I am travelling most of today and have commitments at the other end. So I have meaning to post his podcast I did with Melbourne radio station 3CR in July, so today is a good time to make it available here.
With the Rhine drying up and grass turning brown all over Europe (including the UK), even conservative bodies such as the ECB are starting to take notice and comment. On July 2, 2026, a member of the Executive Board, Frank Elderson gave a speech to the 7th World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists – The green transition – benefits and barriers. In that speech, he directly tied the mounting climate chaos with inflation volatility and emphasised the need to transition as quickly as possible to a net zero carbon economy. I am continuing to draft material for an upcoming book on degrowth and decolonialisation from an Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) perspective. The current area I am researching concerns the evolution of new uses of fermentation to provide food security and allow humanity to transition away from reliance on animal and fish products. The evidence demonstrates that the Chinese are now using its traditional expertise in fermentation to fast track production of Alt protein. As we know, the production of protein via livestock is highly inefficient (protein per hectare) and environmentally unsustainable. Using biomass and converting lignocellulose into food protein is a way around that situation and the Chinese are already way ahead of the rest of us. As long as we hang on to neoliberal ideologies that prevent wide scale state support of emerging industries and starve researchers of state provided R&D funding, the greater will the gulf be between China and the rest of the world on these future technologies and products. We are now seeing this in the production of EVs, for example. Alt protein is the solution for humanity to eliminate livestock dependence. We should be following the processes that China has put in place.
Most of the economics commentary in the last few weeks about Japan has been about the need for higher interest rates or, relatedly, the ‘desperate’ foreign exchange intervention where the US allegedly bailed out Japan to prevent currency failure. All side issues really. The forex intervention said more about US paranoia than anything about Japan’s challenges. The US clearly doesn’t want Japan to sell off its stock of US Treasury bonds and cause yields to rise (not that that would matter anyway) and it also knows that Japanese manufacturers have become very competitive (and are booming) in the US market. That is what that is all about. But the real news, in my view, is the decision by the Japanese Cabinet to cut the sales tax on food from 8 per cent to 1 per cent, even if the cash registers in the big retail stores would have needed massive upgrades to accommodate the planned zero sales tax. A 1 per cent compromise solved that piece of archaic infrastructure. But the sales tax proposal, which will see the first cut since the tax was introduced in April 1989 is a significant plank in the current government’s desire to shock the economy out of its damaging deflationary mindset. While I support the move, it would have been better for the government to scrap the sales tax completely. But the current proposal is a small but significant step in the context of Japanese politics and the surrounding economic commentariat. So we should be thankful for small mercies.
The prophets of doom (Japan division) are back in town predicting the worst for the country. The UK Guardian even is getting in on the act (July 25, 2026) – Can Japan avoid a Liz Truss-style shock as its PM embarks on a giant spending spree?. It is interesting now that the prophets have a new ‘case study’ to provide them with a reference point for their predictions of chaos. I wrote about that in this blog post – Rinse and repeat – Truss chaos – the new benchmark (March 28, 2024) – and gave some Japanese context sometime later in this post – Those who invoke the ‘Truss Moment’ should look at what is happening in Japan (February 12, 2026). Apparently, the plans by the Japanese government to revitalise public infrastructure and crowd in private investment will see the “International investors” will lead to a “Liz Truss-style economic shock”. I wonder every day what these journalists think of their lives when they reflect on what they write. It can’t be a very fulfilling life when it is based on beat-ups, conspiracy-style fictions, and the rest of it. One of the rules of composition that I was taught in university was that an argument had to be internally consistent. These types of articles cannot even get that rule right.
The former head of the Australian Treasury claims that: “Everybody knows the budget should be in surplus right now.” Well last time I checked I was still part of the body of humanity and I don’t know that. In fact, the fiscal balance is currently recording a deficit (which should be referred to as a net public injection of financial assets to the non-government sector) which by all indicators is not large enough. The commentators that are blindly repeating the former Treasury head’s assertion really haven’t much idea of how the system works and what the implications of a shift to surplus would have for the overall prosperity of the nation and its people. They blindly rehearse fictions about fiscal deficits pushing up interest rates and leaving future generations worse off. The reality is that if the Federal government could somehow move to surplus, there would be a recession and the number of available workers who were either unemployed or underemployed (currently 10.9 per cent of the available labour force) would rise significantly. That would undermine the well-being of tens of thousands of workers and their families. The call for fiscal surpluses completely ignores the macro linkages that bind the sectors in the economy together. Such a shift would amount to criminal neglect.
