On strategy and compromise

As more people become aware of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), extreme reactions emerge to basic concepts that, in any reasonable sense, should evade such reactions. For example, when the concept of the Job Guarantee (JG) is explained the reactions include hysterical comments such as “This is Socialism”; “MMT advocates the government employing everyone – they are stealth Communists”; “MMT is Communism in disguise”; and the rest. I get several E-mails along these lines per week – all which go into the trash immediately – so why bother sending them! I also get many (polite) E-mails suggesting that we (MMTers) should adopt a compromise line and embrace the ideas of those, who while clearly holding ideas that are inconsistent with MMT, do advocate government-led stimulus in the present context. Apparently we should also use terminology that is consistent with the mainstream to minimise the chasm that has to be be crossed to jettison that orthodoxy and accept MMT. These tactical suggestions have resonated once again in the current little dispute about whether various economists, who operate in the New Keynesian paradigm are channeling Minskian ideas. The suggestion is that, while they might not have foreseen the crisis and hold to various theoretical concepts that are inconsistent with MMT development, we should, as a matter of strategy, form alliances with these economists because they are now advocating policy more or less similar to that proposed by MMTers. So our common purpose should be prioritised over our theoretical differences. I disagree. History shows us that it is very dangerous to develop a new approach by minimising the differences between it and the dominant, but erroneous paradigm just to make it easier for adherents of the latter to embrace the former.

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The on-going crisis has nothing to do with a supposed liquidity trap

I was going to write about the so-called fiscal cliff today and would have shown that the only thing that might fall of the said cliff would be real GDP growth should the US Congress actually not extend the tax cuts and impose the spending cuts. The US economy would follow the lead from the British economy and double-dip in 2013 as sure as day follows night (or is it the other way round). The most elementary exposition of what we might call – ECO101 Macroeconomics – would tell us that. One person’s spending is another person’s income and so on. I note that some economists are arguing that ECO101 Macroeconomics is alive and well because it has had a an impeccable record in the current crisis. In my recent blogs – Fiscal austerity damages real growth and prolongs the financial downturn and Neo-liberalism has failed but we still don’t get it – I have argued that the mainstream of my profession has failed – both in anticipating the emerging crisis and providing credible solutions to remedy it. So have I overstated that claim, given that ECO101 Macroeconomics is the go-to approach at present? The problem is that while there are some leading economists who are arguing against harsh fiscal austerity at present at the basis of their reasoning is a thoroughly mainstream approach which has helped create the problem. I don’t think their version of ECO101 Macroeconomics provides the answers. There is some common ground with Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) but an even deeper incongruence.

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Rising working poor proportions indicates a failed state

The Sydney Morning Herald’s economics editor Ross Gittins wrote an article today (June 20, 2012) – This is no Sunday school: prosperity comes with pain – where he argued that the real world is not like his Sunday School (where all was forgiven) and that “discord and suffering are the price we pay for getting richer”. He might have also qualified that statement by saying that some get richer while others endure discord and suffering. I thought about that because I have been reading a number of related reports on the concept of the working poor – workers who for various reasons (pay, hours of work, job stability) live below the poverty line. I usually focus on the pain that unemployment brings but the working poor, many of whom are full-time workers, are also a highly disadvantaged cohort. It is not enough to just create growth that creates full employment. The policy framework also has to take responsibility for making sure that no-one who works is in poverty. A rising proportion of workers classified as working poor indicates according to metrics I use a failed state. The US is one such state.

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UE is needed rather than QE

And what is UE you might ask? Unemployment easing! As the major economies start to slow again (as fiscal stimulus is withdrawn prematurely), the calls are coming thick and fast for more quantitative easing. The Bloomberg editorial (June 8, 2012) – The Key to a Stronger Recovery: A Bolder Fed – was representative of this renewed call for the central banks to somehow stimulate aggregate demand to the tune of several percent of GDP in many nations. Like the latest bailout in Europe, the call for more QE is predictable. Neither initiative addresses the real problem with the relevant policy tool or change. What is needed is something much more direct. Why don’t we have a policy of unemployment easing (UE) where the treasury departments, supported by their respective central banks, immediately set about directly creating jobs and reducing the unemployment rates around the world. Putting cash (wages) into the hands of those that are most constrained (the unemployed) will do much more good for the economy than doing portfolio swaps with banks who will not lend to thin air! So we need UE not QE.

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What is macroeconomics?

