Sometimes there is serendipity in a researcher’s life. Usually not. But sometimes. The last few months I have been investigating the question of how to effectively design fiscal policy interventions. It is an important issue because there are multiple goals that need to be satisfied. Two clear goals can be identified to simplify matters. First, fiscal policy has to be designed and implemented in a way that ensures there is sufficient aggregate demand in the economy relative to its real productive capacity so that full employment is achieved and sustained. Second, it should be designed and implement so as to reduce inequality. The two goals are interdependent despite the myths that economics students learn about the trade-off between efficiency and equity. It is now clear that rising inequality harms the prospects for sustainable economic growth. The evidence is now starting to come in that during the neo-liberal era, fiscal policy was actively used to reduce its redistributive capacity and its capacity to reduce market-generated inequality was severely compromised. Not eliminated but substantially reduced. That is what this blog is about.

In his – Introductory Statement – at the Press Conference last week (November 8, 2012) announcing the decision of the ECB Governing Council, ECB Boss Mario Draghi provided us with all the evidence we need that the conduct of macroeconomic policy is being based on false premises, which makes it unsurprising that the world economy is enduring slow to negative growth and millions are unemployed. The ECB decision was to keep interest rates unchanged. But that isn’t the point of this blog. We all look to monetary policy to solve the crisis when it is ill-equipped to do so. The reliance on monetary policy and the hostility towards fiscal policy is all part of the same ideological baggage that caused the crisis in the first place. Dr Draghi’s promise that the ECB would buy unlimited quantities of government bonds was held out as part of the solution but in fact only confines the central bank to maintaining solvency, which is intrinsic to any currency-issuing government anyway. But the main Eurozone problem is a lack of aggregate demand. The ECBs action do nothing to resolve that problem. Similarly, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and all the rest of the central banks do not have the tools to ensure that the main problem is addressed. The crisis has confirmed that yet so deep has been the indoctrination that we (the collective) still hang on to the idea that fiscal policy is bad and monetary policy has to carry the counter-cyclical weight. The fact is that it cannot.