CofFEE Conference 2010 – Day 1 Report with update

Today is the first day of the 12th Path to Full Employment Conference/17th National Unemployment Conference in Newcastle, hosted by my research centre. As host I am tied up in the event but here are some snippets. All of the presentations in the parallel sessions have been very interesting. I also note some economic news out from the Australian Bureau of Statistics today for October 2010 which provide more news that the Australian economy is growing only modestly. More tomorrow. UPDATE: Audio file now available.

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The Australian economy loses to the snail

Three months ago, I wrote that Australia continues to grow but the signs are not all good in response to the moderating National Accounts data for the June quarter and associated data releases. My position in the national debate was lambasted as heretical and my competence was questioned because as all the bank economists, politicians, and related officials know Australia is close to full capacity and full employment and is about to burst at the seams courtesy of the “once-in-a-hundred” years commodities prices boom. My response, if only that was true! Sure enough, unemployment rose last month and there have been many signs that my judgement that the fiscal withdrawal and rising interest rates were cruelling growth was sound. Today’s Australian Bureau of Statistics release of the National Accounts data for the September quarter should shut those who are talking things up continually up. The Australian Bureau Statistics shows the Australian economy is growing barely faster than the zero line of no growth. And our so-called mining boom is not sufficient to generate a positive net exports contribution. The reality does not match the direction of policy or the rhetoric that is being used to justify the withdrawal of fiscal support. Bad luck if you are unemployed, underemployed or one of those that will certainly lose their jobs as employment growth stalls, again!

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When you haven’t got a Plan B

The UK is still in the grip of a serious slowdown and the British government has begun its fiscal austerity program which will savage net public spending and cause wide spread job losses. But the Chancellor is still boasting that Plan A – scorch the economy – will be maintained and he has sought legitimacy for his position in the release by the UK Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) of its Economic and Fiscal Outlook November 2010 yesterday (November 29, 2010). When one examines the OBR document in detail one could be excused for thinking it was a “colouring-in” exercise with a difference – you know, draw nice colourful bar charts to tell the story that you want based on assumptions that will not survive empirical scrutiny in coming months and years. The problem for Britain is that there does not appear to be a Plan B. It is all or nothing and while the “lab rat” nature of the policy experiment is intellectually interesting for researchers such as myself I don’t want to glean enjoyment from what will be the increased suffering of millions. Plan A will fail because the assumptions and projections are unrealistic. When you haven’t got a Plan B then that failure will be very costly.

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Kicking the can down the road outside the Roach Motel

My friend Marshall Auerback has described the EMU has the Roach Motel – a very North American term but one which resonates everywhere. The full article – is recommended reading. Very amusing and perspicacious. He says – “The Germans might occupy the penthouse suite, but it’s the penthouse suite of a roach motel” which is apposite. The latest decisions of the EU finance ministers after an emergency meeting in Brussels over the weekend will just hold the ultimate crisis at bay for a little while longer. The EMU is currently surviving because the ECB has stepped in as the “missing” fiscal agent and keeping the bond markets at bay. While the ECB is the only entity in the EMU which has currency sovereignty and can “fiscally fund” member state deficits permanently, the underlying logic of the monetary system will continue to ensure these on-going crises will spread across the union. The EU bosses are just buying time and “kicking the can down the road a bit” at the moment. Ultimately, to survive the system has to add a unified fiscal authority and abandon the fiscal (Maastricht) rules (not politically possible) or accept the experiment has failed and dissolve the union. The latter option is clearly preferred and while the can is being kicked down the road apiece the EU leaders should be dismantling the Roach Motel and setting the captives free.

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Saturday Quiz – November 27, 2010 – 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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When miracles lose some shine

It is a fact that the Australian economy escaped recording a technical recession (2 consecutive quarters of negative real GDP growth), having recorded only one negative real GDP quarter (December quarter 2008 = -0.7 per cent). In that quarter, the first of large fiscal stimulus measures began and growth accelerated after that. The downturn, however, did push up official unemployment and underemployment and the legacy of the rationed employment and hours growth is that Australia currently has a broad labour underutilisation rate of 12.5 per cent. Aggregate policy (fiscal and monetary) is now tightening and is being justified by official statements that the economy is about to explode on the back of a very strong commodity boom (mining) and that we are close to full employment anyway. We are being told that unless policy tightens now inflation will break out. The problem with the official rhetoric is that a sequence of data releases is telling a different story. In the past few weeks we have seen exports falling, a weakening construction sector, flat credit demand, and yesterday, a very weak investment outlook. The outlook for next week’s September quarter National Accounts data is becoming increasingly pessimistic. In the meantime, unemployment rose in October. The justifications for the policy tightening are vanishing although I would argue they never were credible in the first place. The miracle Australian economy is a little less shiny at present.

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A rising public share in output is indicated

I have been thinking about changing industrial/sectoral shares today and how it bears on the way we construct macroeconomic policy (spending and taxation). At present, a major debate in Australia is how we are going to deal with the strong growth in the mining sector and the negative consequences this growth is having on other sectors that are not enjoying buoyant demand conditions. The mainstream response – to impose fiscal consolidation and tight monetary policy – is exactly the opposite response to what is required. But the discussion about sectoral change has further application in terms of the long-run movements in demography and shifting demand for health care and other age-related services. It generalises even further if we consider the growing need for environment care services. The upshot is that trends which will require a rising public share of total resource usage should not be seen as financial crises. Rather we should see them as part of the long process of structural transformation in our economies. Once we see it from that perspective, then the ideological nature of the ageing society debate is exposed. But first, Ireland …

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Advocating full employment

Today I am travelling all day and have no time to write anything. So I asked our guest blogger Victor Quirk who has just completed a PhD on the political constraints to full employment to fill the gap. As usual, he more than fills it. In this blog he shares some of his doctoral research which I had the pleasure of being the supervisor. The depth of documentary enquiry that Victor engaged in was something else. And the final product was an incisive and very challenging critique of the mainstream orthodoxy that erects artificial barriers to the achievement of human potential (in the form of unemployment) to advance its ideology urgency which ultimately is about extracting an ever greater share of real national income. I will be back tomorrow.

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Education – a vehicle for class division

Yesterday I wrote, in part, about the way in which the term long-run is mis-used by the mainstream economists to assert “natural rate” theories, which essentially deny a role for government macroeconomic policy in stabilising the business cycle and reducing mass unemployment. I also get asked by readers (several times now) to provide some discussion of what were known as the Cambridge capital controversies in the 1960s and 1970s. They are related in fact to the notion of the long-run. These were rather esoteric debates which are now largely ignored by the mainstream despite the fact that the results of the debate showed, beyond any shadow of doubt, that the whole body of neo-classical distribution theory (that is, marginal productivity theory) is plain wrong. MPT was developed to justify the claim that capitalism delivers “fair” income distributions because everybody gets back what they put in. The Cambridge debates killed the legitimacy of those claims. But my profession continued oblivious because the results would have meant that a major part of the mainstream apology to capitalism would have to be jettisoned. Who understood the debates anyway? It was easy to just sweep the results under the carpet. I still plan to provide some commentary in this regard as I used to teach a course in capital theory covering these debates. But in thinking about them I started thinking of prior questions which also feed into a policy debate in Australia at present. It relates to educational outcomes and class.

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