Today I am departing from usual practice. I have decided to use Friday’s blog space to provide draft versions of the Modern Monetary Theory textbook that I am writing with my colleague and friend Randy Wray. We expect to complete the text by the end of this year. So each Friday I will publish the work I have been doing on it during the previous week in between the other work that I am pursuing. Comments are always welcome. Remember this is a textbook aimed at undergraduate students and so the writing will be different from my usual blog free-for-all. Note also that the text I post is just the work I am doing by way of the first draft so the material posted will not represent the complete text. Further it will change once the two of us have edited it. Anyway, this is what I wrote today.

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The US government have total control over domestic policy

I have not much time to write a blog today but the latest US labour market data provides fertile ground for some analysis. The latest Employment Situation Release from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (published June 1, 2012) covering May 2012 has been called a “bleak jobs report” ((Source) by commentators. I expect a few Op Ed columns from the likes of Robert Barro and John Taylor to name a few who will be saying “see, there have been no gains from fiscal policy stimulus” – ad nauseum. The reality is that the data tells us how effective fiscal policy was in staving of a depression and also that the US government has been pressured into a premature withdrawal of fiscal support and the government contribution to real GDP growth is now negative – hence a slowing economy and poor labour market outcome. While the neo-liberals are hanging onto the notion that governments can do little about the crisis but reduce their net spending the reality is completely the opposite – sovereign, currency-issuing governments such as the US government have total control over domestic policy and the only thing missing is the willingness to use that capacity.

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The New Economy cannot flourish with fiscal austerity

I often get E-mails from readers – some hostile others more reasonable – telling me that I should stop arguing for more economic growth. The reasoning is relatively straightforward – the Earth is buckling under the rapacious resources demands of the capitalist system and not only is that process likely to be finite, notwithstanding substitution via technological advances, but also in the process of exhaustion the amenity declines. The argument juxtaposes ecological claims with other claims relating to the desirability of the current neo-liberal dominated system which relies, seemingly, on creating more inequality, a reduction in government oversight and allows the worst aspects of the capitalist system to run amok. However, somewhere along the way, the 99% or whatever percentage it is (I think it is substantially lower than 99) miss the boat. The current crisis is used to demonstrate that conjecture. I haven’t time to reply to all the E-mails and I try to provide “collective” replies (which should tell you something in itself) via my blog posts. So today I am addressing that issue. The message is simple – I am very sympathetic to localised, new economy-type collective ways of organising social and economic activities. I support egalitarianism and co-operative solutions rather than competitive, dog-eats-dog approaches. I don’t mind working and giving my surplus to aid those who are unable for whatever reason to achieve the same material outcomes by their own hand. I am happy with consolidation rather than growth. But despite the romantic appeal of all this – as the solution – we have to understand that there is still something called a monetary system and a currency to deal with. Localised solutions are still constrained by the sovereign state they are located in and their fortunes are determined in no small way by the way the currency-issuing government conducts its fiscal policy. There is no escape from that.

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2012 becomes 1844 or thereabouts

I had a little reminisce today and took a mental journey back to the North of England where I studied for a time. Although this time (early 1980s) was just before the digital age, I have collected bits of information about the economic and social life of workers and capitalists in early industrial England. And, of-course, there are some wonderful accounts in the wider literature of what life was like in those days. These were times when there were no unions, no job security, no income support, no safety standards, and little or no sanitation of public health regulations in the urban areas where workers were sequestered by the ruling elites. While the rich industrialists erected open spaces and promenades to surround their luxury residential facilities, the workers mostly lived in filth and died dreadful deaths. There was a reason that this way of doing business was attacked by growing worker discontent throughout England and Europe in the late 1840s and beyond. There is a reason trade unions formed. There is a reason that governments were forced by popular pressure to introduce income support and labour market regulations. People can only be put down for so long and the capitalist system is built on a very small minority seeking to repress the rights and rewards of the vast majority. Once the greed pushes the balance too far to the minority – their hegemony is threatened. We might be in 2012 but the elites are once again driving us all back to 1844 or thereabouts. They will rue the day.

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Oh Ireland, if only you were growing

I regularly check the data for Ireland to see how she is going, given that the Irish government was the first to impose the austerity solution in early 2009 – that is, three years ago. I read yesterday that “of the countries that were in trouble, I would say Ireland looks as if it’s the best at the moment because Ireland has implemented very heavy austerity programs, but is now beginning to grow again”. That created some cognitive dissonance for me. Was I dreaming when I last looked at the Irish national accounts data? Surely, I hadn’t made a mistake when I concluded that the last two quarters of 2011 recorded negative growth as Irish exports slowed in the wake of the emerging double-dip recession in Britian? When I reviewed the data today, it seems that Ireland is still going backwards and people are becoming poorer. Claims that Ireland’s austerity approach provides a model for other nations to follow because it produces growth cannot be sustained from the data. But if only it were true … Oh Ireland, if only you were growing.

