Yesterday, the Living Garden section of the Newcastle Herald published an interview with me on their Profile page. After requesting (and publishing) a short bio they asked me a series of questions. Here is the transcript of my answers and note the whole profile was restricted to 800 words.
Sydney Morning Herald journalist Adele Horin article in the SMH today – Here’s a stimulating idea: create jobs – challenges the Federal Government to get it priorities right. She writes:
If employment is the primary concern, there are surer, more direct ways than cash payments to ensure bosses hire rather than fire. If not now, a debate on the hoary old topic of direct job creation may be just around the corner.
Yesterday the Government announced its latest fiscal response to the rapidly worsening economic situation. They will spend $42 billion (mostly in 2009 and into 2010 to shore up aggregate demand. They estimate this will underwrite 90,000 jobs in the economy. That is not new jobs but existing jobs. They also estimate that the unemployment rate will rise to 7 per cent over the coming year which is around 300,000 people extra who will be without work. That will take unemployment towards 850,000 and underemployment will certainly rise in lock-step (already around 600,000) so you see the scale of the deterioration.
However, while I think the package is a step in the right direction, the Government has failed to really target jobs. If the Government had have introduced a Job Guarantee and paid the workers the current national minimum wage (with holiday pay etc) it could have hired 557,000 full-time equivalent workers for around $8.3 billion per year. Where does this figure come from?
In the New York times article (December 26, 2004), from Larry Rohter – Argentina’s Economic Rally Defies Forecasts – it is reported that the Argentinian economy has made a surprising comeback. Rohter writes “When the Argentine economy collapsed in December 2001, doomsday predictions abounded. Unless it adopted orthodox economic policies and quickly cut a deal with its foreign creditors, hyperinflation would surely follow, the peso would become worthless, investment and foreign reserves would vanish and any prospect of growth would be strangled. But three years after Argentina declared a record debt default of more than $100 billion, the largest in history, the apocalypse has not arrived. Instead, the economy has grown by 8 percent for two consecutive years, exports have zoomed, the currency is stable, investors are gradually returning and unemployment has eased from record highs – all without a debt settlement or the standard measures required by the International Monetary Fund for its approval.”
In the New York Times, December 27, Brent Staples explains – Why Some Politicians Need Their Prisons to Stay Full – and outlines how public spending can clearly be a tool for essential job creation underpinning regional development. The problem is that it seems the Americans haven’t quite got it right.
I have been ‘at it’ for decades now but it never ceases to amaze me how mainstream macroeconomic analysis is carried out and the way the public just accepts the conclusions without understanding the basis on which the analysis generates those conclusions. Chapter II in the BIS Annual Economic Report (released June 28, 2026) – High public debt and shifting financial markets: challenges for central banks – exemplifies this point. The conclusions are rather stark but they all flow on some key assumptions that could be varied at any time by the government, which would nullify the conclusions. In other words, the projections of crises and monetary emergencies are all predicated on the assumption that the government would not step in with its unique capacities to prevent the catastrophe. In what world would we think that would happen? Not the real world, and the GFC and pandemic are recent examples where the alleged constraints are jettisoned by government in the blink of an eye.
The recent extreme weather in the northern hemisphere, the twin monster tropical storms in Japan, the impending shutdown of the – Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) – among other happenings is telling us that things are changing for the worse. Clearly long-term weather trends are open to interpretation because the available data is sketchy the further one goes back. And, narratives from historians tell us that there have been rather extreme weather events in the past, which have led to many lost lives. The National Museum of Australia has an interesting information page – Heatwaves – which helps us understand the historical experience in Australia. There are other credible sites that deal with global events. However, the serial nature of the recent weather trends and the interlinked changes in the oceanic conditions, the cryosphere, rain and storms, and temperature allows us to counter the arguments that are presented to refute climate change science, which rely on claims that the current period is just part of a recurring cycle. These events are also relevant to the current political machinations in the UK, where Starmer is going (yay!) and the new probably PM is under fire from both business and unions for wanting to do something about climate change. In this post, I discuss what can be done.
