Austerity has damaged the ability of Greece to defend itself against fire threats

It is Wednesday and I have been busy on other writing projects. But today I offer some data analysis on the Greek fire tragedy as well as a short video promoting a very important festival that is coming up. Then I offer some personal insights on the accusation by the right-wing press that on-line learning is just a ruse for lazy “work-shy” professors. And to calm us after all that – we have some fine jazz from 1960.

Read more

The ideology of neoliberal ‘freedom’ ends up damaging all of us – NSW Covid outbreak

It has been a while since I updated my commentary on the new bi-weekly dataset using Australian Tax Office payroll data that the Australian Bureau of Statistics started publishing in March 2020, in order to provide more updated information on the state of the labour market during the pandemic. The Monthly Labour Force survey comes out in the third week of each month and relates to data collected around the second week of the previous month. With ongoing state government lockdowns being imposed with little warning having a significant impact on employment, this more frequent dataset was welcome. We are now in a situation where around 13 millions Australians are in tight lockdowns (over half the population), principally in Melbourne and Sydney. The latter, due to the incompetence of the conservative state government in NSW, has been in lockdown for weeks now and as the largest state, the reverberations are clearly going to be felt across the nation. Last week (August 5, 2021), the ABS released the – Weekly Payroll Jobs and Wages in Australia, Week ending 17 July 2021 – which provides the first glimpse of what the impact of the extended lockdown in Sydney (in particular) is having on the labour market. Employment in NSW shrunk by 5.1 per cent in the 3 weeks since June 26, 2021 (the start of the restrictions). Overall, employment has slumped by 2.4 per cent nationally. And the virus is spreading into regional NSW and things will get worse. The damage is being borne largely by our youth, given the occupation segregation in the ‘closed down’ sectors. The Federal government is demanding we all get vaccinated but due to its trying to ‘save money’ last year, there is insufficient vaccine available to supply the demand. Both the NSW and Federal governments have demonstrated their incompetence in the decisions they have taken in the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘fiscal surpluses’.

Read more

US labour market continues to recover – but a long way to go yet

Last Friday (August 6, 2021), the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released their latest labour market data – Employment Situation Summary – July 2021 – which reported a total payroll employment rise of 943,000 and a 0.5 points decline in the official unemployment rate to 5.4 per cent. The results are strong even though the US labour market is still 5,702 thousand jobs short from where it was at the end of February 2020, which helps to explain why there are no fundamental wage pressures emerging.

Read more

The Weekend Quiz – August 7-8, 2021 – answers and discussion

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.

Read more

Inflation is coming, well, it could be, or, it might happen, gosh …

One could make a pastime observing the way that so-called ‘expert’ commentators change their commentary as the data unfolds. As one rather lurid prediction fails, their narrative shifts to the next. We have seen this tendency for decades when we consider the way mainstream economists have dealt with Japan. The words shift from those implying immediacy (for example, of insolvency), to those such as ‘could’, ‘might’, ‘perhaps’, ‘under certain conditions’ and more. The topics shift. The commentariat were obsessed with ‘this time is different’ during the GFC and the ‘debt insolvency threshold’ rubbish that the likes of Reinhardt and Rogoff propagated. That is, until they were sprung for spreadsheet incompetence. More recently, we have apparently forgotten how many governments were about to go broke and the mania has shifted to inflation. The data shows some price spikes earlier in the year which set of the dogs. Now, things might be shifting again. It is a pastime following all this. Short memories, no shame is the only requirement that is required to be a mainstream economics commentator. Prescient knowledge is not included in that skill set.

Read more

The pandemic exposes the damage that neoliberalism has caused

Australia is now locked into a new phase of the pandemic where NSW is in danger of allowing the virus to run free throughout the population due to the incompetence of the conservative state government. For the duration of the pandemic up until now, the NSW government has been lecturing the other states (mostly run by Labor governments) about how they had a superior health system (health is organised along state/territory lines in Australia) and how they valued freedom more than the dictatorial Labor states that go into lockdown very quickly if a case threatens. It turns out NSW has just been lucky to now and the latest outbreak has revealed their ‘freedom first’ approach is a false freedom. Sydney has been locked down for weeks now and cases are still rising and it seems the contact tracers have lost control. But the hubris from the NSW government has really exposed a much deeper malaise that has been evident for years now as a result of the way neoliberalism has reconfigured the public sector and the role of government. The pandemic is just exposes the erosion of government capacity to provide public services and infrastructure and deal with public emergencies. That is one of the important revelations to come out of the pandemic.

Read more

Has global trade peaked?

I have recently updated my trade databases as I write a book chapter on the topic. I am also curious about the dramatic growth in freight charges over the last 12 months in international shipping. I have a friend who runs a business importing cement who is now paying 5 times the freight charges now than he was a year ago. Why that would be the case is an interesting question. I have previously written about the way that the neoliberal ideology became conflated with the trends towards globalisation in supply chains. Globalisation, was then weaponised with the ‘free market’ ideology, which undermined key aspects of the benefits of trade, particularly for poorer nations. The ‘free market’ mantra became code for increasing the rate of surplus extraction from these nations by financial interests in the richer nations – a sort of more sophisticated version of the way colonialism sucked wealth from the colonies to the benefit of the metropolitan economies. But in recent years (since about 2007), a fundamental shift in the relationship between trade volumes and income growth (a relationship that is often used as a proxy for the pace of globalisation) has occurred. Some think this indicates that peak trade has been reached. There are good reasons for thinking that to be the case.

Read more

The Weekend Quiz – July 31-August 1, 2021 – answers and discussion

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.

Read more
Back To Top