Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’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.
I spend a fair bit of time in various airports each month and hate the onerous security checks, which at times seem petty in the extreme. It always amused (not the right word) me that a passenger could just walk straight on with a bag full of duty free whisky which would make a lethal weapon if smashed, yet characters like me with pins in my legs (old bike crashes) have to nearly strip each time we have to fly. Now I suppose they will have security screening outside the terminal entrance just to enter. The authorities would have been better ensuring that their youth had access to employment rather than allowing them to wallow in unemployment and the resulting social exclusion. It is too simplistic to attribute the growing dangers in Europe and elsewhere to concentrations of high unemployment. But if a society deliberately denies a particular generation of the chance to gain employment and, instead, vilifies them as lazy, wanton individuals then it is easy to see why those characters will conclude that society has nothing to offer. In Europe where these manifestations are becoming increasingly obvious, the flawed monetary system is at the heart of the problem. It has failed categorically and the fall out of that failure is multi-dimensional.
I read two articles/reports today about Japan. The first was a Fairfax article (March 21, 2016) from a journalist who invariably peddles the neoliberal economic myths. The second was from the IMF extolling the virtues of higher wages in Japan. What? Yes, you read the second point correctly. The IMF considers that an essential new policy element (a “fourth arrow”) is required in Japan in the form of real wages growth outstripping productivity growth by around 2 per cent. It wants the government to legislate to ensure that happens. In general, the IMF solution for Japan is in fact one of the key changes that nations have to do bring in to restore some sense of stability into the world economy. Governments around the world has to ensure that real wages growth, at least, keeps pace with productivity growth and that workers can fund their consumption expenditure from their earnings rather than relying on ever increasing levels of credit and indebtedness. This will of course require a fundamental change in our approach to the interaction between society and economy. It will require increased employment protection, larger public sector employment proportions, decreased casualisation, and legislative requirements imposed upon firms to pass on productivity gains. It’s no small order, but it is one of a number of essential changes that we will have to do introduce as part of the abandonment of neoliberalism.
Last week, the Australian Labor Party (the federal opposition) released a new policy platform, which it hopes will give it some electoral leverage in the upcoming federal election. The Party announced that they would be attacking poverty and inequality by restoring full employment. The UK Guardian political editor opined in her article on Friday (March 18, 2016) – A shift in political thinking is giving Labor a sense of purpose – that the announcement by Labor was a policy breakthrough and a recognition that the neo-liberal claims about free markets etc, that emerged in the 1980s, are no longer a viable basis on which to base policy. I agree. I also agree that a currency-issuing government should always pursue full employment. But the reality is that this pledge from the ALP is going to be as hollow as all the other value statements it makes in an attempt to convince the electorate that it is a progressive party looking out for the workers and the disadvantaged. A lot of jobs have to be created to restore true full employment, which will require significantly larger fiscal deficits. Meanwhile, the ALP is claiming it will return the fiscal balance to surplus.
Last month, employment growth was basically flat (slightly negative). Participation decreased. The signs were ominous. This month, the dismal picture unfolded further. Today’s release of the – Labour Force data – for February 2016 by the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that those ominous signs have worsened. Total employment growth was zero (well 300 net jobs). A pathetic result. Unemployment fell but only because the participation rate fell by 0.2 points – thus the idle labour arising from the weak employment growth just left the labour force and is now hidden unemployment. Working hours fell further – the trend is flat and has been for the last few years. The teenage labour market continued to deteriorate with the adjusted unemployment rate (taking into account the sharp fall in participation since the downturn) of 29.1 per cent rather than the official estimate for February 2016 of 17.8 per cent. Overall, with private investment forecast to decline further over the next 12 months, the Australian labour market is looking very weak and the Federal government should be introducing a rather sizeable fiscal stimulus in its upcoming fiscal statement. This should include large-scale public sector job creation which would ensure teenagers regained the jobs that have been lost due to the fiscal drag over the last several years.
Last week, the shadow British Chancellor, John McDonnell confirmed that the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn will not be part of a progressive realignment of the public debate regarding fiscal policy. By that I mean, they have chosen, probably for misplaced ‘political’ concerns (leaving aside total ignorance), to reinforce in the public mind the neo-liberal myths relating to the capacities of a currency-issuing government to spend and advance prosperity. I have no doubt that John McDonnell desires, genuinely, to advance the material well-being of the working class in Britain. His public career to date would suggest that. But like many on the Left, he has been seduced by the neo-liberal snake oil into believing that fiscal rules that bind a currency-issuing government to balance, in total or in part, the fiscal situation and that such a government should submit itself to the dictates of a technocracy full of mainstream economists, is a necessary requirement of responsible fiscal management. His most recent statements really amount to surrender. The British Labour Party is staying faithful to its Monetarist roots, which were established in 1974 under Harold Wilson’s second tilt at the top job. The distractions of New Labour and now Jeremy Corbyn has not really changed anything. This is a neo-liberal party no matter what they claim and their advice and underpinnings are firmly neo-liberal.