Economics and business correspondents regularly serve as apologists for poor policy. Their motivation is to file a story and often they take the easy way out by paraphrasing press releases put out by some conservative think tank, or economist, or…
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released the latest labour force data today (June 25, 2026) – Labour Force, Australia – for May 2026 – which showed that the labour market improved slightly in May after a poor showing in the April figures. However, there are now 10.2 per cent of available labour not being used (either unemployed or underemployment), which makes a farce of the RBA’s claims that the labour market is tight. There is substantial scope for more job creation given the slack that is present.
Successive governments in the UK – Labour and Tory – have pushed the nation to the brink where there is little capacity left for progressive policy. And I am not referring to Brexit. Rather, the elevation of the financial sector as a primary force in the economy, dating back really to the Callaghan Labour government and then fast tracked by Thatcher and Blair, has resulted in almost every important part of the economy being devoured by the greed machine. This is relevant to the leadership struggle in the UK Labour government, which should see the lamentable Starmer replaced by the (to be assessed) Andy Burnham. The latter would be the first Prime Minister to hail from Lancashire since David Lloyd George (1916-22) although Harold Wilson came from nearby Yorkshire. The problem the new leader will face apart from his own misguided notions about fiscal capacity and the need for ‘strict’ fiscal rules is that the financialisation of the British economy (like most economies in this neoliberal age) is so pervasive that the spheres of resistance to change are everywhere.
I saw a clip from John Stewart’s Daily Show yesterday where he showed some Fox News commentators (I think) talking about how they hate ‘woke’ and how they now have to put up with public events featuring “half naked men” (their slight against the gay community). Stewart then showed the next clip – the cage fight at the White House where two half naked men were featured. The way he presented it was (as usual for the show) very funny. Yesterday (June 17, 2026), the leader of the far Right party in Australia (One Nation) gave her first ever – Speech – to the National Press Club in Canberra and apart from several outrageous statements (such as “Businesses also tell me you can’t sack people these days, they’re on their phones, they don’t work, they don’t turn up, they actually are lazy” and the “hoax of global warming”), she announced that Australia cannot be a multicultural society and that “we must be monocultural”. The fact checkers have already exposed her lack of honesty with respect to the actual data surrounding many of her assertions. But the question of culture and national cohesiveness is a subject that I am working on as part of my aim to publish a sequel to my 2017 book – Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World – which I co-authored with Thomas Fazi. The question that the sequel begins with relates to what defines a viable currency area and what legitimates government fiscal policy. I see this issue as a central extension of the work on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) because it provides a sociological basis for currency sovereignty. One needs to develop a concept of the – Demos – to answer that question. I use that concept in the original sense.
The opening line of Part II of Joseph Schumpeter’s 1942 book – Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy – was “Can capitalism survive? No, I do not think it can”. His thesis was not that capitalism would perform badly, quite the opposite. Rather the considered that “its very success undermines the social institutions which protect it, and inevitably creates conditions in which it will not be able to live and which strongly points to socialism as the heir apparent.” The climate crisis facing the world is combining with the other outcomes of neoliberalism to create what is now called a poly crisis. Recently, a group associated with the United Nations Human Rights Council has released a – Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth (published June 10, 2026) – which proposes a series of policy shifts designed to address aspects of the poly crisis. While it recognises that we must “escape the trap of growthism”, it fails to articulate that the fundamental logic of capitalism is capital accumulation that requires growth. To escape the trap, we must move beyond that mode of production. Merely tweaking policy structures within capitalism will not solve the problem.
On May 19, 2026, Oxfam Australia’s media release – Australian billionaires’ wealth grows by $50,000 per minute – informed us of the growing inequality in Australia, a country that promotes a ‘legend’ that egalitarianism is at its core. I will discuss their research in detail at another time but the results are stunning. In a population of 28 million, the “20 richest Australians hold more wealth than the bottom three million households”. While most of the population are struggling with “rising rents, grocery prices and energy bills”, the top-end-of-town have had a “bumper year” increasing their wealth by around $A50,000 per minute. That should frame our response to Tuesday’s (June 2, 2026) decision – Annual Wage Review 2026 – by the Fair Work Commission, Australia’s minimum wage setting authority, which increased the National Minimum Wage (NMW) by 6 per cent. A further cohort – those on minimum awards were given a 4.75 per cent increase in their wage. Against the current CPI growth, that increase provides for some modest real wage increase for the lowest paid workers in Australia. Of course, the employer groups are up-in-arms as usual claiming that the increase (and flow-ons – see below) will devastate employment growth and all the usual bunk as they post record profits. Fortunately, the FWC mostly ignored the bleating of the bosses. But compared to what is happening at the top of the income and wealth distribution, this change to the NMW is trivial to say the least.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released the latest labour force data today (May 21, 2026) – Labour Force, Australia – for April 2026 – which showed that the labour market deteriorated significantly in April. All the main indicators were moving in negative directions – employment growth fell, participation fell, unemployment increased, the employment-population ratio fell. There are now 10.2 per cent of available labour not being used (either unemployed or underemployment), which makes a farce of the RBA’s claims that the labour market is tight. There is substantial scope for more job creation given the slack that is present. However, if the global situation doesn’t improve quickly then that slack will increase sharply.
