Posts about monetary policy

Bank of England Governor just didn’t go far enough

The Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey caused a stir last week when he said that British workers should not get wage increases in the coming period. This was a day after the Bank of England raised interest rates, presumably because they have some theory that that will cure Covid and get trucks moving again. There was general outrage expressed by a range of voices, who often are not on the same page – unions, corporate interests, the ‘high wage’ aspiring Tory government (perhaps). The outrage was, unfortunately, personalised with critics pointing out that “Bailey was paid £575,538, including pension, last year” (Source) and hasn’t offered to give any of that fat cat salary back. But as in most things, getting personal usually misses the point. Beyond the rage, in a sense, he was correct to highlight that if the current supply-induced price pressures trigger a wider distributional struggle then accelerating inflation will result and the policy implications of such an event as that will be very damaging to workers in the UK. But, the problem was that he didn’t go far enough. This won’t be a popular view but it comes from studying inflationary mechanisms all my career, which means I think I understand how supply constraints move into a generalised wage-price spiral, which then causes worker more damage than some wage restraint. And, remember, we are talking about Capitalism here – not some profit-sharing, collectively-owned nirvana. The Bank of England Governor was clearly thinking that the conditions for a 1970s wage-price spiral are approaching for the UK, which means that wage restraint would be sensible if the goal was to insulate the current supply shocks arising from the pandemic and aberrant behaviour by OPEC etc and render them transitory. I don’t think the conditions are present yet and he should have generalised the concern to focus on other more obvious triggers that do exist at present.

Read more

RBA rejects theory that interest rate rises cure Covid and make trucks go faster

It’s Wednesday and a ‘blog lite’ day but there was an important speech delivered by the Governor of Australia’s central bank today that reveals the reasons that the RBA is once again refusing to be bullied into increasing interest rates rises by the ‘markets’. It is almost comical to observe the ludicrous self-importance that the ‘markets’ are exhibiting at the moment. Every day there is a new article or segment on the finance reports about how the ‘markets’ are going to win the battle against the RBA, who will buckle soon on interest rates. Well, yesterday the RBA didn’t buckle and they made fools of the ‘markets’. Remember the ‘markets’ is just a collection of economists who work for financial institutions that make more profits when interest rates are higher. It is no wonder they are always demanding higher rates. That is what vested interests are about. And for the media to just continually give them a platform, especially the national broadcaster, is a disgrace. Anyway, the ‘markets’ lost out yesterday and the RBA clearly doesn’t think that interest rate rises cure Covid and make trucks go faster.

Read more

Australia – inflation mania is alive and well but running on fumes!

There is an increasing frequency of articles appearing in the financial press in Australia about how inflation is back and that the RBA had better start hiking rates and stop buying government debt. Warnings to home buyers that mortgage rates are about to go through the roof. And all that sort of stuff. Moronic. If you examine today’s data release from the Australian Bureau of Statistics – Consumer Price Index, Australia (January 25, 2022) – which relates to to the December-quarter 2021, you might be wondering what the fuss is all about. Inflation rose slightly in the December-quarter 2021 and was driven by rising automative fuel costs (uncompetitive cartel and deliberate government petrol tax policies), global supply chain disruptions (pandemic) and material shortages (supply chain and bushfires). Not much more to see than that really. I note the same journalists are out there beating the inflation mania drum. Don’t they get sick of being wrong all the time. Their wages should be linked to their predictive capacity – they would starve!

Read more

More evidence that the current inflation is ephemeral

When I am asked whether I still consider the recent bout of inflation to be transitory, I say that transitory means as long as the pandemic disrupts the balance between supply and demand. Note: demand. I have been getting lots of E-mails telling me that Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is a fraud because of the inflation spike and our denial of the demand (spending) involvement. Apparently, the data shows that large fiscal deficits and central bank bond-buying programs are always inflationary. Good try. I last provided data and analysis of this issue in this blog post – Central banks are resisting the inflation panic hype from the financial markets – and we are better off as a result (December 13, 2021) – where I made it clear that the spikes are a unique coincidence between abnormal, pandemic-related demand and supply patterns. That couldn’t be clearer. And when that sort of imbalance occurs, with the addition of cartel-type price gouging (which has nothing to do with fiscal or monetary policy settings) then MMT predicts a nation will encounter inflationary pressures. The idea that the economy is defined by periods below full capacity when there will be no inflation and beyond full capacity when there will be inflation is not part of the MMT body of knowledge. It is more complicated than that dichotomy which we address in our textbook – Macroeconomics. Supporting this view, is a recent ECB research paper, which uses fairly advanced econometric techniques to decompose one measure of inflationary expectations in a component that reflects short-term risk and another that reflects longer term inflationary expectations. They find the former is driving the current inflation trajectory while the latter is largely stable. That means, in English, that the current inflation is likely to be of an ephemeral nature driven by how long the pandemic interrupts supply chains.

Read more

When ABC journalists mislead the public and spread fiction

There is a difference between a journalist reporting news about economics and money and a journalist writing an opinion piece. In the first instance, the responsibility of the journalist is to ensure they cover the topic in a balanced way, seeking input from all viewpoints if the topic is controversial, as most topics in economics are. Too often journalists in this situation allow themselves to be used as mouthpieces for specific viewpoints, sometimes because they are coerced by editorial deadlines. Often they just uncritically summarise press releases put out by some group or another and represent the material as fact. In the second case, when a journalist is writing an analytical piece they are holding themselves out as experts. Then they better get it right. Usually, when they are writing about macroeconomics they do not get it right because they merely rehearse mainstream thinking, which most people by now should realise is off the mark. A case in point was a recent Op Ed (represented as analysis) published by the economics reporter at the ABC (January 10, 2022) – How the banks may profit from the taxpayer as COVID quantitative easing winds down. It is full of errors that journalists make when they don’t exactly understand the material they are dealing with. This should have been worked out during the GFC, when these issues arose in the general media. The fact that the same errors are being made more than a decade later doesn’t suggest any learning has taken place.

