The catch-all category for my blogs reflecting my professional expertise as a full professor of economics.

Hype aside – the Juncker Plan – a failure from day one

When Jean-Claude Juncker took over the Presidency of the European Commission in November 2014 – yes, 18 months ago. His record before that should have warned everyone of where his ideological preferences lay. He was the President of the Eurogroup from January 1, 2005 to January 21, 2013, serving two terms and overseeing harsh austerity programs and continually hectoring Member States to obey the rules that would see millions of citizens deliberately rendered jobless. Not only was the Eurozone a deeply flawed construction but the fiscal rules that were enforced for the weaker states (not Germany in 2004) were the anathema of responsible economic policy given the scale of the recession. The Eurozone is still teetering on the brink of crisis some 8 years after the GFC began. It is no surprise that he was termed “the most dangerous man in Europe” by the British press on June 4, 2014 (Source). They noted that he was a “ruthless opportunist” who “admits lying and backs ‘secret’ debate on European finances”. He was previously forced out of his position as Prime Minister of Luxembourg in 2013 as a result of his ‘political responsibility’ for illegal spying by that nation’s secret police on individuals, including rival politicians among other sins. This is the man that is now in charge of the dysfunctional European Commission. When he was eleted to the European Commission Presidency, his main strategic initiative, which was promoted with much fanfare was the so-called €300 billion investment offensive. It was adopted in November 2014 and was accompanied with other plans to fix the banking system and improve productivity growth. The plan has been an abysmal failure like most of the initiatives that come from the neo-liberal Groupthink machine known as the European Commission.

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The government has all the tools it needs, anytime, to resist recession

Several new articles have appeared in the last few weeks in the major media outlets expressing surprise that central banks have had little effect on economic growth despite the rather massive buildup of their ‘balance sheets’ via various types of quantitative easing programs. I have indicated before that I am coming to the view that most of the media, politicians, central bankers and other likely types (IMF and European Commission officials etc) seem to be in a constant state of ‘surprise’ as each day of reality fails to confirm what they said yesterday or last week (allowing for lags :-)). What a group of surprised people we have to effectively run our nations on behalf of capital. Poor souls, constantly be shocked out of their certainties. That is what Groupthink does – creates mobs that deny reality until it smacks them so hard in the face that they can only utter “that was surprising!” And in that context, the latest media trend appears to be something along the lines of ‘well let’s get the turbines moving’ or ‘those helicopters are about to launch’ and when we read that and what follows we learn that the media input into our lives only reinforces the smokescreen of ignorance that we conduct our daily lives within.

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Cancel your subscriptions to Time Magazine

Ordinary citizens find it difficult expressing their dissatisfaction with the overall state of affairs in their nations. Sure enough we can vote a poor government out in many nations but the neo-liberal infestation is now so entrenched that the choices in terms of macroeconomic policy have narrowed to be no choice at all. At the corporate level, shareholders can cause trouble at annual meetings as they did last week in Australia when the bosses of the poorly-performed BP tried to push through a massive executive pay deal for themselves. 60 per cent of shareholders rejected the deal. But then not many of us a shareholders so that is a limited strategy. One thing we can do however is use our powers as consumers to punish corporations that lie to us in pursuit of profit. Consumers, united, do have power. Enough of us, pursuing a common goal, can send a corporation broke, just like the mainstream textbooks, which claim ‘consumer sovereignty’ drives the pattern of production, tell us. In this respect, I urge all readers of this blog to cancel any subscriptions that you might have to Time magazine and run a social media information campaign urging everyone you know (and everyone they know) to do the same. If you are a company who advertises in Time Magazine, I urge you to stop doing business with them. And then seek information on other products the owners of the magazine sell and boycott them too. That might given the company some reason to stop publishing erroneous material designed to distort the public debate.

