Today started off as a usual Sunday – a long-ride on my bike interrupted by two punctures (why do they come in waves). Anyway, then some other things like a visit to the community garden where I have a plot. Then it was down to work and as I read news stories and academic articles I was continually confronted with the tide of hysteria surrounding the impending sovereign defaults (as we are led to believe). My principle conclusion was that these journalists etc have a pretty good job. They get paid for knowing nothing about the topics they purport to be experts about and instead just make stuff up and intersperse it with some mainstream economic ideology taken straight from Mankiw’s macroeconomic textbook. It would be an easy way to make a living. Get the text book out … turn to the chapter on debt this week (last week inflation) and start of with some “large” numbers which are “without precedent” and you are done. Easy pie! Problem is that it influences the readers who do not know these commentators are charlatans.

Today I have been thinking how extraordinarily stupid human beings are. The so-called Club Med Eurozone nations are being fast tracked into a crisis by a pernicious concoction of corrupt and lazy ratings agencies, Northern European truculence, and a ridiculous monetary system that provides no fiscal support within what is really a federal system. And as the ailing governments boldly and stupidly declare a willingness to play ball with the Brussels-Frankfurt consensus bullies there are signs that social order is beginning to break down. Then I read that an American city is turning its lights off at night to save money. Then I read some goon telling everyone to short US bonds because there will be a debt meltdown. And all of this stuff stems from unnecessary constructions and constraints that we have placed on systems that should be geared to advancing general welfare.

Person the life-boats! Get the hard hats out! Strife and pestilence is coming! I am wondering what all these loons – the deficit terrorists – who are now elevating a simple endogenous fiscal balance into a national emergency – will say in a few years when growth returns, unemployment falls, people start rebuilding their savings and most importantly their children do not go into slave camps making widgets to send back to the previous generation to pay for the fiscal balances and … the sky stays firmly above our heads although it does rain occasionally down on us to help farmers grow vegetables. What will these hysterical idiots say then? Today, the budget deficit has become the latest WMD. A seek and destroy mission is required. Bring out the military and attack treasury offices everywhere. Rally patriots the hour of calling is nigh?

By invitation, I wrote the following Op-Ed article for publication in one of the dailies tomorrow morning. I had 500 words so couldn’t say much. The good thing about today is how wrong the market economists were. The bookies even closed the book because they claimed it was a 100 per cent probability that the RBA would put up rates. Anyway, they didn’t which is good but they will which is bad.

Today I have had the misfortune of reading the latest Australian Government Intergenerational Report, which is really a confection of lies, half-truths interspersed with irrelevancies and sometimes some interesting facts. Why an educated nation tolerates this rubbish is beyond me. The media has been making a meal of the latest report and all the doom merchants – those deficit terrorists – a claiming we have to get into surplus as soon as possible. They seem to be ignoring that we are still embroiled in a major economic crisis requiring on-going fiscal support. But more importantly, they haven’t a clue what their policy proposals actually would mean in a modern monetary economy where external deficits are typical and the private sector overall is desiring to increase their saving. Anyway, read on … its all downhill.

For some years now we have been reading about how the UK has benefitted from the Thatcher reforms which involved extensive deregulation of the labour market and retrenchment of significant sections of the state. The falling unemployment rate and strong employment growth prior to the crisis were cited as evidence of the claims. Even at the height of the crisis, mainstream (neo-liberal) commentators have asserted that the UK would bounce back quickly on the back of its labour market flexibility. It turns out that new evidence released recently provides a different view of the employment creation and provides an even stronger case for avoiding cut backs in net public spending than was already obvious to those who understand how the monetary system operates. Sadly, the politics in the UK will likely blind the policy makers to the realities.