Towards the end of last year, I wrote a blog – Finland should exit the euro. I had been undertaking some detailed research on the plight of this relatively small Eurozone nation for a number of reasons. First, it had recently undergone a major industrial decline as Nokia/Microsoft missed market trends and went from world leader to irrelevance. Second, Finland was a vocal proponent of the view that Greece should be pillaried into oblivion by the Troika – to ‘take their medicine’ (more crippling austerity). Third, the data trends were unambiguously pointing to Finland descending into the Eurozone ‘basket case’ category itself as its own conservative government imposed harsh fiscal austerity on the tiny, beleagured nation. Two things are clearer than ever about the Eurozone. First, it is a dysfunctional mess and efforts to reform it so far have only made matters worse. Second, any single nation (and all together) would be unambigously better off exiting the mess and restoring their own currency sovereignty and letting their exchange rate take up some of the adjustment. The following text covers an article that I have written for a Finnish Report coming out in May 2016 to be published by the Left Forum Finland, which is a coalition formed by the political party Left Alliance, the People’s Educational Association (KSL) and the Yrjö Sirola Foundation.
I use the descriptor ‘failure’ in a selective way, although it is probably the meaning that that vast majority of citizens would ascribe to the term. In this context, I’m thinking that successful policy improves the lives of the most disadvantaged citizens in a region. A small minority of people might think of success in terms of how rich the top end of the distribution becomes (in wealth or income). Yesterday (January 25, 2016), a UK research group, the Centre for Cities released their latest – Cities Outlook 2016 – which is a comprehensive analysis of how the larger cities in Britain are performing across a variety of indicators. In this release, the theme was centred on the claim by the British Chancellor that his policy design was intending to produce a “higher wage, low-welfare economy in Britain”. The report suggests the British government has failed and that “almost half of lower wages, and higher welfare, than the national average” and “welfare spending since 2010 has grown at a much faster rate in high-wage cities”. I’ve also been trying to disentangle the impacts of deindustrialisation on urban spaces, which began in the 1980s, from the more recent impacts of policy austerity, driven by misguided understandings of the capacities of currency-issuing governments. I want to address the claim from the Left, that the shifting patterns of capitalist production across regional spaces, is inevitable and undermines the capacity of cities to prosper. The shifting patterns might be inevitable but the conclusion that is drawn about the options available to cities are largely incorrect.
I have been continuing the research for my next book (hopefully to be finished by May 2016) on the way in which the neo-liberals convinced policy makers including those in progressive social democratic political parties that the globalisation of finance and capital flows meant that the currency-issuing state was no longer capable of maintaining full employment through appropriate use of fiscal policies. The tenet we are entertaining is that the state never went away, it was just co-opted by capital to serve its interests. This will be a two-part blog and centres on a critical period in economic history in the mid-1970s, which marked the break with the full employment system which had moderated the excesses of capitalism. This was the period when the neo-liberal period dawned, and which steadily, opened the way for these excesses to reemerge, in all their indecent indulgence and destruction. It is also the period in which a series of economic myths crystallised into the mainstream narrative we know today, which opposes government deficits and allows unemployment to remain elevated at excessive levels. It is really important to understand what went on then because we are living with the legacy of the falsehoods introduced during this period.
Sometimes one reads a press article that is so obviously misleading that it is hard to know where to start with it. But perhaps the conclusion is the best place to start sometimes. Such is the case of a Bloomberg article (January 15, 2016) – What #ResistCapitalism Gets Wrong – written by American academic Noah Smith. Basically, the article attempts to attribute all of the post-Second World War prosperity to the “free market economy”, which he says is “a term many use synonymously with ‘capitalism'”. By the end of the article we learn that in fact that prosperity does not come from ‘free market’ liberalisation and that strong governments are essential for growth and reductions in inequality. The “boring old mixed economy” where, in Noah Smith’s words “government really is instrumental in creating growth”. Start with the conclusion and read backwards is my advice in this case.
