The Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke gave a speech entitled – Economic Challenges: Past, Present, and Future – on April 7, 2010 in Texas. It emphatically demonstrated why he should never have been appointed to the position he is in and why his reappointment just compounds that initial mistake. While he has been largely quiet on fiscal matters over the last few years this speech outlines without doubt that he doesn’t really understand the monetary system he supervises and has an understanding that is seemingly limited to that found in any erroneous mainstream macroeconomics text book. The only other interpretation is that he does understand the system yet chooses to deliberately deceive the wider public so as he can support ideological attacks on government activity. Either way, he is part of the problem we face.

Today I decided that there is another macroeconomics research unit that needs to be closed down. My decision was reached after I read the latest paper from the Bank of International Settlements – The future of public debt: prospects and implications – which confirms that the Monetary and Economic Department of that organisation is publishing deficit terrorist literature. The paper is so bad that I am sorry I read it. I may avoid BIS publications altogether in the future. But if I apply that reasoning I am going to be back to reading Stieg Larsson novels and there are only three of them and I have already read them!

My RSS feed and E-mails have brought some shockers in the last few days from the financial markets – official bulletins from banks that don’t make any sense at all (US about to default-type arguments); hysterical Austrian school logic (from a large player in the Asian markets) and news commentary from a so-called business insider magazine. The latter should immediately close its doors and declare they are not competent to comment on matters relating to banking. Coincidentally, I also received several E-mails in the last few days asking me to comment on the particular Austrian document noted above that has been circulating within financial markets recently. I deal with that later in the post. Anyway, apart from my main research and other writing activities this blog stuff is “all in a day’s work” – Friday March 19, 2010.

As the danger of a global depression recedes, the themes I am picking up regularly now from commentators, politicians etc are all pointing back to the mainstream status quo version of the way the economy works, in particular, for the purposes of this blog the labour market. I expect to increasingly hear and read the rhetoric that dominated the public debates prior to the crisis – that unemployment is essentially a supply-side phenomenon reflecting choices made by individuals in the context of government welfare policy that distorts these choices in favour of not working. In this context, the simple act of extending unemployment benefits in the US has been controversial. This takes us back to the dominant debates over the last 20 years which saw governments all around the World pursuing policies that were antithetical to full employment and pernicious in their impact on the victims of their policy failures. Stay tuned – 2011 – the mainstream will be in full attack mode again – conveniently forgetting where we have been over the last 3 or so years.

Yesterday, the British government announced that they had actually recorded a deficit in January which is rare given they normally get a big revenue boost in that month. The reaction to the news has been hysterical and calls to invoke fiscal austerity measures in the lead up to their national election are gathering pace. You can imagine that these calls are suggesting exactly the opposite of what I think the British government should be doing. Given that they risk locking a generation of their youth into a lifetime of disadvantage, job creation programs are required now which will require further stimulus. That is the only responsible course of action. The bond markets disagree. But if the governments around the world really represented the interests of their citizens they would use their capacities to render all these vandals irrelevant. Most people, however, do not understand what that capacity is and how the government could use it. Anyway, now to the news …

On Friday (February 12, 2010) as Eurostats released the flash estimates of fourth quarter GDP for the EU (see below), the IMF released a new staff position note entitled – Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy. The bad news is the Europe is looking more like a region that is heading for a double dip recession. The even worse news is that that cretins at the IMF are claiming they know why they messed up in the past and how to address their failure. Stay tuned for a modified version of the same. The fact is that the IMF Report reveals they are as ignorant as ever of the workings of the modern monetary economy. So this revisionist exercise doesn’t signal a major paradigm stage.

In this recent blog – Who is in charge? – I outlined the case that all the so-called “financing” arrangements that government deploy which are held out to us as being required to allow them to spend are in fact voluntary and reflect deep-seated ideological anti-government positions. I wanted to make the point that it is governments not amorphous “bond markets” that ultimately in command of the destiny of their nations and that citizens are being grossly mislead by lies and half-truths into believing that governments have to introduce harsh austerity packages to appease the markets because if they do not the latter will “close them down”. I continue with that theme today and address some issues raised in the comments that accompanied that blog.

Today started off as a usual Sunday – a long-ride on my bike interrupted by two punctures (why do they come in waves). Anyway, then some other things like a visit to the community garden where I have a plot. Then it was down to work and as I read news stories and academic articles I was continually confronted with the tide of hysteria surrounding the impending sovereign defaults (as we are led to believe). My principle conclusion was that these journalists etc have a pretty good job. They get paid for knowing nothing about the topics they purport to be experts about and instead just make stuff up and intersperse it with some mainstream economic ideology taken straight from Mankiw’s macroeconomic textbook. It would be an easy way to make a living. Get the text book out … turn to the chapter on debt this week (last week inflation) and start of with some “large” numbers which are “without precedent” and you are done. Easy pie! Problem is that it influences the readers who do not know these commentators are charlatans.