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Rising urban inequality and segregation and the role of the state

Last week, 61.1 per cent of Dutch voters who turned out (the turnout was above the legal threshold to make the vote legal) voted against the referendum proposal to ratify a ‘preferential trade’ agreement between the European Union and Ukraine. It means that the Dutch government cannot, from a political perspective, ratify the EU initiative. It is the second time in its history that the Dutch have rejected a referendum about the EU – the last time was in 2005 when the EU Constitutional Treaty was soundly rejected. Then, the EU elites just ignored the democratic intent and bundled the initiative up into the Treaty of Lisbon and went about business as usual. Democracy is only useful to the EU elites if it ratifies their own self-interest. The same will happen this time. Merkel and Hollande have already said (in as many words) that they will disregard the Dutch outcome. The interpretations of last week’s voting outcome are now coming ‘fast and furious’ and the denialists are out in force – ‘oh, it doesn’t mean what it appears’ etc, and so the EU will just go about business as usual, as it always does, and that ‘culture’ is one of the reasons the whole European Project (now dominated by the common currency) is now proving to be an abject failure. It is a dysfunctional dystopia! Then citizens are watching the unfolding story from The Panama Papers, which only serve to confirm how top-level corruption, hypocrisy etc is rife and there is one (no) rule for them and another, harsher, binding rule for the rest of us. And, recent research findings suggest that our social settlements, where we live, bring up families, develop our aspirations and behaviours, are riven with rising inequality and increased segregation. Juxtapose that with the facts coming out about the urban backgrounds of young Belgians who achieve their aspirations by blowing themselves up and taking as many of us with them. The souls typically come from highly segregated urban enclaves in our cities with joblessness and poverty a daily burden. All of the above has been created by a neo-liberalism that works for the elites and aims to extract as much real income out of the system for the few as possible with as little democratic oversight as possible.

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The CEDA Report – one of the worst ever

The public policy debate in Australia today has been hijacked by two ridiculous interventions. The first, being a proposal that the states be given back their income tax powers (which they voluntarily forfeited in 1942). It is an attempt to align the large spending responsibilities that the Constitution places on the state governments with the capacity to raise revenue. The ideology behind the conservative proposal is to reduce the size of the federal government and to increase the likelihood of a Eurozone-type crisis where the non-currency issuing states would not be able to maintain first-class health and education systems. A far better and more modern solution to the spending-revenue mismatch would be for the currency-issuing federal government to assume responsibility for large-scale public infrastructure, education, health and other related expenditure areas that are currently the responsibility of the states. I will leave that at that for the moment. The second intervention came in the form of a publication, released yesterday (March 29, 2016), by the so-called Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) – Deficit to balance: budget repair options – which has been in the headlines over the last 24 hours. All the media outlets have been salivating over this report – some calling it the work of a “high-powered … Commission”, and I have not read one report as yet, which has given it any form of critical scrutiny. All the reports on all media forms have essentially acted as amplifiers – as press agents for CEDA. Which only goes to show how our national media fails to serve the people in areas that are of crucial importance to our national prosperity. The fact that such a report gets any coverage also confirms that in these crucial areas of public life, the debate is conducted within a fog of ignorance and lies. Almost all of the propositions that form the basis of this Report are just ideological myths perpetuated to advance the interests of capital over the workers.

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The neo-liberal class warfare on the poor and the rest of us

I read a report just released yesterday (March 9, 2016) – The uneven impact of welfare reformby the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, which is located at the Sheffield Hallam University in Britain. It showed that the British Government is successfully prosecuting a class war against the disadvantaged and, increasingly, against segments of ‘middle’ Britain. It confirms the view I formed in 2010 when the Conservative government was elected and announced its first fiscal statement in June of that year that it was intent on pursuing some unfinished business – to wit, entrenching the attacks on workers and income support recipients and redistributing national income in favour of capital. These attacks were somewhat interrupted by the urgency to deal with the meltdown associated with the GFC. Leopards don’t change their spots and the Conservatives are intent on finishing off the agenda that began back in the 1970s with the attacks on unions and public services. I was thinking about the report as I was reflecting on a radio program I heard the other day about how the Australian National Library is being forced to make severe cuts to its archival services among other things in response to federal government austerity plans. Mindless is the first word that came into my head when I was listening to the program. In the case of Britain, the attacks are being dressed up as ‘welfare reform’. In the case of Australia, the spending cuts are being dressed up as ‘efficiency dividends’. The neo-liberal nomenclature is an attempt to obscure what is really going on – a massive attack on society, its disadvantaged, and its cultural institutions. Neo-liberals hate society and anything that provides inclusive access to all in the benefits that society can deliver. These cuts are deliberately targeted to reduce social inclusion and undermine information access.

