On Friday, we had the extraordinary admission from our Federal government that they had overestimated the injection required to fund their wage subsidy JobKeeper program by some $A60 billion. When the overall program was announced the Treasury allocated $A133 billion to it. So now they are admitting to a 45 per cent forecasting error, which sort of dwarfs the worst errors that the IMF makes, and they sure make some bad mistakes in their projections. Whatever the reason for the mistake, the way the Treasurer has defended it is quite repugnant – claiming virtue out of the incompetence. And while all the Labor Party economists are talking about seeing the error from space, none of them picked it up or had the nous to realise that the figures didn’t add up when the Government originally released them. I am the only economist who wrote that the figures published by the Government didn’t make sense. I did that on April 29, 2020. I also wrote to the Treasury and the Treasurer requesting answers to questions that reflected my concern. They didn’t bother replying. Now everyone is wise after the fact. Anyway, the $A60 billion is a nice round figure. And I outline a plan in this blog post on exactly how the Treasurer can spend it and improve the well-being of more than a million Australians with a stroke of the pen.
Here are the answers with discussion for this Weekend’s Quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Welcome to The Weekend Quiz. The quiz tests whether you have been paying attention or not to the blog posts that I post. See how you go with the following questions. Your results are only known to you and no records are retained.
Remember back just a few months ago. We are in Britain. All the Remainers are jumping up and down about Brexit. We hardly see anything about it now as the UK moves towards a no deal with the EU. Times have overtaken all that non-event stuff. Now the developments are confounding the mainstream economists – again. There will be all sorts of reinventing history and ad hoc reasoning going on, but the latest data demonstrates quite clearly that what students are taught in mainstream macroeconomics provides no basis for an understanding of how the monetary system operates. All the predictions that a mainstream program would generate about the likely effects of current treasury and central bank behaviour would be wrong. Only MMT provides the body of knowledge that is requisite for understanding these trends.
Its Wednesday, so a collection of snippets, ads and music. One of the things I am working on as part of my book venture with Thomas Fazi, our followup to – Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (Pluto Books, September 2017) – is the way the Left and Right are responding to the current crisis. It is clear to me that the Right are seeing it as a way to really entrench new beach head gains on their long term agenda to divert public spending away from general welfare towards the top-end-of-town and to use the legislative/regulative structures of government to further their aims to divert more of the national income produced towards capital, particularly financial capital. Meanwhile, it looks as if the Left has gone to asleep – or better – they haven’t really woken from their long-term slumber as they dream their standard narrative that global capital has made the state unable to pursue independent fiscal agendas that will improve the lot of all humanity. So I am looking into that sort of narrative and collecting evidence as one does to compile into a coherent argument.
One bit of good news yesterday was that the Supercars event that has been imposed on the City of Newcastle over the last 3 years will not go ahead this year. This is an event that has massive state subsidies, creates health hazards for local residents, lies about crowd numbers to justify further state subsidies and severely divides the local community. They claim they love Newcastle, but with only a few events possible this year, they are clearly going where the highest subsidies are likely. So that is a relief for the inner city community. But there is not much else that one can be happy about right now. Today (May 19, 2020), the Australian Bureau of Statistics released their latest weekly employment data taken from Australian Tax Office data, which they release and analyse on a two-week cycle. The latest edition came out today – Weekly Payroll Jobs and Wages in Australia, Week ending 2 May 2020 – which covers the new data from April 18, 2020 to May 2, 2020. The data is suggesting that the worst of the job losses are now over, which doesn’t mean where we are at at present is nothing short of shocking. As the lockdown eases, we can now expect more jobs to come back. The question is how many businesses will go to the wall before we get a more usual scale of operation and interaction. My prediction is that many will disappear and so the recovery in employment will be protracted given how many jobs have been lost to date. A much larger fiscal intervention is required and it has to be directed at workers rather than firms and support direct job creation.
I went on a data excursion for part of today to update the flows data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. They published the latest JOLTs data last Friday (May 15, 2020) – Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary – which reveals data up to March 2020. So in a sense it is the calm before the storm. I also reconstructed some of the indicators I compile from that data set which give me a broader impression of what is happening in the US labour market. Clearly, things are going to get worse when the April data is released. We can see that by examining the Department of Labor’s weekly unemployment claimants data, which was updated last Thursday (May 9, 2020). I also updated my state table and map today. Things are looking very bleak. To me, the data tells me that the US is a failed state – incapable of using the capacity the government possesses to advance the well-being, or, in this case, protect the well-being of its people. I am also working on an extended piece on the way the Right and the Left are behaving in this crisis. As usual, the Right are organised and forward-looking putting assets into strategies that will take their agenda to another (pernicious) level. Under the smokescreen of the crisis, they are working to cement changes that will make it even harder for government to advance general prosperity. Meanwhile, the Left appear to be asleep as usual – tweeting their heads off about Biden or Sanders and have taken their eyes off the main game. We have been there before. Even though the US labour market has probably never been here before!
Here are the answers with discussion for this Weekend’s Quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Welcome to The Weekend Quiz. The quiz tests whether you have been paying attention or not to the blog posts that I post. See how you go with the following questions. Your results are only known to you and no records are retained.