With all eyes on the US wondering what would happen if the debt ceiling is not lifted you would think that bond markets would be losing interest in US government debt. If we trawled back through the debate over the last few years we could find many instances of commentators claiming interest rates would soar once bond markets ran out of patience with the rising US government debt. It was either that prediction or the other one – that all the “money” swishing around the system would cause inflation. Like some cult leader there was one self-styled US financial expert claiming that the Endgame was nigh. As the world didn’t slide into a void nor the debt-burdened US economy hyperinflate the date was shifted. Once, twice, thrice. Further, trying to overlay what is happening in the EMU at present onto US, UK, Japan or other sovereign nations is invalid. The monetary systems in place, in say the US, is vastly different to the system the ECB oversees when we focus on the member state level of the Eurozone. So it serves to remind people that none of the predictions the deficit terrorists have made have come true. The ideologues respond that it is only a matter of time. My reply, when might that be?

I am still away from my office and have had a full-day of meetings today – so very little time to write. But earlier today I read another one of those articles from a senior US academic economist about the need to cut aged pensions in the US because the government is running out of money. Martin Feldstein – a Harvard professor – has been found to have engaged in highly questionable conduct (to say the least) by investigations into the causes of the financial crisis. Feldstein must surely know that the government cannot run out of money. Which brings into question his motivation for providing misleading interventions into the policy debate. He has demonstrated over a long period his willingness to hide behind the “authority” of economic theory in order to pursue an ideological obsession with privatisation and deregulation. When writing what seemed to be academic papers or opinion pieces supporting financial deregulation, for example, he didn’t at the same time declare that he was personally gaining from such a policy push. His subsequent track record as a board member of companies, some of which collapsed in the crisis (AIG) or triggered the collapse has been appalling. Feldstein is not the sort of person anyone should take advice from much less pay for it.

I have been travelling the last two days and have disrupted work patterns. But I did manage to read a few things in between other things today which made my hair stand on end and suggest that the austerity debate has moved ground. So desperately lacking is the real evidence which might support the economic claims the conservatives have been using to justify their manic desire to savage public spending when there is 10 per cent unemployment (and worse) – that the deficit terrorists are now appealing to morality – that public deficits and debt are immoral. It makes you wonder why these characters just don’t become stand-up comedians. But given how dangerous they are as a result of their positions in government it is clearly not a laughing matter. I would seek to try these characters for crimes against humanity when it becomes obvious to everyone how wrongful their actions are. It is interesting though – the descent into “moral” arguments means that you can conclude that even the conservatives know that the bevy of economic arguments that they use to justify their damaging policies are nonsense. But there is a new emerging problem. As I write today the entrenched unemployment that the deficit terrorists are now acknowledging they will cause to worsen is giving rise to employers discriminating against the most disadvantaged workers that are seeking work. What this tells us is that the employers have too much power.

There was an interesting conference in Tokyo last week which featured academic Eisuke Sakakibara, the former Japanese government vice minister of finance who is characteristically known as “Mr Yen” given his knowledge of banking and world financial markets. Sakakibara predicted a prolonged recession lasting until 2015 because fiscal deficits are being deliberately withdrawn by misguided governments. The neo-liberals are claiming that public debt ratios have to be cut to reduce the “future tax burden on our children”. The reality is that intergenerational burdens work in exactly the opposite way in a fiat monetary system to what the mainstream neo-liberal claim. The misguided fiscal policy direction the neo-liberals are pushing will impose real burdens on our children. They will be less educated, less skilled, less experienced, and have lower income as a whole as a result of the fiscal austerity. Their future possibilities will be reduced as a consequence. In fact, the whole anti-budget deficit argument is just a ploy to seek ways whereby the elites can get more real income now and more real income later for their own enjoyment. Spreading the real output more widely through fiscal interventions frustrates that aspiration. Significantly, our children never hand real output back in time to pay for the public debt incurred at a previous time.

