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 keep reading that the inflationary expectations genie is about to jump out of the bottle and far from being benign and supportive will wreak havoc on real wealth. I also keep reading that the gold price is rising because of these increasingly robust fears of future inflation. It is one of those themes that get trotted out to alert us to the dangers of government intervention in the economy. It takes about one sentence to get to Zimbabwe and usually Weimar then gets dropped in. I know the characters that perpetuate this sort of stuff have had their minds poisoned by their undergraduate macroeconomics indoctrination but we do become adults eventually and should be able to question everything. If I am doubt I work out the logic of a problem and then confront the logic with some real world data to see if the logic at least is consistent with what actually happens. I am no empiricist but I don’t buy the idea that if the facts refute the theory then the facts must be wrong. Today I went off looking for those pesky inflationary expectations. I found them … looking forlorn. Just another ruse!

1 + 1 equals 2. The world is not flat. Night follows day (usually). You are born and then you die. Spending equals income. The mid-term elections in the US proved that religious zealots target positions of high office in our democracies. They are emboldened by a righteousness brought on by their faith. In the context of economic policy this religious fervour violates the most simple facts. The most simple story in macroeconomics that every student should have ingrained in them in the first two weeks of study is that spending equals income. It is as basic to macroeconomics as 1 + 1 equals 2 is to arithmetic. The mainstream economists know this but because it implies a role for net government spending that insults their religious passions they invent all sorts of elaborate lies and myths which purport to show that cutting spending increases it. These “proofs” are equivalent to those which try to show that 1 + 1 does not equal 2?. They are logical bereft and empirically vacant. The problem is that everyone citizen who forms the same view and votes accordingly increases the chance that their job will be next to go. Meanwhile the religious persecution of those without jobs continues.

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.

The news from the US housing market remains pretty bleak three years after the financial crisis began. Last week, we read that attorneys general from all 50 states were investigating allegations that some major banks inappropriately reviewed mortgage files and/or tendered false foreclosure statements which led to the eviction of thousands of delinquent borrowers from their homes. Apparently, banks and credit suppliers used “robo-signers” to sign false affidavits. The US federal regulators are meeting today (October 20, 2010) to discuss the “foreclosure crisis”. The question is whether this will become a bigger problem and spill over into the real economy and worsen the unemployment crisis. The governments have all the tools and capacity they need to ensure that any financial crisis is totally insulated from the real economy. But their reluctance to show the necessary policy leadership almost ensures that a financial crisis will spread and wreak havoc in the real economy. Their lack of policy action amounts to plain stupidity or malicious contempt for their citizens. Probably both.

Answer: out towards the far right. Today’s blog adds to my previous posts where I consider so-called progressive interventions in the policy debate and show that they are really nothing more than attenuated forms of neo-liberalism. The evidence is that what goes for progressive input these days bears no resemblance to what we used to consider represented progressive thinking. The way the population has been inveigled into accepting policy positions and justification that are represented as “centrist” but are, in fact, what we used to call right-wing positions is one of the success stories of the neo-liberal era. The tendency of so-called progressive organisations to mimic the language and concepts of the right is one of the main constraints on advancing a solid attack on the conservative orthodoxy that created and perpetuated the crisis and which is setting nations up for a repeat in the coming years.

Today I provide some alternative insights to to recent (not so) Nobel prize awards in Economics. It is claimed that the work of the three winners has “conferred the greatest benefit on mankind” (being the criteria for the award). The reality is that the major insights to be drawn from this trio is that mass unemployment does not exist and that unemployment is largely voluntary or a function of over-generous income support policies by “misguided” governments. The policy recommendations to be drawn from their work focus on cutting the meagre benefits that governments provide to the unemployed in times of strife. The winners’ work tells us that they think workers are lazy and do not search effectively enough, in part, because they have it too good in their jobless state. I rank their work among the most distressing and obscene of all the disgraceful con jobs that the mainstream of my profession has deliberately foisted on the public policy process.