I was having a talk with a friend in San Francisco last Monday about globalisation and the capacity of the state, which is the topic of the upcoming book I am working on (manuscript due around May 2015). He made the comment that globalisation had meant that the state can now only do bad and can no longer do good. I asked him whether he was talking about globalisation (the international nature of finance and supply chains) or neo-liberalism (free market economics) and he said “neo-liberalism is a disease – that is the problem and since the 1970s it has meant the state is restricted to doing bad”. The point I was digging at was that progressives often conflates the two concepts which then leads to flawed conclusions about what the state can and cannot do. Further, when he talked about the state doing bad he was really talking about the impact on the average person and those who are disadvantaged. He wasn’t talking about the so-called top-end-of-town, which have without any question done very well since the 1970s. And that is my next point – the state hasn’t gone way or been rendered impotent by neo-liberalism as many on the Left believe and angst over. As the currency issuer it is still very powerful. It just serves the interests of a different cohort now relative to the cohort it served during the full employment period that followed the Second World War. In doing so, it has shifted from being a mediator of class conflict to serving the interests of capital in its battle to appropriate ever increasing shares of real income from labour. That is a wholly different narrative to the one that emerges when globalisation is conflated with neo-liberalism – as if they are parts of the same process.
On December 21, 2015, there was an article on the Social Europe portal – A New Plan for Greece And Europe: A Defining Moment For European Social Democracy – which I found interesting, though very incomplete, given its title. In fact, the ‘New Plan’ is really a series of fairly general statements, which at times, are somewhat inconsistent if you extend them into the necessary detail that they imply. For example, one of their key observations is that within the European Union there is a “wide and growing gap between national control over budgets that people have voted for and the post-national governance imposed on them”. Which would suggest that the solution requires that there is an aligning of the fiscal responsibility and control at the level of the currency-issuing unit. However, there is no hint of that in their ‘Plan’. They talk about an “Enhanced respect for the fiscal sovereignty of Greece” but fail to articulate how that can occur within the common currency when the Greek government has no currency-issuing capacity. Of course, if we want to increase the fiscal sovereignty of any Eurozone nation, then the only sustainable way of doing that is for that nation to re-establish its own currency and exit the monetary union. However, this would appear contrary to their “pan-European” sentiments, which dominate their overall vision. In short, once again the bogey person of the pan-European appears to be taken as a given and then specific matters that might appear inconsistent with that old ‘social democratic’ obsession in Europe are glossed over.
Yesterday, as I was going about my business in San Francisco, I passed a man lying in the gutter outside the Westfield Centre on Market Street (the swish multilevel shopping complex with some expensive label stores), who was poorly dressed, given the weather (cold) and was clearly having some sort of episodic fit. The street was packed with Sunday shoppers most of whom were well-heeled. I asked the person I was with whether we should ring 000 to get some sort of professional help for the man and he told me that it would be futile because they wouldn’t come out anyway. It was not an isolated incident. Throughout the city the extent of homelessness and the public nature of mental illness is stark. There are choruses of shouts, anguished cries, megaphoned self-dialogues emanating from almost every street corner, doorway, alleyway, train station and whatever. People who should be in care, suffering and crying out. For the richest country in the world to tolerate this degree of human rights violation is almost unimaginable. While the Australian health system is far from perfect, our mentally ill citizens are much better cared for in state facilities and are not left on the street, homeless, suffering from a variety of obvious physical and mental maladies – and basically abandoned by the system. There are some who escape the net and wander the streets of our cities, but, in general, we do not accept that the mentally ill should be left to their own devices. It tells me that any American claim to greatness is a pitiful, self deceit. This is a heartless society where citizens who are most in need of state support are the least able to access it.
On December 23, 2015, the Democrat Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders published an Op Ed – Bernie Sanders: To Rein In Wall Street, Fix the Fed – which, correctly, in my view, concluded that Wall Street (taken to be the collective of banksters wherever they might be located) “is still out of control” and policy reform has done little to alter the “too big to fail” problem that was identified in the early days of the GFC as one bank after another lined up for government assistance. Larry Summers replied to the Op Ed in his blog – The Fed and Financial Reform – Reflections on Sen. Sanders op-Ed – challenging several of the proposals advanced by Sanders. The problem is that the progressive voice of Bernie Sanders labours under some basic misconceptions about how the monetary system operates and therefore plays into the hands of those who have created the mess. Conversely, Summers clearly understands basic elements of the monetary system but continues to advocate policies which avoid addressing the main issue – the power of the financial markets.