I often get asked by people I have consulted for to write justifications for their existence (that is, the organisation and its charter). Sometimes it is a trade union, another times a government department and on. In each case you have to think out what the essential interactions are between the organisation in question and the rest of the world and articulate some sense of value to those interactions. These calibrations may not necessarily be quantitative but often it is useful if they are because bean-counting economists around the place who read the analysis I provide in this part of my professional life rarely think more broadly and spare the thought – can probably not even spell “social benefit” much less conceive of it. In the current economic crisis the only problems that should be receiving daily scrutiny in the debate are unemployment, real income loss, and the resulting poverty. We rarely see those items headlined. Instead, we are barraged with a virulent confection of bile about things that do not matter – public deficit to GDP ratios etc. And this anti-government campaign is succeeding in part because people believe the rhetoric that government is wasteful and doesn’t do anything. Well I am here to tell you ….

I followed the attacks on pro-Israeli New York Times war monger Thomas Friedman some years ago, which centred on his support for the invasion of Iraq and his repeated prognosis that it would only take 6 months to decide the fate of the conflict. The six months never really materialised and by 2007 he was arguing, just as vehemently as he argued for war, for US disengagement because the strategy had failed. He was imbued with the WMD mania that was used by the US, Australian and UK governments to “justify” the unjustifiable despite them knowing there were no such dangers. So he is a guy who obviously knows what he is talking about! In his latest column he tries his hand at economics with a similar intellectual arrogance and lack of judgement that he brought to the Iraq issue.

Today I decided that there is another macroeconomics research unit that needs to be closed down. My decision was reached after I read the latest paper from the Bank of International Settlements – The future of public debt: prospects and implications – which confirms that the Monetary and Economic Department of that organisation is publishing deficit terrorist literature. The paper is so bad that I am sorry I read it. I may avoid BIS publications altogether in the future. But if I apply that reasoning I am going to be back to reading Stieg Larsson novels and there are only three of them and I have already read them!

There is currently an international cacophony being created by economists, politicians, political commentators and any-one else that thinks they have something to say which goes like this: China’s export orientation and its “manipulation” of the renminbi to stop it appreciating is damaging World demand and plunging the Western world into unsustainable debt levels and persistent unemployment. The simple retort is: the commentators have it all backwards and are ignoring the policy options that the Western world has but which policy makers will not fully utilise. But it is an interesting debate and the institutional attachment to the debate is not necessarily predictable as you will see.

Last week (February 10, 2010), the ever-louder irrational rantings of Niall Ferguson about debt got another airing in the Financial Times in his article – A Greek crisis is coming to America. My two word reaction – which might be better than writing a whole blog was – Oh really! But the article demonstrates how desperate conservative academic commentary is becoming. The inflated self-importance of these characters quite obviously craves for ever increasing attention. However, not only does Ferguson demonstrate a poor attention to detail; a confusion about which monetary system is which; and a denial of history – but he also discloses such a vivid imagination that he might productively turn his hand to writing children’s fairy tales. Except then he would have to lighten up a bit or the kid’s would be having nightmares. As for the rest of us, we should be getting the lifeboats out if he is right. For me, I am staying on dry land except in the mornings when I chase those waves!

As indicated yesterday, Steve Keen and I agreed to foster a debate about where modern monetary theory sits with his work on debt-deflation. So yesterday his blog carried the following post, which included a 1000-odd word precis written by me describing what I see as the essential characteristics of modern monetary theory. The discussion is on-going on that site and I invite you to follow it if you are interested. Rather than comment on all the comments over on Steve’s site, I decided to collate them here (in part) and help develop the understanding that way. That is what follows today.

The ABC News Online business reporter Michael Janda ran this Opinion piece – Economists tackle the deficit and debt debate today. He interviews three economists – myself, Steve Keen (University of Western Sydney) and Stephen Kirchner (Centre of Independent Studies). The discussion is interesting because it demonstrates how the journalists modify what you say to mean something slightly different (no accusation here that it was designed to skew meaning though) and generates the statistic that two out of three economists do not understand how the modern monetary economy works.