On holidays

The blog is on holiday until Monday, December 30, 2019 although a harder than usual quiz will appear later this week. All the best from my local beach (Nobbys). For the rest of the week I am finishing writing commitments that have approaching deadlines and have to travel to my next speaking engagement at the end of the week.

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Bregret eh!

Just a few snippets for Wednesday. The post British General Election wash-up continues and the urban Remainers who support Labour are now coming out of their holes to speak forth on why it all went wrong. There is lots of regret but little real reflection and responsibility is being exhibited. And, it is now a fair proposition to argue, that given it was this group that so distorted Labour Party policy and drove the ‘optics’, that they they should now just shut up and do some serious review of their own positions and why they lacked understanding and foresight. Some are proclaiming it was the toxity of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) for the Left that was somehow involved. One cannot get more desperate than that. But mostly it was their disdain for those less educated and less privileged that sealed the deal. You cannot continually label people fools and racists and claim they were so ill-informed that within a few days of the Referendum result that they were clearly experiencing ‘Bregret’ and expect them to play ball with the cosmopolitan dream. Especially when that dream had created such havoc in areas where the majority of Labour MP represented and had voted Leave. We found out how much Bregret there was last Thursday.

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My brief comment on the British election

It is Wednesday and I am travelling a lot today. So just a collection of short snippets today that I have collected over the last week or so. First, the British election is tomorrow and the Tories have been successful in confining the focus to Brexit. My view on the EU and Britain’s decision to exit is well known. Labour should have been leading that process given the majority of their elected MPS come from Leave majority seats. Instead, they gave out a mixed message, with many senior Labour politicians claiming they would vote remain in another referendum. This is despite both major parties guaranteeing to the people in June 2016 that they would implement the vote to leave. The information we have at present is that that position on Brexit is probably going to cost them office. Which means the Tories survive when they should not but finish the Brexit process which they should. Then Labour will have to reinvent itself to take advantage of the renewed sovereignty that Brexit will bring. To do that it has to expunge its ranks of the neoliberals. One other matters, Leonard Cohen’s last album was released recently. We hear a song from it.

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Japan announces a stimulus as the Right take over Bolivia

Just a short blog post today (short in research) as I devote Wednesday’s to other writing and I have to travel a lot today. More a collection of snippets that I come across over the course of a day’s work. Today, we think about Bolivia and the right-wing thugs that have overthrown a legitimate government advancing the well-being of its people. We also see senior progressive politicians falling into a myriad of lies and misconceptions about the monetary system and handing political initiative to the right wing as a consequence, even though they think they are being clever in their framing. And we think of Japan a little. And then some music offerings or two.

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Leopards do not change their spots

Only a short blog post today as it is Wednesday. My father, in fact, used to say that ‘leopards do not change their spots’, when referring to people who in one period behaved one way and then when sprung would pretend they were reformed. I was thinking about that when I noted that the queue to the magical reinvention door is getting longer by the day. This is the process, whereby a person, who previously advocated neoliberal macroeconomic policy interventions from the sidelines (as an academic economist or media commentator) and/or executed them from a position of power (say, as a Treasurer or Minister of Finance), starts attacking present day governments, who inherited their own fiscal surplus obsessions, and are, like they did themselves, driving their economies into the ground as a result of the same obsessions. Who is in the spotlight today? None other than the former Australian Treasurer, Paul Keating who was reported in the press this morning (October 30, 2019) – Paul Keating slams Liberal party ‘surplus virus’ (paywall) – as being critical of the current government for keeping the “Australian economy ‘idling at the lights'” as a result of “running Australia’s budget like a ‘corner shop'”. He urged the government to stimulate the economy with fiscal policy. Now before we get too excited, and this applies to all the goons who come out claiming they wanted fiscal stimulus all along, these characters typically blow their cover and reveal their true DNA when they reflect on their own track records on the subject. But it is an interesting, if not amusing, pastime watching these characters try to revise their CVs to look like they ‘knew it all along’ as they try desperately to retain relevance and get on the right side of history. We are not that stupid though.

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When the idea of a fiscal surplus becomes a talisman

It is Wednesday and I am travelling a lot today with limited opportunity to write. I am reading a lot though. Highly significant political debates with far reaching effects on the well-being of citizens once policies are implemented are conducted on a daily basis in our national Parliaments and in the media with little correspondence to reality. This is the norm for debates on macroeconomics, which dominate political news every day. There is this fictional world that has been created to keep citizens in check. When the painful policies the neoliberals haul out inflict pain, the solution is to blame something erroneous, attack it, which then just causes more pain. This is the norm these days when it comes to macroeconomic policy. And for the rest of us we suffer in the real world but reason in this fictional world, which is why it persists.

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Apparently core MMT idea is now supported by the mainstream

It’s Wednesday and only a collection of snippets today. Today we saw some self-aggrandising hypocrisy with a short memory come out of the sewers, and a statement by a government denying that they are a “successful case of MMT”, an advertisement (call for help) and some music linked to a recent, rather significant death, when considered in the history of contemporary music. Pretty full day really.

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Travelling all day today …

There will be no blog post today as I am travelling for the next 24 hours or so back from the US. It has been a very busy two weeks or so that has taken me to many cities and meetings with many different people. A lot of different agendas to absorb and think about. From West Africa to the struggles within the US, to the Eurozone and the chaos of Britain. But the commonality is a desire to understand MMT and apply it to better deal with the problems that face us and our planet. While I am flying I will not be attending to comments that need moderation. So it might be some time before you see your comment published (or not). I am now preparing for my next foray which will take me to Japan later this month.

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The ‘rats’ are deserting the mainstream ship – and everyone wants in

It is Wednesday today and only a short blog post. I am heading to New York city today from London. More on that tomorrow. It is clear now that journalists from all over the globe are starting to pick up on the shifts in policy thinking that I have been writing about – the admission by policy makers that monetary policy has reached the end of its effective life (not that it was ever particularly effective) and that there is a crying need for a return to fiscal dominance, which was the norm before the neoliberal era began several decades ago. We have not yet reached the stage where the dots are being fully joined – monetary policy dominance dead -> fiscal policy dominance desirable -> neoliberalism dead. But that will have to come because the fiscal policy activism will have to be aimed at addressing targets that have been neglected by the neoliberal era – real wages growth, quality and security of employment, restoration of public services, environmental care priorities, scope and quality of public infrastructure, and the like. But as the journalists are starting to file copy on this topic, some are very lazy – and just want to have it on the record that they were part of the throng. One of the laziest offerings I have read was published today in the Australian on-line newspaper, The New Daily (September 23, 2019) – The economic weapon too hot for the RBA to mention: Helicopter money – and written by finance journalist Michael Pascoe, who is usually more careful with his words. While many might think any publicity is good for the spread of our Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) work, my view is that falsely constructing MMT can add to the already stifling dissonance among the public that has been mislead for years by the framing and language of the mainstream economists.

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Travelling all day today …

There will be no blog post today as I am travelling for the next 24 hours or so to Europe via LA. I have a detective novel to read – well 79 in fact, I have just started the complete Maigret series written by Belgian author Georges Simenon – so in the spirit of that great song from the Who – I hope I get finished with the series before I get old! And regular transmission will probably resume from Paris on Tuesday. While I am flying I will not be attending to comments that need moderation. So it might be some time before you see your comment published (or not). I hope to see many MMT people at one or more of the events where I will be speaking in the next two weeks – the details are overleaf.

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