One of the tools that right-wing elements use to control the public debate about government spending and to justify their attack on public deficits is migration. There are many aspects to this public manipulation that invokes raw fear, ignorance and prejudice among the population. One of the elements, which plays on job insecurity and the range of fiscal myths that characterise the neoliberal era, is the claim that so-called ‘benefit tourism’ is rife and if left unchecked will bankrupt national governments and lead to higher burdens on ‘taxpayers’. So we are often told that migrants from poorer nations move to access welfare benefits that are superior to those offered by their own nations and that these movements are parasitic in nature and do not advance the interests of the host country citizens. Last week (December 10, 2015), the Irish-based EU organisation, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound) released a report – Social dimension of intra-EU mobility: Impact on public services – which examines “the extent to which mobile citizens from central and eastern European Member States … take up benefits and services in nine host countries” by “mobile citizens from 10 central and eastern European Member States” (the so-called EU10 mobile citizens). The Report should be read by all those who wish to contribute to this debate or understand what the facts are. Essentially, the Report finds that mobile citizens from poorer nations have lower take-up rates of welfare support in host countries than natives. That really should be the end of the ‘benefit tourist’ assertions. But then most of these public debates are not based on evidence or logic.
Last week (December 8, 2015), the British Office of National Statistics released its updated – Family Spending, 2015 edition – which provides a detailed breakdown of household spending for 2014. What is interesting about the release from my perspective, in addition to seeing how household spending changes in composition over time, is what it says about distributional forces in the UK and the way in which households are losing out to corporate interests under the policy directions of neo-liberal British Labour and Conservative governments. In real terms, household spending overall is a lower in 2014 than what it was at the turn-of-the-century. British households are also saving less as a percent of their disposable income than they were 10 years ago. The weight share in national income has fallen dramatically over that time. Yet, real GDP growth (that is, real national income) has risen by around 27 per cent since the turn-of-the-century. It doesn’t take a genius to work out where that real income that it the workers have lost has gone. There are several components to this story and this blog looks at some of them.
The unemployment rate in Finland is climbing steadily and in October 2015 was 9.6 per cent (seasonally adjusted) and the employment to population ratio stood at 60.1 per cent and was trending down. Finland is fast becoming the next basket case of the Eurozone. What was once a highly supportive society is steadily being turned into a austerity-ridden backwater. The latest news, however, that the Finnish government is due to debate a proposal to provide every citizen with a basic income of €800 a month has excited the progressives – unfortunately. The proposal currently being prepared by the national agency that administers the Finnish welfare system (KELA) would offer this basic allowance in lieu of all other existing benefit payments. It would be paid regardless of whether the person received income from any other source. I have been considering the Finnish welfare system over the last month or so since my visit there in October. This is in relation to a series of queries I had from activists there who were keen on the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) Job Guarantee proposal but were wondering how it would situate itself within the existing system of unemployment benefits in Finland. This blog captures my thoughts on both of those topics.
Its my Friday lay day and I am catching up on reading today. But one thing I have had to complete by today is the introduction to the German Translation of my friend Warren Mosler’s 2010 book – The Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy. The publisher wanted an introduction for the German readership that helped them relate the discussion in the book to the reality in Europe – given that the Economic and Monetary Union is a perverted hybrid of a fixed exchange rate/fiat currency system that works for no-one really. So you may be interested in reading my introduction. Then a dose of the master guitarist completes my Friday blog.
Its my Friday lay day blog and I am working on various projects today so I will cut this blog relatively short. Two things came up this week that I thought were interesting but only require a noting by way of blog entry. The first was a report about a mini-Job Guarantee type program in the New Mexico city of Albuquerque, which is demonstrating that public job creation programs can change peoples’ lives for the better when there is no hope and no other opportunities. The second story I read that was interesting was the Wolf Street Report (October 24, 2015) – Barcelona Threatens to Print Parallel Currency, Madrid Seethes – which discussed the plan by “Barcelona’s left-wing city council plans to roll out a cash-less local currency that has the potential to become the largest of its kind in the world”. The austerity-mavens in Madrid and their puppet masters in Brussels will be having conniptions at the prospect.
This week is – Anti Poverty Week 2015 – in Australia and there are many events and happenings on to mark the time and to highlight the issue of poverty. I will be appearing on a panel on Wednesday afternoon in Newcastle (see below). I was thinking about what I might say in my short presentation next week as I read a report in the UK Guardian (October 17, 2015) – Wealth therapy tackles woes of the rich: ‘It’s really isolating to have lots of money’ – that appealed for sympathy from the rest of us for the top-end-of-town, who have to undergo psychological counselling because they are stressed out being wealthy. Apparently, they also have to engage in “stealth wealth” which means they “are hiding their wealth because they are concerned about negative judgment”. I immediately felt bad for them. Oh, the pain the top 1 per cent feel owning around 50 per cent of all the assets in the world! What a shocking plight they face. In the context of this week’s focus on Anti-Poverty, I couldn’t quite rouse the sympathy the story was seeking to elicit. Sorry!