Saturday Quiz – January 26, 2013 – answers and discussion

The reference to Invasion Day in this week’s quiz title is in solidarity with the indigenous brothers and sisters in Australia. The other name for yesterday (January 26, 2012) is Australia Day, our national day. It marks the day that the colonists took over this land and declared it – Terra Nullius – or “land belonging to no one”, which explicitly denied the legal rights of the indigenous Australians who had lived here for more than 30,000 years prior to the colonists arrival. 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.

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Saturday Quiz – January 19, 2013 – answers and discussion

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.

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Saturday Quiz – January 12, 2013 – answers and discussion

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.

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Treasurer wants policy to be driven by models that can’t beat a random walk

On Monday (January 7, 2012) – The culpability lies elsewhere … always! – I wrote about the unacceptably large forecasting errors from the IMF derived from models that informed their input into bailout packages etc, which in turn set the fiscal austerity agenda and as resulted in millions becoming unemployed. I was interviewed about this today by the ABC National Radio program – the World Today – and told the journalist that if errors of this size occurred in medicine, the practitioner would be jailed for professional negligence. A summarised transcript from the World Today programme is available here – Eurozone jobless rate hits record high. A few snippets from a 10 minute interview! I did another interview today about a paper that came out recently from the RBA, which largely admitted its forecasting record was inferior to what we might have gained from assuming a random walk (unemployment) or simple historical averages (real GDP growth). You have to see this incompetence not in terms of some technical boffins waxing lyrical in a research paper about a range of technical measures of their errors but rather, in terms of the damage that the policy that has been informed by these errors. Today we received more evidence of that damage in the form of the ABS publication – Job Vacancies, Australia (November 2011). The evidence is clear. Our economy is faltering because policy settings have been wrong. They have been wrong because the policy setting paradigm is wrong and this has led to the use of models which deliver predictions that cannot be sustained given the underlying dynamics of the monetary system that this ideology chooses to ignore.

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Saturday Quiz – January 5, 2013 – answers and discussion

Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you understand the reasoning behind the answers. 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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Saturday Quiz – December 29, 2012 – answers and discussion

Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you understand the reasoning behind the answers. 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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Peace and love – if only it was true

Despite my constant utterances about short or relatively short blogs, today will truly be a short blog although I am aware that that descriptor is at all times relative. Is a short blog a few lines (which then raised the question of what is a Tweet) or a few paragraphs or what? Anyway, here are some thoughts that came out while I have been reading today.

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Saturday Quiz – December 22, 2012 – answers and discussion

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.

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Keep the helicopters on their pads and just spend

I was looking back through snippets I save (like a magpie) today and remembered that I hadn’t written anything in response to this Financial Times article (October 12, 2012) – UK needs to talk about helicopters – which demonstrates that a good argument can be housed in a faulty analytical structure. The reference to helicopters comes from Milton Friedman and is popularly known as “printing money” and dropping it on the populace from high. The practice – is described as the ultimate heresy for central bankers. From an Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) perspective, there is clearly no need for a sovereign government to issue debt to the private sector. Given the political issues relating to debt buildup, it would be preferable if governments moved away from that practice altogether. Whatever accounting arrangements they put in place with the central bank to ensure that its spending desires were reflected in appropriate credits going into the banking system are largely irrelevant. The inflation risk is in the spending not the monetary operations that might accompany it.

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Saturday Quiz – December 15, 2012 – answers and discussion

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.

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Saturday Quiz – December 8, 2012 – answers and discussion

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.

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A national disgrace – the abandonment of full employment

Yesterday, I indicated that I would comment on an article that was published in the Melbourne Age (December 3, 2012) – Dimming of the light on the hill – which documented the Federal government’s abandonment of any commitment to achieving full employment. The by-line of the article read that “(o)nce it was a political mantra for the Labor Party, but the goal of full employment has dwindled to a distant memory”. This article is one of the first I have seen in years that tackles this question. It is a topic that most regular readers will realise is one that I have spent most of my career promoting for discussion. My Phd is about it. Many of my published articles and books is about it in one way or another. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is about it. But the mainstream media avoids discussing it and, instead, accepts the line peddled by the government and its crony economists that a lie is the truth. That 12.5 per cent labour underutilisation rates are in some way consistent with full employment. Our grasp of history is poor in this nation and this article serves to remind us of what was once a truth. It also reminds us that the abandonment of full employment as a policy objective by our Federal government ranks up there with the other (many) national disgraces, including, for example, our treatment of indigenous Australians and our treatment of refugees. Why do we gain succour from (unnecessarily) treating the most disadvantaged among us so poorly?

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Saturday Quiz – December 1, 2012 – answers and discussion

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.

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Saturday Quiz – November 24, 2012 – answers and discussion

Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you understand the reasoning behind the answers. 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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Saturday Quiz – November 17, 2012 – answers and discussion

Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you understand the reasoning behind the answers. 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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Saturday Quiz – November 10, 2012 – answers and discussion

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.

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Saturday Quiz – November 3, 2012 – answers and discussion

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.

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Saturday Quiz – October 27, 2012 – answers and discussion

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.

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Saturday Quiz – October 20, 2012 – answers and discussion

Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you understand the reasoning behind the answers. 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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Saturday Quiz – October 6, 2012 – answers and discussion

Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you understand the reasoning behind the answers. 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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