Earlier this week (July 28, 2026), the Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia presented to a fundraising event in Sydney on the topic of – Monetary Policy in an Era of Shocks. Later she conducted a Q&A session where she declined to answer key questions about the policy choices the RBA has taken under her leadership, opting instead to treat the assembled as bereft of basic analytical capacity. The speech continued the sequence of self-serving misrepresentations of the true state of the Australian economy. Apparently, the RBA thinks that a broad labour underutilisation rate of 10.9 per cent (that is, resource wastage approaching 11 per cent) and a capacity utilisation at its lowest since June 2020 (when lots of production enterprises were shut!) is still below the slack needed to restore ‘balance’ (full employment). The prominence of central banks and monetary policy as the primary macroeconomic counter-stabilisation policy tool is one of the worst aspects of this neoliberal era. At some point, we will understand that the central banks should be reduced in their role and self-serving appearances of the senior staff at public events terminated.
Over the last several years, I have been indicating that I think we are in the endgame for neoliberalism as a dominant ideology. On many fronts, the signs are that its institutional structure has failed and the promises that justified that structure have not materialised. I know there is a difference between the promises to sell the idea (that we would all be better off) and the true motivation (to enrich the already wealthy and consolidate their hegemony). But short of military dictatorship where the top-end-of-town control the military, major economic changes are conditioned by the legislative and regulative structure created by government. That means that the voters have to be convinced that change is worthwhile. Neoliberalism thrived because the elites reconfigured the state to serve their interests after the social democratic era saw the state play a mediation role in the class conflict. That reconfiguration was driven by an intense public relations campaign to manipulate the public perception. The working class was divided into segments and segments were turned on other segments (the ‘dole bludgers’, the migrants, trans people, etc) as part of the strategy. The strategy enriched the architects beyond belief but for the rest of us the outcomes have proven dysfunctional to say the least. Now the endgame is upon us as the evidence continues to stack up that neoliberalism was an elaborate con to enrich the already rich and powerful. A report from Australia last week added to the evidence. It shows that one of the defining manifestations of neoliberalism in Australia – the privatised job services system has failed badly and only serves to fills “the pockets of private equity and millionaires, while leaving jobseekers without work”. Another brick in the wall falls.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released the latest labour force data today (July 23, 2026) – Labour Force, Australia – for June 2026 – which provided mixed signals about the state of the labour market. While employment growth was positive, it was biased to part-time work, which is perhaps signalling a weakening as the first adjustment typically made by employers is to reduce hours of work before they cut jobs overall. However, on the other side, participation grew, which means more workers are either working or seeking work. However, the bias towards part-time work was manifest in the rising underemployment rate. There are now 10.9 per cent of available labour not being used (either unemployed or underemployed), which makes a farce of the RBA’s claims that the labour market is tight. There is substantial scope for more job creation given the slack that is present. There is substantial scope for more job creation given the slack that is present.
In addition to the basis academic research that occupies my working time and is funded by national competitive research funding agencies such as the Australian Research Council, I also do commissioned work for various organisations, mostly unions and community groups. That income allows me to also cross subsidise the basic research and is how a research centre in a modern Australian university manages to stay afloat. In the latter work, I am always confronted by government lawyers or the experts the government hires to challenge my assessment of reasonable pay increases for union members in matters that appear at the Federal Fair Work Commission or the state-level Industrial Relations Commissions. I am always appalled by the willingness of these government agencies to spend millions on high paid consultants and lawyers just to stop their workforce enjoying a pay rise. The same agencies look the other way when their executive pay is in focus. And as a result of wage suppression for workers and the free-for-all at the top, the ratio of executive to average earnings is skyrocketing. This trend summarises the inherent inadequacy of capitalism for most of us who depend on real wages growth to enhance our material standard of living in economies that are growing. Two recent reports, one in the UK and one in Australia highlight the indecent state of affairs where CEOs can earn more than 130 times the annual salary of the median full-time UK worker and 55 times the annual salary of the average full-time worker in Australia. The top paid CEO in Australia gets 316 times the average, full-time salary in Australia.
Earlier this year, I analysed how decisions taken by the Japanese Government Pension Investment Fund to speculate in global financial markets have played a significant role in the depreciation of the yen. In this blog post – Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund and the yen – mainstream macro myths driving bad policy (February 2, 2026) – I demonstrated how massive quantities of workers’ savings held by the GPIF are being channelled into the private, for-profit investment banks and hedge funds, which deliver huge profits to these financial market players. Moreover the GPIF has shifted its investment portfolio significantly towards foreign bonds and shares post 2010, which has seen the GPIF selling large tranches of yen and adding to the excess supply in foreign exchange markets. The Japanese Finance Minister is now pressuring the GPIF to reallocate its portfolio into domestic assets to boost the domestic growth rate. A similar trend is happening in the UK and Australia. What does it mean? The conclusion lets you see that their proposals miss the point.