I wonder how progressives are viewing the fact that they gave credence to a key Trump operative

It’s a big data week for me and today’s post is more of a news information offering rather than a deeper analysis of a topic, which is my usual pattern. However, I discuss in some detail recent appointments to the US Health Administration, some of which were prominent during the early COVID years and received considerable promotion from so-called Left progressives. One of the leading characters in the attack on government restrictions is now Trump’s appointment to the major national health research funding agency and he has vowed to defund any institution that doesn’t follow the ‘freedom’ dictates of the authoritarian regime that Trump is running. I wonder how these progressives are viewing the fact they gave credence to a key Trump operative.

Read more

The intersection of neoliberalism and fictional mainstream economics is damaging a generation of Japanese workers

The – Japanese asset price bubble – burst in spectacular fashion in late 1991 (early 1992) following five years in which the real estate and share market boomed beyond belief. The boom coincided with a period of over-the-top neoliberal relaxation of banking rules which encouraged wild speculation. The origins of the boom can be traced back to the endaka recession in the mid-1980s, after the signing of the – Plaza Accord – forced the yen to appreciate excessively. This was at the behest of the US, which wanted to reduce its current account deficit through US dollar depreciation. The narratives keep repeating! This post, however, is not about the boom, but its aftermath. The collapse in 1991-92 marked the beginning of what has been termed the – Lost Decades – which was marked by a trend slowdown in economic growth, deflation, and for the purposes of this post, cuts in real wages as nominal wages stagnated. While the long period of wages stagnation was bad enough for Japanese workers, there is still hardship coming as the cohort who entered the labour market during this period reach retirement age. This post is part of work I am doing on Japan, which I hope will come out in a new book early next year after I return from my annual working period in Kyoto towards the end of this year.

Read more

Australia is not America – elections after Trump

Last week, the – 2025 Canadian federal election – was held and the Liberal Party won for the fourth consecutive time securing 169 seats (in the 343-seat House of Commons), just short of a majority. They also won the popular vote (43.7 per cent of the vote – up 11.1 per cent), which was the first time they had achieved that since 2015. The Opposition Conservative Party leader lost his own seat in the election. On January 7, 2025, national polling saw support for the Conservatives of around 47 per cent and support for the government around 20 per cent. By the time the poll came, that had shifted dramatically in favour of the government. In between, came Trump. The UK Guardian analysis (March 19, 2025) – Canada’s Liberals on course for political resurrection amid trade war, polls show – said the shift “has little precedent in Canadian history, reflecting the outsized role played by an unpredictable US president”. To some extent, the craziness of the US political situation at present also impacted on the – 2025 Australian federal election – which was held on Saturday (May 3, 2025). The incumbent government, which was well down in the opinion polls before Trump took power, won in a landslide achieving the highest two-party preferred outcome in Australia’s electoral history. The parallels with the Canadian outcome are strong despite the different voting systems in both countries. Moreover, the conservative Liberal-National Coalition in Australia, the dominant party in the Post-WW2 era has been reduced to being little more than a far Right populist party. Similar to the Canadian situation, the Opposition leader also lost his seat, which was the first time that has ever happened in Australia. So Trump is undermining the very movements he is trying to promote. But what is very clear is that Australia is nothing like the US, despite some commonalities (language – sort of!).

Read more

US National Accounts – growth contracts but likely to be temporary

People are closely watching the US data at present to see what the impacts of the recent tariff decisions by the new US President might have. I am no exception. Yesterday (April 30, 2025), the US Bureau of Economic Analysis published the latest US National Accounts figures – Gross Domestic Product, 1st Quarter 2025 (Advance Estimate) – which provides us with the first major data release since the new regime took office. The fact though is that this data cannot tell us much about the tariff decisions, given that Trump’s – Executive Order 14257 – only really became operational on April 4, 2025, although there had been some earlier tariff changes before then.

Read more

Australian inflation rate stable at 2.4 per cent – solid case now for further cuts in the policy interest rate

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released the latest – Consumer Price Index, Australia – for the March-quarter 2025 today (April 30, 2025). The data showed that the inflation rate rose by 0.9 points in the quarter but over the 12 months was stable at 2.4 per cent . The inflation rate has been within the RBA’s inflation targeting range for the last 9 months and inflationary expectations are all within the range. There are no significant wage pressures evident. Using the RBA’s own logic, its policy interest rate should now be cut.

Read more

Trump Administration appears to be kicking lots of own goals

Soon after the US President announced – Liberation Day tariffs – I wrote this blog post – US government is pinning its tariff hopes on some unlikely to be realised assumptions (April 7, 2025) – to help readers understand what logic there was, if any, in the decision by the American government to impose wide-ranging and seemingly random tariffs on the rest of the world. The only apparent logic was that his advisors thought that while the tariffs would variously increase the US dollar price on final goods and services available to US consumers via imports, the flood of global investment funds into US treasury bonds, as a result of the heightened global uncertainty would push the US dollar up and offset the tariff impacts on import prices, because all foreign goods would now be cheaper. We now have a few weeks of data available to see whether things are turning out as Trump and his advisors thought. The definitive answer to date is that the opposite trends are emerging which will see the burden of the tariffs borne by the US consumers and producers rather than the presumption of the Administration that the burden would be pushed onto the rest of the world, which would precipitate rapid change in the favour of the US. It seems at present that an ‘own goal’ is being kicked – and – probably a lot of them.

Read more

Australian voters face a Hobson’s Choice – just like voters around the world

Today, I am fully engaged in work commitments and so we have a guest blogger in the guise of Professor Scott Baum, who will soon be joining us at the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE) at the University of Newcastle as a senior research fellow. Scott has been one of my regular research colleagues over a long period of time and we currently hold ARC grant funding together to explore regional disparities as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Scott indicated that he would like to contribute occasionally and that provides some diversity of voice although the focus remains on advancing our understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its applications. Today he is going to talk about the dilemma facing Australian voters who will go to the polls at next week’s federal election – the so-called Hobson’s choice facing voters all over the world.

Read more

My blog is on holiday today

It is a public holiday in Australia today and I decided that I would use the time, which is free of workplace-type interruptions, to work on a project that has an impending (very) deadline. I also did a podcast interview…

Read more

System problems resolved

Dear Readers I apologise for the lack of connectivity over the last 36 hours or so. My research centre and related WWW pages are delivered by servers that we maintain within a larger data centre in Adelaide. On Wednesday evening…

Read more
Back To Top