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Debunking myths

My friend Sean Carmody, sometime commentator and always obstinately objective, introduced me to this work – The Debunking Handbook – written by a physicist and psychologist. It serves to focus thoughts because it considers the pitfalls that arise in an exercise aimed at debunking myths and strategies that might be deployed to effectively achieve this aim. The authors appear to be motivated by the climate change debate but the discussion is equally effective in the context that I work within – how to convince people that mainstream macroeoconomics is largely devoid of meaningful content and predictive capacity.

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IMF struggling with facts that confront its ideology

I haven’t a lot of time today (travel) but I thought the latest offering of the IMF was interesting. In their latest World Economic Outlook (April 2012 – which will be released in full next week) they provided two advance chapters – one – Chapter 3 – Dealing with Household Debt – demonstrates just how schizoid this organisation has become. They are clearly realising that their economic model is deeply flawed and has failed to predict or explain what has been going on over the last five years. That tension has led to research which starts to get to the nub of the problem – in this case that large build-ups of debt in the private domestic sector (especially households) is unsustainable and leads to “significantly larger contractions in economic activity” when the bust comes. They also acknowledge that sustained fiscal support is required to allow the process of private deleveraging to occur in a growth environment. But then their ideological blinkers prevent them from seeing the obvious – that sustained fiscal deficits are typically required and that in fiat monetary systems this is entirely appropriate when . Which then leads to the next conclusion that they cannot bring themselves to make – the Eurozone is a deeply flawed monetary system that prevents such fiscal support and should not be considered an example of what happens in fiat monetary systems. Some progress though!

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Policy failure in Europe scales new heights

I had the occasion to re-read an article published by The American Prospect Magazine (March/April edition 1996, pages 54-59) and written by American institutional economist Lester Thurow – The Crusade That’s Killing Prosperity (reprinted December 19, 2001). It is a fine article about the way inflation-first monetary policy, which was one of the defining macroeconomic characteristics of the neo-liberal era (under the aegis of the NAIRU), deliberately drove unemployment and broader measures of labour wastage much higher than necessary and suppressed the capacity of those remaining in employment to enjoy wages growth in proportion to productivity growth. The article is prescient because it provides some good insights into what happens when policy makers deliberately create unemployment (via monetary and fiscal austerity). It allows one to see that the costs extend well beyond the unemployment that emerges fairly quickly. It also allows one to appreciate how austerity impacts across time and damages the prospects for generations. Each week new data comes out which confirms the view that fiscal austerity has failed. Yesterday, the data suggests that the policy failure in Europe has scaled new heights.

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Fiscal austerity – there is another way

I have had very little time today (worse than usual). I gave a 3 hour lecture today on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and unemployment to a final-year class in the Social Work program at the University of Newcastle. It was interesting trying to work out how to explain all these concepts, which are intrinsically hard, to a group that has no background in economics. Just the language we use is not universal and so I spent quite a bit of time working out how to communicate. Anyway, the following blog is short as a consequence. But knowing I didn’t have much time, and the blog I am thinking about will require some more digging, I decided to take the chance today to write an Op Ed that was requested from a newspaper in Buenos Aires and which I am late in delivering. They only wanted 5,000 odd characters so it forced me to be disciplined. It is about fiscal austerity and will be translated into Spanish for their readers.

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Flawed macroeconomic models lead to erroneous conclusions

I get a lot of queries about the difference between fixed and flexible exchange rates in terms of the options that each present a sovereign, currency-issuing government. I considered this question several times in the past. Many of those questions are pitched in terms of the basic macroeconomic framework for an open economy that appears in most mainstream macroeconomics textbooks, particularly those written in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. I am referring here to the Mundell-Fleming model which has been the mainstream staple for many years. The modern textbooks still teach these models but the exposition has evolved although remains deeply flawed. It seems that this conceptual framework is still used to make public comments along the lines that the US government is facing insolvency and that the euro remains the best monetary organisation for Europe. Those conclusions are as flawed as the model that spawns them. Flawed macroeconomic models lead to erroneous conclusions.

