Australian labour market – steady in March

The Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest labour force data today (March 17, 2022) – Labour Force, Australia – for March 2022. The labour market steadied after the huge rebound last month as the Covid restrictions were substantially dismantled. Employment growth was modest. There are still 1.43 million Australian workers without work in one way or another (officially unemployed or underemployed). We are seeing the impact of flat population growth coming up against growing demand for workers and that is the reason the unemployment rate has fallen so quickly. The underlying (‘What-if’) unemployment rate is closer to 6.4 per cent rather than the official rate of 4 per cent.

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Australian voters – caught between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

The Wednesday news and music blog post. The Prime Minister has now announced the federal election will be held on May 21, 2022. I think I will concentrate on the football that Saturday rather than the election given how depressing the political situation is. They should allow only a week for campaigning because 3 days in to the current 6-week campaign it is already deeply depressing and reinforces that Australian voters, particularly those of the progressive variety are caught – Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea – when it comes to federal elections. Both major parties are happy to over 550,000 Australians (and their dependants) deliberately forced by government policy to live in abject poverty. Many thought that the Australian Labor Party (the leader of which couldn’t even tell the media this week what the unemployment rate actually is) would probably honour their previous promises to review the unemployment benefit system and increase the payment as a result. Given that voices from the welfare lobby, the OECD, the business lobby (and yours truly) have consistently been calling on the federal government to end the enforced poverty. Overnight, the Labor Party demonstrated their credentials for re-election. No matter what else they say in the next several weeks, the fact that they have abandoned any intent to raise the unemployment benefit nor engage in any job creation disqualifies them from office. I hope they lose. But then I hope the other rotten conservative lot lose to. An impossible set of hopes. The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Speaking of the devil we can then listen to ‘Old Devil Moon’ after all of that and calm down.

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The rising incidence of Long Covid and its labour market impacts

I have written about the so-called – Great Barrington Declaration – before. The Great Barrington reference is just the name of the town where the letter was drafted and signed during a conference and bears no inference of greatness – far from it. I was also disappointed that some Left commentators fell under the spell of the anti-restriction, lockdown, vaccine lobby that the GBD represented. What transpires is that we now have an increasing body of evidence that suggests the main assumption of those behind the GBD – that herd immunity would be reached by an open slather approach to Covid (with some protections for the vulnerable) – has not been realised. Specifically, the idea of vulnerability was poorly constructed because it didn’t foresee the increasing incidence of Long Covid. The evidence now coming out by credible researchers is that we are mostly all vulnerable to long-term debilitating effects of a Covid infection and the jury is still out on how bad this will turn out to be. And, while it is clearly a medical issue, it is also causing havoc in labour markets, with increasing numbers of workers not being able to work to full potential or at all. And with the fiscal support for incomes now largely gone, that spells trouble for low-income workers. It is also a factor that will prolong the current inflationary episode.

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French presidential election – some hope for a future progressive, anti-EU Left

Australia will go to a federal election on May 21, 2022 with the current conservative government looking in bad shape and the Opposition Labor Party has been helped a little by interventions from the French president. Emmanuel Macron candidly called the Australian Prime Minister a liar which further dented his already fractured image as the most untruthful politician in Australia. I hope the conservatives are routed but, in saying that, I know it means the Labor Party will take power and continue their embarrassing pretence to be progressive, while preaching the very mainstream economics that has damaged so many of the people that the Labor politicians claim to represent. A bad situation really. We are not yet in a situation where the traditional conservative and labour parties are being challenged by new entrants to the field. The first round of the French presidential election for 2022 were held at the weekend with some very interesting results and definitely showed that the traditional political voices in France are dead – something we could only wish for in this country.

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The Weekend Quiz – April 9-10, 2022 – 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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Exploring the essence of MMT – the Job Guarantee – Part 2

This is Part 2 of an irregular series I am writing on some of the complexities of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) that are often overlooked by those who rely on reading airport-style books or Op Eds on the topic. In – Exploring the essence of MMT – Part 1 (March 29, 2022) – I dealt with some conceptual issues about values and theory. Today, I am considering the way to think about the – Job Guarantee – within the MMT framework. The Job Guarantee is at the centre of MMT because it contains an insight that is missing from the mainstream economics – the concept of spending on a price rule. This insight leads to the conclusion that the price level is determined by what the monopoly issuer of the fiat currency – the government is prepared to pay for goods and services. This, in turn, means that the Job Guarantee goes well beyond being a job creation program and constitutes within MMT a comprehensive macroeconomic stability framework – where the so-called trade-off between inflation and unemployment (Phillips Curve) is eliminated. However, while in the real world, complexity enters the scene and we need to be aware of the nuances so that we do not fall into the trap of thinking of the Job Guarantee as an inflation killer.

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Apparently, MMT says there are no inflationary threats – which planet?

It’s Wednesday and we have the music feature to enjoy following some other news snippets. Here is an argument: Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) tells us that when there are fiscal deficits there is no problem with inflation. At present, inflation has been rising and there are deficits left over from the pandemic. Therefore “Tick off a loss for the modern monetary theorists amid rising inflation” because “Under MMT, the risk of inflation is considered minimal as governments that fully control their fiat currencies are believed to be able to control price levels”. Okay? So I think I better just terminate this blog today, say sorry for being so stupid, and start writing Op Eds demanding interest rates rise and governments cut their fiscal deficits immediately. But I won’t. Why? Because I am not stupid enough to mount that argument in the first place like some, who have the audacity to write financial columns that only demonstrate their ignorance. Good. Let’s have some music.

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Myopic meanness – Australia’s ODA cuts to its neighbours in the Pacific

Neoliberal governments and their supporters have a habit of spruiking gee whiz solutions to the world’s problems, where gee whiz means make it easier for corporations to make profits and harder for workers to get pay rises, claiming that the destiny of individuals is in their own hands (denying systemic failures), and reducing regulations that ensure equity is enhanced. Australia added another dimension to that list (which is not exhaustive) – being mean spirited when it comes to the less well-off nations in the world. The problem with this approach is that it does not live up to promise – it certainly enriches those who are already well-off – but when the rest of us realise something is wrong, the horse has already bolted and picking up the pieces becomes more ‘costly’ than before. In the last few weeks, our government has been bellowing again about China. China is a threat, China is a crook, China is this, China is that. The trigger point this time is the revelation that China’s external strategy has come to the Solomon Islands and the anti-China paranoid gang within the Australian government has a problem. The Solomon Islands are less than 1,700 kms from our mainland and the fear that China will establish a military base there is sending shivers up the spines (euphemism) of our conservative government. Perhaps if we had have been more generous to this region, the Chinese would not have so easily been able to invest there.

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US employment continues to grow but still 1.6 million jobs short of pre-pandemic levels

Last Friday (April 1, 2022), the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released their latest labour market data – Employment Situation Summary – March 2022 – which reported a total payroll employment rise of only 431,000 jobs. Fortunately, employment growth was strong enough to drive the unemployment rate down by 0.2 points to 3.6 per cent. But there is still room for the unemployment rate to fall even further. The US labour market is still 1,579 thousand jobs short from where it was at the end of March 2020, which helps to explain why there are no wage pressures emerging. Real wages continued to decline. Any analyst who is claiming the US economy is close to full employment hasn’t looked at the data.

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