Australian government in contractionary bias when stimulus is needed

This will be my only commentary on last night’s fiscal statement (aka ‘the budget’) from the Australian Treasurer unless I make another one. There were few surprises and lots of tricks all aimed at presenting a government that has abandoned its extreme right-wing ‘hit the poor the most’ past (as in 2014 and 2015) and decided to quell the deficit and debt hysteria that the right-wing of its party had determined was the best way to win votes. The conservatives are still in office but now they just claim that “the government has to live within its means” and spreads the adjustment profile by which it claims it will force the government to do that over a longer time period (2020-21 the first fiscal surplus is projected). It is big on claims about infrastructure development but, in fact, it tricks the population into believing that cuts are increases. It talks about fairness but introduces compulsory drug and alcohol testing for income support recipients because apparently you “can’t go to work if you are smashed”. It also includes projections that are required to get the surplus projection which are simply unbelievable, which means the 2020-21 surplus is just a token. Even the Treasurer has stopped short of promising its realisation saying the figure is just a “projection”. The government is cutting spending on universities despite saying it wants Australia to be a clever country. And in making changes to secondary education funding in general it is squeezing into the natural territory of whining Labor Party opposition and giving them nowhere to go. That Party has become trapped by its own adherence to neo-liberalism and now just looks stupid. In summary, it still delivers contraction in the year ahead at a time when Australia is growing well below trend and domestic spending growth flat. In other words, to be a fair and responsible policy document it should have increased the deficit over the next few years to stimulate employment growth and bring down unemployment and underemployment.

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Eurozone recovery is much weaker than the headline figures might suggest

It is fiscal statement (aka ‘budget’) frenzy in Australia at present, with the Treasurer about to bring down the annual policy strategy tonight. There is so much claptrap in the press and electronic media that I have tried to avoid saying anything about it. I may stick to that. I have been trying to understand the French election results though. That has occupied my attention a bit given the success of Macron (where a record number of voters stayed away and he barely scraped through the first round). He will be proven to be duplicitious I think. He is a Eurocentric neo-liberal who is anti-union, largely, anti-regulation and state intervention and believes the ‘market’ and an incentivised middle-class will do the trick for France. He is caught up in the Europe thing and so cannot see that the Eurozone straitjacket will ensure a growing underclass is retained. There was some interesting research published by a private investment bank (BOAML) – Job Quality and Escape Velocity – which provides a rather sombre view of the much-touted Eurozone ‘recovery’ over the last three years.

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US labour market continues to improve but a jobs deficit remains

On May 5, 2017, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released their latest labour market data – Employment Situation Summary – April 2017 – which showed that total non-farm employment from the payroll survey rose by 211,00 in April up from the miserable 98,000 the previous month. The unemployment rate fell from 4.5 per cent to 4.4 per cent. The estimate of employment change from the Labour Force Survey was also positive (156 thousand net jobs added). Last month, we wondered whether the poor showing signalled the beginning of a slowdown after the positive ‘Trump’ spike or whether it was just a monthly variation that will iron itself out over the longer period. We are probability safer concluding it was monthly variation. Whatever the direction, there is still a large jobs deficit remaining and other indicators suggest the labour market is still below where it was prior to the crisis.

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The Weekend Quiz – May 6-7, 2017 – 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.

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The Weekend Quiz – May 6-7, 2017

Welcome to The Weekend Quiz, which used to be known as the Saturday Quiz! The quiz tests whether you have been paying attention or not to the blogs I post. See how you go with the following questions. Your results are only known to you and no records are retained.

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Resistance and change doesn’t come from going along with the (neo-liberal) pack

I get a lot of E-mails that accuse me of being politically naive. The accusations were rekindled by yesterday’s blog – British labour lost in a neo-liberal haze. I imagine if I wrote a blog where I outlined support for Marine Le Pen in the context of a two-way fight against the worse-of-the-worst neo-liberals Emmanuel Macron the accusations would turn uglier even. My support for Brexit was met with similar hostility from a range of (self-styled) ‘progressives’ as being naive and offensive. Why, Brexit was a conservative plot wasn’t it? How could I have missed that? Progressives are now advocating votes for Macron even though they know he is an archetype neo-liberal – the anathema of what they believe. And they tell me every day in these E-mail tirades and other blogs that I should give people like Jeremy Corbyn some slack because he knows better than me that to advocate a major departure from the neo-liberal macroeconomic narrative would be political suicide. So why don’t I just shut up and recognise that politics is beyond my grasp and I should desist. Basically that is the message I get regularly. Well, I am sorry to say, such views completely misunderstand the role of an academic and the way in which resistance is constructed.

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British labour lost in a neo-liberal haze

There was an exchange in the British House of Commons a few weeks ago (sitting on April 19, 2017), which really summarised why the Tories will win the British election and why Jeremy Corbyn has led the Labour Party there into an abyss of neo-liberal mumbo jumbo where there is no way out but loss. It was during the Parliamentary time when the Prime Minister lists her engagements for the day (a cute aspect of Westminster systems). You can follow the exchange in the Hansard entry – Volume 624. It will make your skin crawl. I guess that is what one gets from reading Parliamentary records. The upshot is that the British labour lost in a neo-liberal haze and marching forthrightly towards its Waterloo. The aftermath will not be pretty.

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The poor are getting poorer in the US

Yes, the ‘politics of envy’. That is one of the epithets that the neo-liberal apologists use to defend the fact that the top-end-of-town are increasingly seizing the major proportion of any growth in wealth. They claim that shifts in the distribution of wealth and income do not matter if the levels of each distributional cohort (say, a decile or quintile) are all moving up. They ask the question: Why should a poor person care if a rich person is getting much richer as long as the poor are becoming less poor in absolute terms? The facts are that in advanced countries, the wealth accumulation of the last three decades has not been particularly beneficial to the poorest members of society. The rich have experienced massive gains in wealth even if the poor have enjoyed modest gains. But in the US, not only has the wealth distribution moved heavily towards the top end, the bottom 50 per cent now have less wealth than they had before the GFC began and have not increased their wealth since 1989 (when comparable data is available). And further, even if the bottom end of the distribution improved their absolute position, it still remains a major problem for wealth to be increasingly concentrated among the rich. It erodes the democratic process and increases social polarisation.

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Common elements linking US and UK economic slowdowns

Last week, the British Office of National Statistics (ONS) released data that revealed that quarterly growth in real GDP dropped to 0.3 per cent in the March-quarter 2017, down from 0.7 per cent in the December-quarter 2016. Household consumption growth fell in an environment of rising household debt and flat real wages. In the same week (April 28, 2017), the US Bureau of Economic Analysis released the latest National Accounts data for the US for the March-quarter 2017 – Gross Domestic Product: First Quarter 2017 (Advance Estimate). It showed that GDP grew on an annualised rate of 0.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2017, down from 2.1 per cent in the December-quarter 2016. The US result was driven, in part, by a dramatic slowdown in personal consumption expenditure and a negative contribution from government. The common elements linking the slowdown on both sides of the Atlantic are clear – growing and massive levels of household debt, flat growth in personal incomes (real wages etc) and inadequate fiscal support for growth. These elements, in part, were key features leading up to the GFC. Governments haven’t learned that relying on personal consumption expenditure for economic growth in an environment of flat wages growth means that household debt will rise quickly and reach unsustainable levels. How harsh the correction is unclear. The faltering the outlook in the US and the UK suggests that their national governments will need to increase their discretionary fiscal deficits to stimulate confidence among business firms and get growth back on track.

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The Weekend Quiz – April 29-30, 2017 – 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.

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