Read more

German threats of exit rely on the ignorance of others reinforced by Europhile progressives

I read a story in the German press – Der Euro auf dem Prüfstand (‘The euro on the test bench’, published January 7, 2022) – which reinforced my view that progressives who think the harsh austerity-bias of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) have vanished with the invocation of the ‘general escape clause’ within Article 126 of the Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union when the pandemic arrived are off the mark. And when the same commentators/thinkers welcomed the end of the Merkel era and the dawning of the new German government, their assessment reflected that they are trapped within the TINA to the euro thought process. Well, economists with influence in Germany certainly don’t think that and one of the bosses of the Kiel Instituts für Weltwirtschaft (IfW) (Kiel Institute for the World Economy), which is a German research institute, has called for the topic of German exit from the EMU to be debated. He believes that this will put pressure on the other Member States (particularly the so-called “Achse Paris-Rom” (Paris-Rome axis) to abandon any thought of relaxing the economic and monetary rules and force the ECB to tighten monetary policy again. The iron gauntlet of ‘schwarze Null’ is still firmly gripping the European debate.

Read more

Bottom up reform in the EMU requires the abandonment of the Treaties

Regular readers will know that I have written a lot about the topic of European integration. My 2015 book – Eurozone Dystopia: Groupthink and Denial on a Grand Scale (published May 2015) – was a detailed study of the evolution of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) from the origins of the ‘European Project’, as peace came in the late 1940s. I have argued that the creation of the EMU, after several failed attempts in the 1960s and 1970s, was only possible because of the emergence of Monetarism in the academy and its related socio-political manifestations which we call, generally, neoliberalism or market liberalism. If France had not succumbed to the neoliberal myths and believed it could dominate the currency union with a ‘franc fort’ then its traditional rivalry with Germany would have continued to prevent the adoption of the common currency. What I have been arguing since the ECB introduced the Securities Market Program (in May 2010) is that despite the success by the EMU architects (Delors and his gang) in embedding neoliberal principles into the legal structure of the European Union and its institutions the reality has overtaken them and a dysfunctional dystopia is only maintained by the ECB and other institutions defying the ‘rules’ established. We are now starting to see other researchers take up that angle, which is progress.

Read more

The Japanese denial story – Part 2

Here is Part 2 of my analysis of the claim that Japan is not a good demonstration of what happens when macroeconomic policies are pushed beyond their usual limits. I have long argued that trying to apply a mainstream macroeconomics (New Keynesian) framework to the Japanese situation yields nonsensical predictions about rising interest rates, accelerating inflation, rising bond yields and government insolvency. Nothing like that scenario has emerged since Japan has introduced economic policies that ran counter to the mainstream consensus since the 1990s. Japan demonstrates key Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) principles and those that seek to deny that are really forced to invent a parallel-universe version of MMT to make their case. That version is meaningless. In Part 2, we extend that analysis to consider trade transactions, the fear of inflation, and the argument that the current generation are selfishly leaving their children higher tax burdens while we party on.

Read more

The Japanese denial story – Part 1

Well, it’s 2022 already and we enter the 18th year of this blog. Regular readers will know that I have studied the Japanese economy in considerable detail over the course of my career and when it experienced one of the largest commercial asset price bubble busts in history in early 1992, the questions I was asking and the data I was looking out were important in framing the way I have done macroeconomics since. I consider Japan to be one of the nations that was early to embrace the madness of neoliberalism – credit binge, wild property speculation then crash – and the first nation to abandon it in favour of more responsible fiscal policy – which given the circumstances required on-going fiscal deficits exceeding 10 per cent of GDP at times. Its policy approach – including the relatively high deficits, the zero interest rate policy of the Bank of Japan, and then the massive bond-buying program by the same, became the target for various New Keynesian macroeconomists (including Krugman) to prophesise doom. Their textbook models predicted the worst – rising interest rates, accelerating inflation, rising bond yields and then government insolvency as bond markets bailed out and the currency plummetted. Nothing like that scenario emerged. Japan was playing out policies that ran counter to the mainstream consensus in the 1990s and beyond and I learned so much from understanding why things happened there as a consequence. This is Part 1 of a two-part discussion about why Japan demonstrates key MMT principles and how those who wish to deny that reality have to invent a parallel-universe version of MMT to make their case.

Read more

Turkey – who is squeezing who?

It’s Wednesday and a shorter blog post, which includes the latest from Turkey and some music. The mainstream narrative against Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has been ramped up significantly in recent weeks as a result of events in Turkey, where, up until yesterday, the currency had depreciated significantly. The screams for interest rate rises from bankers etc (of course! they profit or protect foreign debt exposure) have been deafening. But the most recent monetary policy decision was on December 16, 2021, when the CBRT reduced its policy rate (the one-week repo auction rate) from 15 per cent to 14 per cent. The ‘markets’ can’t really get a handle on the current government’s thinking because it is running against the mainstream in several ways, including cutting rates to reduce inflationary pressures (see Press release on Interest Rates – from the CBRT). Overnight a big swing happened after the government made a significant fiscal policy announcement. That will further confound the markets who were forced to scramble to close out short-selling positions as the lira appreciated by around 25 per cent in one day. The fiscal squeeze worked. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Read more
Back To Top