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Questions and Answers 3

This is the third Q&A blog where I try to catch up on all the E-mails (and contact form enquiries) I receive from readers who want to know more about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) or challenge a view expressed here. It is also a chance to address some of the comments that have been posted in more detail to clarify matters that seem to be causing confusion. So if you send me a query by any of the means above and don’t immediately see a response look out for the blogs under this category (Q&A) because it is likely it will be addressed in some form here. It is virtually impossible to reply to all the E-mails I get although I try to. While I would like to be able to respond to queries immediately I run out of time each day and I am sorry for that.

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Unemployment causes higher property and violent crime rates

The NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR) released an interesting study yesterday (March 13, 2012) – The effect of arrest and imprisonment on crime – which might be a strange topic for a Modern Monetary Theory blog to highlight. On the contrary, this type of research provides an invaluable reality check against those who think that entrenched unemployment during a recession is more efficient than fiscal initiatives that aim to directly generate public sector employment. We already know that that the daily real GDP losses that arise from an economy operating at less than full employment are massive. The BOSCAR report adds another loss in the form of higher crime rates. It confirms long-standing research findings that shows that unemployment causes higher property and violent crime rates.

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Keynes would not support fiscal austerity

On Wednesday, we learned that the real GDP growth rate had halved in the December 2011 quarter (to 0.4 per cent) and business investment had contracted. Next day, we learned that the Australian labour market has deteriorated with employment contracting, unemployment rising and since November 2010, 140 odd thousand workers have left the labour force, presumably because employment growth had stalled. We already know that 2011 was a jobless year. Today, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released their International Trade in Goods and Services for January 2012, which shows that our trade balance went from a $A1325 million surplus to a $A673 million deficit (a “turnaround of $1,998m”). Unless that changes in the coming months, the contribution to growth from net exports will be solidly negative. All of these events have reduced the tax revenue for the government. But the response of the Government, which is pursuing a budget surplus this year at all costs, is that they will now have to cut their spending harder. Last year, the Treasurer claimed the authority for this pursuit was none other than John Maynard Keynes. More recently, the British Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills claimed – Keynes would be on our side – in relation to the imposition of fiscal austerity. The reality is otherwise – Keynes would not support fiscal austerity under the current circumstances. The strategy is bereft of any credible authority and is being driven, variously, by politics and ideology.

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Societies that exclude their youth will rue the day

The British Office of National Statistics released a new report yesterday (February 29, 2012) – Young people in work – 2012 – which provides a scary view of how austerity is impacting on the future British adults. It shows that the employment rates of 16-24 year olds in Britain have fallen dramatically in the least several years and that they are bearing the brunt of the recession. The evidence once again highlights the nonsense of imposing fiscal austerity on a nation that is struggling to generate private spending growth sufficient to provide ample employment growth. Once again, the myopia of fiscal austerity is staggering. What does the British government think that British society is going to look like in 20 years when its future adults are being excoriated by the lack of opportunity that the government policy is creating as a deliberate act? Collapsing youth employment rates mean that this cohort is being excluded from the activities which promote stability both in individual terms (self esteem etc) and societal terms. Societies that indulge in this sort of exclusion will rue the day.

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Age discrimination against our teenagers should end

I haven’t much time to write today – I’m off to Sydney later where I will be a speaker at the following event – Open Forum: Young and old-age discrimination and the economy. I will be sharing the podium was the Age Discrimination Commissioner of the Australian Human Rights Commission, a Federal government agency. The topic is how can Australian businesses and government make better use of our youth and senior citizens. As regular readers will know I regularly try to push the parlous state of the teenage labour market into the policy arena, with varying degrees of success. But today’s event is high-profile and provides a good platform for advancing these issues. This blog covers some of the issues that I will raise.

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Fiscal austerity undermines the future as well as the present

Amidst all the political turmoil in the Australian government this week, there was a highly significant report issued by the government (finalised December 2011 but released by the Government on February 20, 2012) – Review of Funding for Schooling – which showed not only how unequal our education system is but also how far behind we have fallen relative to other nations (particularly those that are more important trading partners). For a government which pretends to be concerned with equity and efficiency the Report posed huge challenges. Not only did it suggest current policy was failing, the Report estimated that over AU$5 billion should be invested in education reform to not only improve standards but also ensure that the massive inequalities between rich and poor with respect to educational access and outcomes are reduced. The response by the Australian government was that its priority remained the achievement of a budget surplus in 2012. Here is a classic demonstration of how a failure by the Government to understand the characteristics of the monetary system that it runs leads to poor outcomes in the short-run, but also undermines the future prosperity of the nation.

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