether you have been paying attention over the last seven days. See how you go with the following questions. Your results are only known to you and no records are retained.
Australia is at the end of a long federal election campaign (albeit not as long as the US) and the vote is on Saturday (July 2). Both major parties – the conservatives (who call themselves liberal but oppose many freedoms) and the Labor Party (who are conservatives in drag these days) – have gone to pains to convince the voters that they will get the fiscal balance back into surplus by 2021. The Labor Party, which was meant to be the political voice of the workers has proposed something like $A71 billion in spending cuts and tax hikes (or scrapping tax cuts promised by the conservatives). But both are content to leave more than 15 per cent of the labour force lying idle and to oversee rising inequality, rising poverty and social alienation, in a nation that is arguable in the top three wealthy nations of the world. Moreover, the obsession with pursuing fiscal surpluses is taking a heavy toll on public infrastructure and social and community assets in Australia. The latest data shows that there is a massive shortfall in expenditure on these assets and that more than 11 per cent of these essential assets are in a poor to very poor condition, which means that the assets are incapable of serving their function including supporting economic growth. As well there is increasing evidence that shows the transformative nature of public investment in innovation and education. We starve the state and public infrastructure development at our peril. That should inform a progressive agenda if nothing else does.
We left the trail last time with James Callaghan telling the British Labour Party Annual Conference on September 28, 1976 that governments can no longer spend their “way out of a recession” and that the Keynesian approach was an option that “no longer exists”. He even suggested that the Keynesian approach to stabilising economic cycles was never valid. Meanwhile, his Chancellor, Denis Healey, by then convinced that Monetarist had validity, was working behind the scenes at the Conference to duchess or beat his colleagues in submission and accept the TINA approach to bringing in the IMF. They worked hard to construct the situation as a crisis of massive proportions although much of the ‘crisis’ was the result of their extreme reluctance to allow the pound to depreciate, to impose capital controls to stop the non-productive speculative outflows that were causing the currency to drop in value, and to accept that in the Post Bretton Woods era they no longer had to match their fiscal deficits with private debt issuance. But in doing so, the British government effectively created their own ‘funding’ crisis. Things came to a head in November 1976 within the Labour Cabinet, which was still deeply divided over the IMF issue. We finish this analysis of Britain and the IMF today by tracing events at the end of 1976 before providing a general summation of what it was all about.
Journalists have a lot to answer for in this modern era of constant media reporting across multiple modes of communication. I have previously argued that the trend has become one where journalists are used as broadcasting tools for press releases – that is, stories that appear to be news commentary are really just precised versions of some corporate press release or a statement from some right wing think tank. The lack of critical scrutiny where one line statements that on the face of it are highly contentious are allowed to ‘go through to the keeper’ is now the model for modern mainstream journalism. An example of this was the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s PM current affairs radio program last night (June 27, 2016) – Investors brace for another wild ride on international markets post-Brexit. The PM program is the ABC’s premier evening news and current affairs program where issues are meant to be taken apart and some so-called experts (from all sides) are meant to be interviewed so as to enlighten the public, who otherwise might be uncertain about the meaning and/or impact of some event. At least that was the intent of the program when it started many years ago. Now, it has become, like most of the ABCs current affairs reporting, a rather pale imitation of its original brief.