The Weekend Quiz – November 25-26, 2017 – answers and discussion

Here are the answers with discussion for this Weekend’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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The lame progressive obsession with meaningless aggregates

Maybe the British Labour Party could get Nancy Pelosi to do some stupid tweets for them as well. She is an expert at it – see my blog – When neoliberals masquerade as progressives. She thinks it is smart progressive politics to post tweets criticising her political opponents for a policy that “explodes the deficit … dumping … debt on every man, woman & child in America”. A fallacious argument. But moreover, a very stupid strategic argument because it fails to educate the public on what deficits and public debt are and what the capacities of a currency-issuing government and locks the progressive side of politics into no-win dilemmas. When it is their turn to govern they quickly find that they have no room to move on government spending because their own taunts when in opposition are thrown back at them. Same the world over. The progressive side of politics seems to have a lame obsession with meaningless aggregates – like the size of the fiscal deficit or public debt to GDP ratio. Pathetic is not the word.

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Household debt is part of a broader problem – be informed

The head of the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), which was created in 1998 as part of the sham to separate regulation from policy and pretend the Reserve Bank of Australia was independent, gave a speech in Sydney yesterday (November 21, 2017) – Housing – The importance of solid foundations. The reason the speech is important is because it demonstrates the disconnect in policy making and the failure of key policy makers and regulators to connect macroeconomic dots. Australia – like the rest of the world – needs politicians and officials who understand how the macroeconomic aggregates are connected. One cannot have a conversation about household debt without recognising that it is, in part, directly related to the fiscal position of the government and the nation’s external position. While the APRA boss is correct to highlight the precarious nature of household balance sheets given the record and increasing debt levels being borne by households who are experiencing a wages squeeze and a government intent on austerity cuts, he should be educating the public on the broader context. Then there would be more acceptance of expanding discretionary fiscal deficits and a wages policy designed to bring real wages growth back into line with productivity growth. If that was the case, much of the idiotic conversations – some masquerading as ‘research’ results would disappear.

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Australian real wages growth flat – the ripoff of workers continues

Today (November 15, 2017), the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released the – Wage Price Index, Australia – for the September-quarter 2017. Private sector wages growth was marginally higher in the September-quarter at 1.86 per cent (annualised) after six consecutive quarters of record low growth. However, with the annual inflation rate running at 1.83 per cent, real wages barely moved. This follows two-quarters of real wage cuts. With real wages growth lagging badly behind productivity growth, the wage share in national income is now around record low levels. This represents a major rip-off for workers. The flat wages trend is also intensifying the pre-crisis dynamics, which saw private sector credit rather than real wages drive growth in consumption spending. Further, the forward estimates for fiscal outcomes provided by the Australian government are now not achievable, given the flat wages growth. There is no way the tax receipts will rise in line with the projections, which assumed much stronger wages and employment growth than will occur under current austerity-type fiscal settings.

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Automation and full employment – back to the 1960s

On August 19, 1964, the then US President Lyndon B. Johnson established the – National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress. He established the Commission in response to growing concern during the deep 1960-61 recession that the unemployment had been created by the pace of technological change. Ring a bell! He wanted to an inquiry to explore this issue and come up with recommendations on how to deal with the possibility that automation was wiping out jobs and the future would be bleak. Before the Commission had reported, the Federal government had reversed its fiscal austerity and the resulting stimulus had driven the unemployment back down to relatively low levels. The Commission noted that unemployment was largely the result of inadequate total spending and that the Government had the tools at its disposal to eliminate it. They considered that there would be workers (low-skill etc) who would suffer more displacement from technology than those with more skill etc, but that ultimately even those workers would be able to get jobs if the public deficit was large enough. In this regard, they eschewed pointless training programs that did not provide immediate access to jobs. Instead, they recommended (among other things) the introduction of a Job Guarantee (Public Service Employment) financed by the Federal government but administered at all levels of government. It would pay the Federal minimum wage and be available on demand. This is the preferred Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) approach and rejects solutions that rely on the provision of a basic income guarantee to resolve the problems created by unemployment.

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What matters about the Paradise Papers

A cursory glance at the World’s leading tax havens illustrates the hypocrisy of politicians getting wound up about the revelations in the recently released Paradise Papers and the Panama Papers before them. Many of the havens are within the direct legislative jurisdiction of nations such as the US (which is itself a tax haven) and the UK, for example. And we should not forget that Luxembourg, Switzerland are key European homes of tax avoidance. Remember that the current President of the European Commission “spent years in his previous role as Luxembourg’s prime minister secretly blocking EU efforts to tackle tax avoidance by multinational corporations” (Source) ably supported by the Netherlands, another nation engaged in the practice. If the politicians were truly worried about this issue they could do something about it directly with the stroke of a legislative pen. Britain could, for example, eliminate Jersey, the Isle of Man, and its Overseas Territories from this corporate scam. The US could do similarly. The EU could bring in new rules to stop Luxembourg. But they don’t stop it, which tells you everything. But, the problem of tax avoidance and evasion is not fiscal. Progressives get stuck on that point. It is largely irrelevant. The real issues are inequality, power and macroeconomic stability. That is what this blog is about.

