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

The existential crisis of Labour-type political parties

At one point in my student days anyone who wasn’t reading Marx on a particular day, was reading Satre, Camus and Merleau-Ponty, among others, at least in the groups that I mixed in. But then they were also reading Dostoyevsky. Whichever way – they learned a lot about class conflict and existentialism. Labour-type political parties might reflect on the concept of an existential crisis because the declining electoral fortunes around the World are of their own making and reflect a lack of identity and certainly little ‘essence’. These parties have lost their meaning and purpose of existence and everyone knows it. The reasons are relatively straightforward. They have bought into the free-market myths and demeaned the role of the State. They now only argue about how much fairer their version of fiscal austerity will be relative to the conservatives, never challenging the underlying lies that drives the austerity agenda in the first place. Here are some lunchtime thoughts on the matter.

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Iceland’s Sovereign Money Proposal – Part 2

In Part 1, I briefly outlined the Sovereign Money System proposal (SMS) advanced by the Icelandic government as a way forward in banking reform. I also demonstrated that the banking collapse in Iceland in 2008 could hardly be seen as being caused by the banks having the capacity to create credit. Much more was in play including the fact that banks had stopped behaving as banks and were serving the doubtful aspirations of their owners rather than any notion of public purpose. While the Icelandic report claims that the commercial bank lending destabilised the growth cycle in Iceland the reality is that it was other factors that led to the explosion of their balance sheets. The money supply did expand faster than “was required to support economic growth” but that is because the financial system was deregulated and the banksters and fraudsters were allowed to serve their own interests and compromise the national interest. As we will see that sort of duplicity can be reigned in with appropriate structural regulation without scrapping the capacity of the private banks to create credit. In this Part 2, I consider some of the mechanics of the SMS and argue that essentially we cannot get away from the fact that a central bank always has to fully fund a monetary system. If it tries to restrict funds yet maintain private bank lending then recession would surely follow and interest rates would rise beyond the control of the central bank. I also provide some ideas on where more fundamental monetary system reform is currently needed.

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Iceland’s Sovereign Money Proposal – Part 1

In a way this blog is being written to stop the relentless onslaught of E-mails coming, which seek to promote so-called positive money. I am regularly told that I need to forget Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and instead see the benefits of this alleged revelationary approach to running the economy. Other E-mailers are less complimentary but just as insistent. Then there are the numerous E-mails recently with the following document attached – Monetary Reform: A Better Monetary System for Iceland – which I am repeatedly told is the progressive solution to bank fraud and, just about all the other ills of the monetary system. The Iceland Report was commissioned by the Icelandic Prime Minister and is being held out as the solution to economic and financial instability because it would wipe out the credit-creating capacity of banks. It has been endorsed by the British conservative Adair Turner, who formerly was the chairman of the UK Financial Services Authority and who recently advocated so-called overt monetary financing (OMF) as a way to resolve the Eurozone crisis. I agree with OMF but disagree with his view that it is the credit-creation capacity of banks that caused the crisis. The crisis was caused by banks becoming non-banks and engaging in non-bank behaviour rather than their intrinsic capacity to create loans out of thin air. A properly regulated banking system does not need to abandon credit-creation. Further, I am aware that in holding this view, I and other Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) proponents are accused of being lackeys to the crooked financial cabals that hold governments to ransom and brought the world economy to its knees. Let me state my position clearly: I am against private banking per se but consider a properly regulated and managed public banking system with credit-creation capacities would be entirely reliable and would advance public purpose. I also consider a tightly regulated private banking system with credit-creation capacities would also still be workable but less desirable.

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Mixed metaphors, same old fiscal myths

The ABC news report (May 4, 2015) – Budget figures likened to Stephen King novel as Deloitte predicts $14.1 billion blowout for 2015-2016 – is one of the worst pieces of journalism you will ever read. There is no critical scrutiny in this report at all. It clearly just takes the press release from the private consulting firm and summarises it for public consumption. That is not balanced reporting or good journalism. The ABC is our national broadcaster, funded from the public purse and reaches all the population. It is also a free resource so there are no barriers to entry to consumption. It therefore has a responsibility to provide balanced reporting and should never become partisan. The problem is that on economics matters it has become a neo-liberal mouthpiece and continually gives headline space to mainstream economics organisations who make money from selling spurious advice about the economy. The only reasonable thing that this ABC Report is that the headline likens the fiscal analysis of Deloitte Access Economics, a Canberra-based economic consultancy firm, to fictional prose, which I think is an accurate assessment.

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A “Budget Responsibility Lock” – a ridiculous proposal

The US Koch brothers provide substantial funds to the George Mason University to ensure it remains a bastion of so-called libertarian, free-market thinking. The brothers don’t really want a free market but it just serves their political and commercial aims to tell everyone that is what it is all about. The Economics Department at this university pumps out propaganda about the virtues of deregulation. One academic (Bryan Caplan) goes further and claims that democracy is a bad idea when compared to taking the advice of economists who advocate free markets. This idea that somehow policy choices conditioned by what would advance the best interests of the public are inferior to those advocated by economists who know what is best for all of us has permeated the debate over the last few decades and led to some very undesirable developments. This was on my mind when I was reading the Manifesto of the British Labour Party which proposes, wait for it – a “Budget Responsibility Lock” – as a framework for fulfilling its responsibilities to the British public. This is a ridiculous proposal.

