There has been a lot of talk lately about the need for the Government to plot a course over the coming years back into fiscal surplus. Our perceptions of fiscal responsibility are being conditioned by the relentless media campaign that this is the best thing for the Government to do. We are being told that cyclical deficits are unavoidable at this time but the “structure of the budget” should point us back to surplus as soon as possible. This campaign is being supported by official looking documents that are produced by Treasury (notably the Budget papers) which have all sorts of technical terms in them that only the cognoscenti understand. The term structural deficit is being touted around in these documents and appearing in the opinion columns. But the way this concept is being represented is very misleading and is deliberately being used to obfuscate the lack of intention by this Government to seriously pursue full employment. Well lucky for me I am part of the cognoscenti and cannot be so easily fooled. Here is the truth.

Policies such as Quantitative Easing which has been in the news lately are predicated on a mistaken belief about the way the banking system operates and how the non-government and government sectors interact. One of the hard-core parts of mainstream macroeconomic theory that gets rammed into students early on in their studies, often to their eternal disadvantage, is the concept of the money multiplier. It is a highly damaging concept because it lingers on in the students’ memories forever, or so it seems. It is also not even a slightly accurate depiction of the way banks operate in a modern monetary economy characterised by a fiat currency and a flexible exchange rate. So lets see why!

The dreaded NAIRU is still about! I was thinking – rather optimistically – that it would just disappear from whence it came! But sorry to disappoint. Some economists just won’t learn. Yesterday the ABS released the latest data from the Australia Treasury Model (TRYM) database. You can get it here. Among other things of great interest that you can find in that database, is the Treasury TRYM model’s estimates of the so-called NAIRU. Sounds scary. Well, it stands for the the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment and has a central place in neo-liberal mythology. The NAIRU is an important component of the TRYM model and influences the way it produces economic outcomes and policy simulations. So how much reliance should we place on this important component of the policy making process. Answer: not much!. My conclusion: any model that relies on a NAIRU is a crock!

The only nautical analogy that I have carried through my days as a professional economist is the one that apparentely John F. Kennedy coined – A rising tide lifts all boats. It was used by famous American progressive economist Arthur Okun in the 1960s to motivate his research on upgrading benefits of what he called the high pressure economy. It was an aspirational term used to goad national governments into fiscal action to ensure that the economy was always as close to full employment (high pressure) as possible. Accordingly, when the economy is at high pressure, both the strong and the weak prosper. Labour participation is strong, unemployment is at the irreducible minimum, labour productivity is high, wages are high and a number of upgrading effects across social classes and generations occur. Children from disadvantaged families get a chance to transcend poverty and workers who are displaced by global economic changes are able to be re-absorbed into productive work. Direct public sector job creation is a significant part of the national government’s responsibilities in this regard. If the private sector is incapable of providing enough jobs then there is only one sector left, ladies and gentlemen. Today I read of a new nautical analogy and my how times have changed! Its time to debrief again!

I am awarding this week’s worst piece of economics journalism to an article that appeared in Saturday’s Australian newspaper and was written by high-profile economics correspondent George Megalogenis. The article makes a sequence of statements that cannot be supported by any credible macroeconomic theory. Why do journalists write things that they do not seem to understand? Anyway, in case any of my readers happened to waste their time reading this article I offer the following clean-up job. Yes, its that time again. Time to debrief.

This morning I was reading the Sydney Morning Herald and Economics writer Ross Gittins was talking about the fact that the ALP election victory in Queensland over the weekend violates the dogma that Treasury officials (federal and state) like to put around. Of-course, Gittins is in his own words “has great sympathy for treasuries” so I never expect him to tell his readers how the modern monetary system actually operates. But at one point, he advances without any critical scrutiny one of the greatest myths propogated by neo-liberals (including treasuries) about the way federal government budgets work. The myth: budget surpluses increase national saving. The truth is they do not. Its that time again. Time to debrief.

Some readers have written to me asking to explain what quantitative easing is. Some of them had heard an ABC 7.30 Report segment the other night which interviewed the Bank of England Governor who outlined the BOE’s plan to “print billions of pounds” as its latest strategy to stimulate lending and hence economic activity in the very dismally performing UK economy. Once again we need to de-brief and learn what quantititative easing actually is. We need to understand that it is not a very good strategy for a sovereign government to follow in times of depressed demand and rising unemployment. We also need to get this “printing money” mantra out of our heads.