This week is a big week for the banks in Australia being the annual reporting time when they are forced to disclose the remuneration packages that they pay out to their management. The banks have been under attack – again – for gouging their customers with spurious arguments about rising costs and falling margins. While some of their costs may have risen from the rock-bottom levels before the crisis, the evidence does not support the narrative that the banks are now presenting to the public as a precursor to further gouging. The big debate though – which is simmering – is about the purpose of banking in a monetary economy. Essentially, banks are public institutions given they are guaranteed by the government. But there is a tension between their public nature and the fact that the management of the banks claim their loyalty lies to their shareholders (and their own salaries). This tension has led to the global financial crisis and its very destructive aftermath. However, while the real economy still languishes in various states of decay, the financial sector has bounced back under the safety net of the government’s socialisation of their losses. How long will all of us citizens tolerate this? The solution to the tension is to socialise both the gains and losses of the banking sector. In that sense, nationalisation of the banking system is a sound principle to aim for. This would eliminate the dysfunctional, anti-social pursuit of private profit and ensure these special “public” institutions serve public purpose at all times.

I happened to re-read an article from the 1960s today – The paranoid style in American politics – written by Richard Hofstadter which was published in the November 1964 edition of Harper’s Magazine. It is one of those articles you should re-read from time to time to remind yourself that not a lot changes. What we call the deficit terrorists now were alive and well then and predicted that anything government amounted to a descent into communism with accompanying mayhem. The facts are clear. The US and most of the world enjoyed positive contribution from government net spending (budget deficits) for most of the post Second World War period and managed to avoid becoming communist (although they might have been better off if they had!). Today, the same paranoia is evident in the interventions into the policy debate from the deficit terrorists. They are so anxious. But underlying their alleged anxiety is a visceral hatred of anything government (except when the handouts are in their favour). None of the calls for fiscal consolidation are based on any firm understanding of how the monetary system works.

The central bankers have been meeting in Wyoming over the weekend as part of the annual Economic Symposium organised by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. While not all of the papers and discussion are yet available for public scrutiny there were some notable presentations (that you can access in full) which suggest that key central bankers are starting to realise that the economic crisis in not over and the fiscal-led recovery is slowing and that monetary policy alone cannot provide the solution. Moreover, one leading central banker indicated that monetary policy is not a suitable tool for controlling longer term problems such as price bubbles in specific asset classes. This view challenges the basis of the mainstream macroeconomics consensus that has dominated the policy debate for 30 odd years and culminated in the worst financial and economic crisis in 80 years. It is certanly a welcome trend in a debate which is typically flooded with ideological input from the mainstream macroeconomics profession.

Next Saturday (August 21, 2010) Australia gets to choose a new federal government which will govern for the next three years. These are crucial years because the economy is still mired in the uncertainty that accompanied the financial crisis and private spending is still very subdued. Growth around the world is still being supported by fiscal stimulus and without it economic activity will decline again. The majority of the economic indicators in Australia and elsewhere are pointing to a new slowdown as the fiscal stimulus wanes. So it is absolutely essential for the next Australian government to maintain strong fiscal support. The only problem is that both the major parties are having a battle to win votes on the platform of who can get the biggest budget surplus in the shortest period of time. It doesn’t bear thinking about. The conclusion is that none of the main parties are worthy of a vote. And the third party in contention (at least for the balance of power) – The Greens – are similarly blighted when it comes to macroeconomic policy. How did we get into this mess?

Today I am catching up on things I read last week. Each year, there are various publications provided to high school students telling them about all the programs that are on offer at Universities. The prospective students use these publications to help them decide which program they want to pursue after high school and at which university or other higher educational establishment they might want to pursue it at. There is a lot of lobbying by institutions to get favourable reviews. But there is never a catalogue published which advises students where not to study. So today I am noting three economics departments which should be on the blacklist of any student who is considering undertaking the studies in that discipline. They are on my blacklist because of the questionable competency of at least some of their staff members. I will expand this list over time!

Last year it was Reinhart and Rogoff being rammed down our throats as the deficit terrorists were claiming that governments in the advanced nations were on the cusp of defaulting on their sovereign debt. Their book was relentlessly misused by commentators and academics (like Niall Ferguson and others) and even the authors themselves left things ambiguous in interviews. The fact is that their research (if we dare call it that) is applicable to only a narrow set of situations none of them relevant in the contemporary setting. More recently, the deficit terrorists have been holding up a new effigy – a new hero. Another Harvard economist – Alberto Alesina. What is it about that place? Alesina has allegedly provided a solid theoretical case to support the absurd claims by the austerity proponents that cutting the very thing that is supporting growth at present will not damage that growth. He is now the new hero. Well it is another scam job! He chooses to use flawed orthodox textbook models to assert his case without mind to the situational context and other realities. He is no hero but just another mainstream economist seeking celebrity with zero substance to offer and very little else to sell other than a headline.