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The BIS adds to the financial turbulence and should be disbanded

In 2014, it was apparent that the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) had made itself part of the ideological wall that was blocking any reasonable recovery from the GFC. I wrote about that in this blog – The BIS remain part of the problem. I was already concerned in 2013 (see this blog – Since when did the BIS become the Neo-liberal Ministry of Misinformation?). Things haven’t improved and the latest statements from the Bank in the BIS Quarterly Review (March 6, 2016) – Uneasy calm gives way to turbulence – demonstrates two things that are now obvious. First, that the neo-liberal Groupthink that created the crisis in the first place, and, which has prolonged the malaise continues to dominate the leading international financial institutions. Second, not only are these institutions (and I include the OECD, the IMF, to BIS, among this group) impeding return to prosperity as a result of their continued adherence to failed macroeconomics, but worse, their patterned behaviour actually introduces new instabilities that ferment further crises. Someone should be held accountable for the instability these organisations cause, which, ultimately leads to higher rates of unemployment and increased poverty rates.

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We are being led by imbeciles

After yesterday’s marathon blog, today will be easier going (and shorter). I was reading John Maynard Keynes recently – circa 1928 – that is, 8 years before the publication of the General Theory with his Treatise on Money intervening. He was railing against the principles and practice of ‘sound finance’, which he noted had deliberately caused billions of pounds in lost income for the British economy. He urged the Treasury and the Bank of England to abandon their conservative (austerity) approach to the economy and, instead, embark on wide-scale fiscal stimulus to create jobs and prosperity. He concluded that with thousands of workers idling away in mass unemployment that it was “utterly imbecile to say that we cannot afford” to stimulate employment via large-scale public works – building infrastructure etc. He considered the policy makers who opposed such options were caught up in “the delirium of mental confusion”. The stark reality is that 88 years later, he could have written exactly the same article and would have been ‘right on the money’. We are being led (euphemism) by imbeciles.

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Finland would be better off outside the Eurozone

Towards the end of last year, I wrote a blog – Finland should exit the euro. I had been undertaking some detailed research on the plight of this relatively small Eurozone nation for a number of reasons. First, it had recently undergone a major industrial decline as Nokia/Microsoft missed market trends and went from world leader to irrelevance. Second, Finland was a vocal proponent of the view that Greece should be pillaried into oblivion by the Troika – to ‘take their medicine’ (more crippling austerity). Third, the data trends were unambiguously pointing to Finland descending into the Eurozone ‘basket case’ category itself as its own conservative government imposed harsh fiscal austerity on the tiny, beleagured nation. Two things are clearer than ever about the Eurozone. First, it is a dysfunctional mess and efforts to reform it so far have only made matters worse. Second, any single nation (and all together) would be unambigously better off exiting the mess and restoring their own currency sovereignty and letting their exchange rate take up some of the adjustment. The following text covers an article that I have written for a Finnish Report coming out in May 2016 to be published by the Left Forum Finland, which is a coalition formed by the political party Left Alliance, the People’s Educational Association (KSL) and the Yrjö Sirola Foundation.

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Real wages falling in Australia

The Australian Bureau of Statistics published the latest – Wage Price Index, Australia – for the December-quarter yesterday and annual private sector wages growth fell to 2.0 per cent (0.5 per cent for the quarter). This is the fourth consecutive month that the annual growth in wages has recorded its lowest level since the data series began in the September-quarter 1997. Real wages in the private sector are now in decline. In the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook published in December, the Government assumed wages growth for 2014-15 would be 2.5 per cent rising to 2.75 over 2016-17. They also assumed real wages (the difference between growth in the nominal Wage Price Index and the Consumer Price Index would be positive (0.5 per cent in 2016-17). On current trends, neither assumption will be realised, means the forward estimates for taxation revenue are already falling short and the fiscal deficit will be larger than assumed. There will be then the typical hysteria about the size of the fiscal deficit and the need to cut it which will be missing the point entirely. The rising deficit is just responding to a generalised decline in economic activity, falling employment and suppressed wages growth. Depending on how we measure inflation, the annual wages growth translates into a small real wage rise or fall. Either way, real wages are growing well below trend productivity growth and Real Unit Labour Costs (RULC) continue to fall. This means that the gap between real wages growth and productivity growth continues to widen as the wage share in national income falls (and the profit share rises). The flat wages trend is intensifying the pre-crisis dynamics, which saw private sector credit rather than real wages drive growth in consumption spending. The lessons have not been learned.

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