Last week, the RBA hiked interest rates again and tried to claim the economy was overheating. One way that we assess that claim is via the wages pressure in the labour market. An economy that is running out of productive resources, typically sees firms competing for scarce workers and bidding up wages to attract them. Yesterday (May 14, 2026), the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest – Wage Price Index, Australia – for the March-quarter 2026, which shows that the aggregate wage index rose by 3.3 per cent over the 12 months and is steady. Meanwhile, the annual inflation rate for the March-quarter came in at 4.1 per cent, while the monthly CPI inflation rate for March was 4.6 per cent. That means real wages are falling quite sharply, which is not consistent with an economy that is overheating and running short of resources. The RBA are grossly misrepresenting the current situation because they need cover to pursue their ideological crusade and assert their prominence in the policy making arena. The costs are borne by the workers who cannot get decent wage rises and the low-income mortgage holders that are transferring income (via the rate hikes) to the financial asset holders and bank shareholders (the ‘top-end-of-town’). It is extraordinary that the working class is so compliant in the face of this arrant power abuse by the elites.
The biographer of Keynes in three volumes – Robert Skidelsky – died on April 15, 2026 at the age of 84. As I explain below, Skidelsky was what we consider to be a mainstream ‘deficit dove’, who are Keynesian and Post Keynesian economists that are comfortable with using fiscal deficits to increase economic activity when there is mass unemployment, but then consider the government must then pursue surpluses on the other side of the cycle to balance out the fiscal position over the full cycle. They couch their recommendations in conservative logic bounded by appropriate movements in the debt to GDP ratio. They are ‘mainstream lite’ and typically oppose Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). As I explain, I met Skildesky in London a few times when MMT was becoming very popular (early in GFC) and we had fundamental disagreements even though he was attracted to certain element of MMT including the Job Guarantee. Here are some recollections.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released the latest labour force data today (APRIL 16, 2026) – Labour Force, Australia – for March 2026 – which showed that the labour market steadied after last month’s contraction. While employment growth remained positive and was dominated by full-time work gains (as part-time employment fell), the fact that the participation rate fell helped keep the unemployment rate stable. There are now 10.1 per cent of available labour not being used (either unemployed or underemployment), which makes a farce of the RBA’s claims that the labour market is tight. There is substantial scope for more job creation given the slack that is present. However, if the global situation doesn’t improve quickly then that slack will increase sharply.
I read a new Report this morning – Waste Not – that was published by a new unit in Britain called Verdant, which seems to have links to the England and Wales Green Party. The work is interesting and raises several issues that bear on how government fiscal policy should be assessed. The issues I have with the Report were not canvassed by the author to its detriment. It relates to the impact of government spending and the employment effects of cutting expenditure, regardless of whether we classify that expenditure as ‘waste’ or not.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released the latest labour force data today (March 19, 2026) – Labour Force, Australia – for February 2026 – which showed that the labour market had gone backwards. While employment growth remained positive, full-time work fell. The participation rate rose, which in some situations indicates a positive outlook as workers re-enter the labour market to take advantage of the increased employment opportunities. In this case, I think it signals more desperation as cost-of-living pressures rise, given that a lot of older workers came back into the labour market looking for work. Unemployment rose sharply (0.2 points) to 4.3 per cent. Together with underemployment, there are now 10.1 per cent of available labour not being used it is ludicrous to talk about Australia being close to full employment. There is substantial scope for more job creation given the slack that is present. The RBA’s claim that there is significant excess demand in the overall economy, which they used on Tuesday to justify a further rate hike, is hard to reconcile against this data.