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The Weekend Quiz – November 11-12, 2017 – answers and discussion

Here are the answers with discussion for this Weekend’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 neoliberals masquerade as progressives

One wonders what goes on in the heads of politicians sometimes. Perhaps not much other than a warped sense of their purpose in life – which for some seems to be to advance themselves rather than advance societal well-being. In recent days, fiscal debates have raged on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, there is the Trump tax cut debate. The correct progressive response would be to focus on why these cuts will not advance anybody but the rich and will do very little if anything to create new jobs. Unfortunately, prominent Democrats such as the awful Nancy Pelosi have been spouting stuff about the tax cuts increasing the federal deficit and federal debt. At a time, when the Republicans are abandoning the deficit terrorism to advance their own interests, the Democrats seems to be reinforcing the ‘deficits are bad’ narrative. Instead, they could have seized the opportunity to say to the American people – see deficits are fine but the real issue is what we do with them. Pelosi and her ilk seem incapable of adopting that quality of leadership. In the UK, the reality is dawning on the British government that the austerity harvest is anything but what they had hoped it would be. No surprises there. Austerity undermines growth which can easily increase the fiscal deficit when the goal is the opposite. But the way that reality is being handled in the progressive press is pathetic. The UK Guardian, for example, has headlines about ‘black holes’ and is giving oxygen to reports that talk about the deteriorating fiscal situation in the UK. Readers are left with nothing but neoliberalism reinforcement of the ‘deficits are bad’ myth. A shocking indictment of the progressive debate in the UK.

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The Weekend Quiz – October 28-29, 2017 – answers and discussion

Here are the answers with discussion for this Weekend’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 the mainstream Left gets lost down its Europhile hole

Thomas Fazi and I recently published an Op Ed in Social Europe (October 20, 2017) – Everything You Know About Neoliberalism Is Wrong, which is a precis of the main arguments in our new book Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (Pluto Books, 2017). It seems that our message resonates with a lot of people. And, inasmuch as it is deeply critical of the extant Left position on ‘internationalism’ who continually seem to live in terror of those amorphous financial markets just waiting for a chance to send a nation state bankrupt, it seems to have also upset some who I consider to be the ‘lost’ mainstream Left. One such critic accuses us of using a “presumptuous title” but he is seemingly unable to capture the pop culture irony that is inherent in the choice. Just a bit of fun Andrew. Since when is comedy presumptuous? But failing to grasp the subtlety of the title is just the start. Things go downhill from there.

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The sham of ECB independence

One of the major claims the founders of the EMU made was that by creating an independent ECB – by which they meant ‘independent’ of the influence from the Member States or other EU bodies (such as the Eurogroup) – they were laying the foundations of financial stability and disciplining the fiscal policy of the Member States. This so-called independence was embodied in the – Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union – where Article 123 prevents the ECB from giving “overdraft facilities or any other type of credit facility” to the Member State governments (and other EU bodies); Article 124 prohibits any Member State government (and other EU bodies) from having “privileged access” to the financial institutions; and Article 125 prohibits the ECB from assuming any liabilities or “commitments” of the Member State governments (etc) – the famous ‘no bailout’ clause. But a recent report from the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) – Open doors for forces of finance – (published October 3, 2017) – suggests that the ECB feigns independence and is in fact captive of the largest profit-seeking financial institutions that sit on its advisory groups. In other words, the ECB has become a vehicle to advance private return and avoid regulative imposts when the TFEU outlines an entirely different role for the bank.

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The Weekend Quiz – October 21-22, 2017 – 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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Wolfgang Schäuble is gone but his disastrous legacy will continue

History is often made by single, very powerful individuals acting on their own mission according to their own calling. Many of these individuals are seemingly immune to the reality around them and try to recreate their own reality – sometimes succeeding to advance the well-being of those around them and beyond, but, usually, they just leave the main stage after creating havoc. I could name names. But only one name is relevant for today’s blog – Wolfgang Schäuble, the former CDU German Minister for Finance. Schäuble resigned that role after the recent German elections and is now being feted by the mainstream press as some sort of visionary who kept the Eurozone together through his disciplined thinking and his resistance to populist ideas that would have broken the discipline imposed on Member States by the European Finance Ministers. History tells us differently. He has overseen a disastrous period in European history where its major step towards political and economic integration in the 1990s has delivered dysfunctional and divergent outcomes for the Member States. Some countries (Greece) has been ruined by the policies he championed while others are in serious trouble. Further, despite him claiming the monetary union has been successful, the fact is that the Eurozone is still together only because the ECB has been effectively violating the no bailout articles of the Treaty of Lisbon via its various quantitative easing programs since May 2010. Should it stayed within the ‘law’ of the union, then several nations would have been forced into insolvency between 2010 and 2012. The problem is that while Schäuble is now gone from the political stage, his disastrous legacy will continue.