It is now 2.15 am in Boston on a Thursday morning (16:15 Thursday afternoon in Australia East Coast). I always try to stay on Australian time when I make these short trips. It is hard while you are away but easier to adjust back when you get home. No real jet lag. Yesterday (Wednesday) I gave a Teach-In on the concept of fiscal sustainability to an interesting group of participants ranging from those with an active role in the financial markets to those with more general business interests. The participants came from all around as far as I can gather – many from New York which is a fair hike for a single day workshop. The discussion that followed my presentation was very interesting and while the concerns reflected the usual issues – solvency, exchange rates, intergenerational issues – the standard of debate was civilised. I don’t know how many Warren and I convinced to probe deeper but I hope we planted some seeds of doubt in the minds of the audience that the mainstream macroeconomics position is wrong and therefore untenable. After the Teach-In I read the BIS Annual Report 2009/10 – which signalled to me that they are now firmly part of the problem that we face when dealing with the task outlining fiscally sustainable policy positions.

I read a 2006 research paper from the New York Federal Reserve today entitled – Why Is the U.S. Treasury Contemplating Becoming a Lender of Last Resort for Treasury Securities?. The article bears on the discussions recently here about the motive for issuing bonds and the likely consequences of not issuing them. It also brings back the memory of how the Australian government was duped by financial markets into continuing to issue debt even when they were running surpluses. That single act demonstrated beyond doubt that that public debt-issuance isn’t about funding net public spending. Rather, the continued issuance of public debt is a form of corporate welfare which makes the task of making profits through trading financial assets in private captial markets that much easier. Typically, it is the top-end-of-town who complain about welfare payments making the poor lazy. Well, the on-going issuance of public debt makes the private users of the same lazy because they do not have to create low risk products themselves. It is a total con job!

It is interesting how the big neo-liberal economic organisations like the IMF and the OECD are trying to re-assert their intellectual authority on the policy debate again after being unable to provide any meaningful insights into the cause of the global crisis or its immediate remedies. They were relatively quiet in the early days of the crisis and the IMF even issued an apology, albeit a conditional one. It is clear that the policies the OECD and the IMF have promoted over the last decades have not helped those in poorer nations solve poverty and have also maintained persistently high levels of labour underutilisation across most advanced economies. It is also clear that the economic policies these agencies have been promoting for years were instrumental in creating the conditions that ultimately led to the collapse in 2007. Now they are emerging, unashamed, and touting even more destructive policy frameworks.

Today I am writing about child cruelty. We would all react to child cruelty in the same way – it is repugnant and undermines the chances of the child maturing into a fully functional adult replete with capacities that promote self esteem and allow meaningful and enduring relationships. So what would we think of child cruelty when a high level government agency is engaged in it? What would we think of a government that was poisoning the minds of the young? Many Americans write to me accusing me of being a communist sympathiser and claiming that freedom was subjugated under those regimes via brutal indoctrination mechanisms embedded in their societal infrastructure. Maybe it was. But the Americans don’t actually have to look very far nor resort to history to find regimes that use indoctrination to oppress their citizens’ free spirits, including the intellectual development of their children. On Thursday, June 3, the Director of the US Congressional Budget Office wrote his Letter to a Seventh Grader. It contains pure indoctrination designed to develop fears about budget deficits at an early age.

I have been writing a fiction novel lately in my spare time (which is when I don’t sleep)! It is about the usual themes – individual struggle, tragedy and perhaps realisation. I haven’t yet conceived how it is going to end yet but it will either be very grim or full of splendour. Black and White I am! The interesting part of the exercise is trying to define one’s style separately from one’s academic style. I read a biography of Jack Kerouac recently and it talked about how he obsessed about trying to develop a unique style but kept falling back to be like one or another of the great authors of the day. It was only once he typed a lot that he started to find his own distinct identity as a writer. For me, the blog helps develop alternative ways of writing outside the terse cloistered world of technical economics. Anyway, I didn’t write much fiction today (yet) but I sure did read a lot of it.