I got on a plane on Monday and flew many hours. I was in search of the public debt overhang. I read and read many articles during my journey to the other side of the planet (where these overhangs are apparently sighted on a daily basis). But in the cold (very) early (very) hours of today, I concluded my mission was a failure. The rumours of a public debt overhang, whatever that might be, remain just that – the mumbling gossip that passes for truth once the public start spreading it. In the world of facts, such an overhang eludes specification. In January 2013, at the annual American Economic Association meeting (January 4-6, 2013) in San Diego, there was a panel session with a number of allegedly “leading” economists. Their deliberations were apparently public endorsement of the claim that government debt had reached a dangerous overhang and would undermine growth prospects for the future. The policy options were limited and all involved harsh fiscal austerity – or in IMF speak “growth friendly fiscal consolidation” (which is my nomination for the joke phrase of 2013). The problem was that a few months later the IMF released a major update (October WEO) where they appeared to deny the presence of a “tipping point” – some dangerous threshold that public debt should not exceed (R&R-style). So here is how it all unfolded …

The title gives the game away – Hope all that’s left as growth slows to crawl. It was written by Ross Gittins, the Sydney Morning Herald’s economics editor. Hope is all we have because this thing we call the economy is beyond us and not something we can control. That is the mainstream conceptualisation of the economy as some sort of deity which we just have to offer our sacrifices to and hope for the best. Australia is weathering a renewed burst of deficit terrorism. The media is running stories every day at present about the need to make massive cuts to federal spending and how taxes have to rise to “repair” the budget. The way the issue is being framed by the media is asinine in the extreme. Worse is the fact that the media is refusing to offer a balance to the issue. There is no debate. Mindless TV presenters and journalists are just pumping out “press releases” from partisan think-tanks without the slightest reflection about whether the underlying assumptions are correct. A bad day for informed debate.

There are seven graphs in the paper. An Excel spreadsheet was involved. Shonky stuff alert! R&R are back with another attention-seeking effort after they were disgraced when their Excel manipulation that just happened to generate ideologically-convenient results was discovered to be shonky (in the extreme). This time is not different though. As in all their so-called historical insights the pair conflate monetary regimes across time and at points of time, which means most of their conclusions are erroneous. While their insolvency threshold has zero credibility now they also still hang on it, if only by implication. And they claim that repression is when residents of free nations enjoy parking their savings in risk-free, interest-bearing government bonds, instead of taking risks with commercial paper. Sounds like free choice to me. Is suggest R&R take some R&R and let governments get on with expanding their deficits and reducing unemployment. The public debt ratios will take care of themselves.