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The Weekend Quiz – October 14-15, 2017 – answers and discussion

Here are the answers with discussion for this Weekend’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 former UK Chancellor attempts to save face and just becomes confused

On May 6, 1997, just 4 days after coming to office in what was to become Tony Blair’s retrogressive regime, the then British Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown announced that Labour would legislate the so-called independence of the Bank of England. The BBC claimed this was the “most radical shake-up in the bank’s 300-year history”, which gave “the bank freedom to control monetary policy”. Gordon Brown’s legacy to the British people, of course, is in his famous ‘light touch’ regulation, which he boasted about in the lead up to the GFC but went silent about soon after. But he has come out of the woodwork recently to reflect on his decision to set up the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) within the Bank of England and abandon the practice where the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank would meet on a monthly basis to determine interest rates. He claims that decision kept Britain out of the euro and was a great success. But then in the same speech he railed against the ‘political’ intrusion of the MPC into broader fiscal policy debates and its failure to conduct monetary policy correctly during the GFC. A very confused narrative. The point is that central banks can never be independent of treasury departments and the claims to the contrary were just part of the depoliticisation of policy that accompanied neoliberalism. Brown is also wrong that setting up a separate MPC kept the nation out of the euro. Britain realised the euro would be a disaster long before 1997.

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Mainstream macroeconomics credibility went out the window years ago

The Vice President of the European Central Bank, Vítor Constâncio, gave the opening speech – Developing models for policy analysis in central banks – at the Annual Research Conference, Frankfurt am Main, on September 25, 2017. Last time I heard Constâncio speak in person, in Florence 2015, he was in typical Europhile central bank denial. He thought the Eurozone was fine, a great success given the low inflation, inferring that the ECB’s conduct had something to do with that. He didn’t talk about the millions of people that had deliberately been rendered jobless because of the austerity obsession of the Troika, of which his institution was an integral part. Things might be changing a bit as the evidence mounts that the mainstream approach to macroeconomics and monetary theory is moribund, at best. But the changes are really just more of the same. There is no willingness to admit that the whole framework is without merit. The mainstream profession is lost in my view and clutching at anything they can to stay credible. But credibility went out the window years ago.

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The Weekend Quiz – September 30-October 1, 2017 – answers and discussion

Here are the answers with discussion for this Weekend’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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Addressing claims that global financial markets are all powerful

The United Nations Trade and Development Report 2017 was published last week and carried the sub-title “Beyond Austerity: Towards a Global New Deal”. It is amazing that 9 years after the crisis emerged we are still discussing austerity and its on-going damaging consequences. Effectively the crisis interrupted the neoliberal agenda to increase the incomes shares of the elites at the expense of the workers, with growth being a secondary consideration if at all. Austerity was the means by which the elites could resume this push and used all sorts of depoliticised arguments to make it look as though there was really no choice. They have been spectacularly successful in their quest. More shame to the rest of us who have stood by and blithely accepted the agenda and, to make matters worse, become mouthpieces of the myths that the neoliberals have constructed to give ‘authority’ to their savage attacks on public purpose. So social democratic politicians lead the austerity charge. Citizens stand around in pubs and cafes mouthing neoliberal nonsense about fiscal deficits etc without the slightest evidence that they know what they are talking about. UNCTAD report on all this in the latest Report. It is a sorry tale and requires a massive return of collective action and as they say – a “global New Deal”.

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When intra-governmental relations became absurd – the US-Fed Accord – Part 3

I am writing this while waiting for a train at Victoria Station (London), which will take me to Brighton for tomorrow’s presentation at the British Labour Party Conference. The last several days I was in Kansas City for the inaugural International Modern Monetary Theory Conference, which attracted more than 200 participants and was going well when I left it on Saturday. A great step forward. I believe there will be video for all sessions available soon just in case you were unable to watch the live stream. Today’s blog completes my little history of the US Treasury Federal Reserve Accord, which really marked a turning point (for the worse) in the way macroeconomic policy was conducted in the US. In Part 1, I explained how from the inception (1913), the newly created Federal Reserve Bank, America’s central bank, was required by the US Treasury Department to purchase Treasury bonds in such volumes that would ensure the yields on long-term bonds were stable and low. There was growing unease with this arrangement among the conservative central bankers and, in 1935, the arrangement was altered somewhat to require the bank to only purchase debt in the secondary markets. But the change had little effective impact. The yields stayed low as was the intent. Further, all the prognistications that the conservatives raised about inflation and other maladies also did not emerge (which anyone who knew anything would have expected anyway). In Part 2, I traced the increased tensions between the central bank FOMC and the Treasury, which in part was exacerbated by the slight spike in inflation that accompanied the spending associated with the prosecution of the Korean War in the early 1950s. The tension manifested into open disagreement about the FOMC’s desire to raise interest rates and end the pegged yield arrangement with the Treasury. In Part 3, we discuss the culmination of that tension and disagreement and examine some of the less known and underlying forces that were fermenting the central bank desire for rebellion.

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The Weekend Quiz – September 23-24, 2017 – answers and discussion

Here are the answers with discussion for this Weekend’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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