Today I have had the misfortune of reading the latest Australian Government Intergenerational Report, which is really a confection of lies, half-truths interspersed with irrelevancies and sometimes some interesting facts. Why an educated nation tolerates this rubbish is beyond me. The media has been making a meal of the latest report and all the doom merchants – those deficit terrorists – a claiming we have to get into surplus as soon as possible. They seem to be ignoring that we are still embroiled in a major economic crisis requiring on-going fiscal support. But more importantly, they haven’t a clue what their policy proposals actually would mean in a modern monetary economy where external deficits are typical and the private sector overall is desiring to increase their saving. Anyway, read on … its all downhill.

Ahh … the Great Moderation – now wasn’t that a laugh. Today I have been examining data in preparation for a new project I am beginning on inflation response functions. Thinking about the data made me recall the sheer arrogance of my profession. And an article in the Melbourne Age prompted this further by way of coincidence. The idea that the economics profession had solved the business cycle by implementing inflation targetting-type policies and pursuing fiscal austerity was the flavour of the late 1990s and early 2000s. I was even told several times in the last decade that I was mad running a research centre which focused on unemployment because that problem had been solved too. Economists of my persuasion were regularly ridiculed at conferences and meetings. And then … the crisis struck confirming everything that us “idiots” had been saying for more than a decade. And yet, the chief proponents of the Great Moderation lie still aspire to top public office.

Last weekend, the senior economics writer for the Sydney Morning Herald became a salesman. He has been seemingly recruited voluntarily into the marketing campaign for Mankiw’s economics textbooks which dominate the world supply. In his textbook the Principles of Economics, which is just palpable indoctrination, students are introduced at the outset to the 10 Principles of Economics. These principles resemble the hard sell you get from a salesperson who knows their product will not stand scrutiny but wants the commission nonetheless. But Gittins, knowing his power to influence the economic thinking among his readership, presents the principles as if they are all you need to know to understand economics. What a total con that is.

Today I was in Sydney for some meetings and also I attended the first sessions of the Society of Heterodox Economists conference. I took some papers with me to read on the train coming back to Newcastle. Sitting on the train for 3 hours presents a good opportunity to catch up on back-reading. While I would have been better off reading the Phantom comic that I had in my bag, I chose, instead, to read the latest fiscal analysis provided by the IMF. The paper I discuss here is typical of the whole debate at present. It cannot provide any evidence to advance its scary “deficit and public debt” vision, but it doesn’t let the facts get in the way of presenting it anyway. My professional assessment. These guys should get a real job.

In the coming period and probably years you should expect to hear, read and be submerged with mainstream economists coming out and assessing the structural budget deficit. Across most economies, these so-called “experts” will be arguing that the structural deficit in the nation is too high and deep cuts are needed to bring it into surplus. The importance of this debate is that they use the structural deficit estimates as an indicator of the fiscal stance being taken by the government and thus separate out the effect of the automatic stabilisers. The problem is that it is an inexact science. The mainstream approach is highly dependent on the NAIRU concept (see below) and thus will err on the side of concluding that the deficit is “too big” and “likely to cause inflation”, whereas it is probable that the deficit will be too small to underpin private savings and high levels of employment.

UK Tory leader David Cameron is back in print in the Guardian (November 10, 2009) with his claim that Big society can fight poverty. Big government just fuels it. In the same edition of the Guardian, regular commentator Polly Toynbee provided a critical analysis to the Cameron line in her article – David Cameron, social policy butterfly. However, sadly, neither writer understands the principles of modern monetary theory (MMT) which means that neither has the slightest inkling of how the monetary system that they live in works. If they did understand that system and the opportunities that it provides a sensible national government then they would probably not write what they did.

Today I have been working on a new book and have been deeply emeshed in paradigmic debates. The practical relevance, other than the work gives me another day’s pay to maintain my part in keeping aggregate demand growth moving, is that two Nobel prize winners (Phelps and Krugman) have had a recent paradigmic dispute about similar themes. One attack was implicit (Phelps on Keynesians), the other very direct and personal (Krugman on Phelps). Neither understand modern monetary theory (MMT) although Krugman is closer than Phelps. Phelps’s work, in my view, has been used by neo-liberals for years to undermine the employment prospects of millions of workers. It is also a primary IMF tool for keep less developing countries poor. Sounds like a topic to be discussed.