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The myth of Australian egalitarianism

The Committee for Economic Development in Australia (CEDA), which is usually a pro-business, neo-liberal leaning organisation, released a major report on April 21, 2015 – Addressing entrenched disadvantage in Australia. It was accompanied by a Press Release- CEDA Report: More than a million Aussies living in poverty a disgrace – and an Op Ed article – Australia must do more to address entrenched disadvantage and a – Blog post. They clearly wanted the message to get out! Australians like to think we live in a fair society. The CEDA Report should shake us out of our ‘egalitarian’ dreamland. It is a shocking indictment of an income and wealth rich society that such a high percentage of our population have no hope of prosperity or even a modicum of security. It is an indictment of a policy regime that deliberately undermines the chances that many young Australians have of a decent material life while it shamelessly transfers public resources to the children of the rich to purchase even better schooling facilities. As the Report states – it is a disgrace that so many people in such a wealthy nation can be so poor.

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Inflation benign in Australia with plenty of scope for fiscal expansion

A few weeks ago (April 8, 2015), I wrote a blog – Monetary policy is largely ineffective – which detailed why fiscal policy is a superior set of spending and taxation tools through which a national government can influence variations in activity in the real economy. In today’s blog I will consider two recent bits of evidence that reinforce that viewpoint. Today’s inflation data issued by the Australian Bureau of Statistics clearly indicates that there is plenty of scope for further interest rate cuts within the logic of the central bank’s inflation targetting strategy. But monetary policy is trapped in Australia at present between the need to expand the economy (for which it is largely ineffective) and the worry that further interest rates cuts will push housing prices up further. Second, economic activity is faltering and unemployment has risen because the Government refuses to take discretionary action to increase the fiscal deficit to support higher spending levels. They are firmly caught up in the neo-liberal obsession about the need for surpluses and where they are likely to make concessions is in tax cuts for high income earners – based on the so-called trickle down hypothesis. Some recent research from the US, however, demonstrates fairly categorically that tax changes at the top end of the income distribution have negligible effects on economic activity. This is in contradistinction to changes in disposable income at the bottom end. They are very powerful in terms of stimulating or undermining employment and output.

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IMF – labour market regulations do not undermine potential growth

On the eve of the Annual Spring Meetings of the IMF and the World Bank in Washington last week, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble wrote an article in the New York Times (April 15, 2015) – Wolfgang Schäuble on German Priorities and Eurozone Myths – justifying the German stance with respect to the Eurozone crisis. He argued that the Eurozone was pursuing the correct response by placing a focus on “structural reforms”. He said that the IMF boss was in accord with this assessment and further structural reforms were necessary, including “more flexible labor markets”. He included labour market reform as part of a push for “modernization and regulatory improvements”. In denial of the basic rule of macroeconomics that ‘spending equals income’, Schäuble said that fiscal stimulus “is not part of the plan”. He might have read the complete text of the latest IMF World Economic Outlook (April 2015) – Uneven Growth: Short- and Long-Term Factors – before he sought comfort in the imprimatur of the IMF. That organisation seems to say one thing here and another there! It has become schizoid as it confronts the fact that its Groupthink sees itself as a major part of the neo-liberal free market (help the rich) putsch whereas its research economists find out that the facts don’t match the political (ideological) stance. The IMF should be defunded and recreated to serve positive purposes.

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Latest military expenditure data reveals the hypocrisy of austerity

Yesterday, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released their latest data for – World Military Expenditure 1988-2014. In their – Press Release – we learn that total World military spending has fallen in the last three consecutive years although it “levelled off” in 2014. While the global trends are interesting (the shifting patterns between the big geo-blocks), I was interested in what was happening in the Eurozone in the era of austerity. I was also interesting in juxtaposing the military expenditure and social expenditure dynamics. What you learn is that Greece maintains its position as one of the largest relative spending nations on military items, spending nearly twice the proportion of its GDP compared to Germany and the Netherlands, two nations that lead the charge on imposing austerity. Further, the nations that are pushing the hardest for more austerity are those that benefit the most from Greek military expenditure. The hypocrisy is amazing.

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Australia’s generosity to other nations is collapsing

There was a story in the Australian press (April 8, 2015) – ‘Impossible choices’ to be made as human cost of foreign aid squeeze measured – that not only exposes the deep flaws in economic reasoning that accompany neo-liberalism’s emphasis on austerity but also makes one ashamed to be Australian. The problem, however, is not Australian-specific. The neo-liberal paradigm rules the World at present and humanity generally is the victim, particularly those most disadvantaged in material terms. The cuts announced by the Australia federal government to our Overseas Aid Program in the next three years will be the largest shift in provision of aid in our history. The projected cuts are now starting to manifest in concrete terms as aid agencies start to cancel programs and lay off staff. Once again the myths of neo-liberal macroeconomics leads us to accept governments doing appalling things in our name.

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