Today I got around to reading a report – Australia’s Productivity Challenge – which was released last week (February , 2011) from the Grattan Institute, a new research organisation in Australia that aims to provide evidence-based insights into social and economic issues in Australia. The Report is interesting because it exposes some of the bigger lies that are abroad about how well the Australian economy is faring. I have consistently been arguing (over the last 15 odd years) that the neo-liberal policy onslaught that has aimed to erode the power of workers viz capital and create a desperation among the unemployed (making income support harder to get) have created a dumbed down economy – racing to the bottom. One manifestation of this prediction was that productivity would fall as the impact of the budget surpluses (reduced public investment) and legislative changes too their toll. The Report shows that this future is upon us – we are living a delusion – being propped up by China. That is not a sustainable future.

A Reuters market analyst (John Kemp) has created a stir by effectively declaring that the global economy is governed by some global NAIRU – a non-accelerating rate inflation rate of unemployment – such that the advanced economies cannot reduce their unemployment rates by expansionary fiscal policy and major structural reforms are needed. In a recent article – Mind the global output gap – he argues that “(e)scalating food and fuel prices are a sign the global economy is approaching full resource utilisation and the limits of sustainable output”. He claims that the “high unemployment and idle factories” in the advanced economies are not a sign of a “cyclical lack of demand’ but rather reflect “structural shifts”. From a policy perspective this is natural rate theory on a global scale and effectively denies that sovereign governments can influence domestic demand and real output (within their own policy boundaries) through aggregate demand management. This is the ultimate neo-liberal denial of the effectiveness of fiscal policy. It doesn’t stand scrutiny as you might expect.

Today the Australian government demonstrated how poor their grasp of macroeconomics is and how badly they are managing our economy. In response to the very destructive floods that have ravaged the most populated states on the east coast (Queensland, NSW and Victoria) and wiped out billions in income-generating assets and businesses, they decided to increase taxes to “pay” for the reconstruction relief. This is at at time when the economy is slowing, inflation is moderating and the banks cannot get enough treasury debt to satisfy their prudential requirements. Further, it is at a time when there are 12.5 per cent of willing labour resources lying idle and long-term unemployment is rising. I noted in yesterday’s blog – Its grim on both sides of the Atlantic – that things are really bleak in the UK (now contracting again courtesy of its government policies) and in the US (about to contract courtesy of its government’s mismanagement). In both cases, the malaise is being caused by a dysfunctional ideology being imposed by policy makers onto very fragile economies. Well it seems that the madness along the coastlines of the Atlantic has crossed the Pacific. The imposition of a flood levy is a nonsensical and destructive policy act.

I am currently writing a piece for the US weekly The Nation which is focusing my mind on issues relating to what a social democratic narrative should look like and in what way does it have to change from that which dominated government policy and the relationship the state had with its citizens in the Post WWII period up until the neo-liberal resurgence in the mid-1970s. It is an interesting topic and my deadline looms. Serendipitously, while I was driving back from the airport the other day I was listening to a repeat of an ABC radio program Big Ideas (thank god for our public broadcaster) which was a repeat of a lecture – What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy? – given by the late Tony Judt as the 2009 Remarque Lecture at New York University on October 19, 2009. The lecture nicely dovetailed into my current thoughts and challenged the “left” to wake up to themselves and revive the collective narrative and to get angry about what we have lost over the last 30 years. There are many memorable lines in this speech and the title – imagine if we treated “humiliation itself as a cost” is just one of them (more about which later).

The title of today’s blog comes from a speech given on January 12, 2011 by Richard W. Fisher, boss of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas – The Limits of Monetary Policy – which carried the sub-title – Monetary Policy Responsibility Cannot Substitute for Government Irresponsibility. It is a speech littered with ideological assertions parading as sensible public commentary. It will resonate with the deficit terrorists and reinforce the policy agenda that will only make the situation in the US worse not better. The ideas were echoed elsewhere in the world in the last week. Japan is considering hiking tax rates “because they want more private growth and less public net spending”. The (un)truth brigade have thus been out in force in recent days – spreading a litany of lies and falsehoods which only aim to perpetuate their irrational obsession that government economic activity is bad. I only wish they would just speak the truth.

I am travelling for most of this week with a very disrupted working routine – in between commitments. So this blog is shorter than usual and also somewhat unfinished in its conception. But the topic is the current call for the American Economic Association to introduce a code of ethical conduct for professional economists in the light of revelations in recent years about the abominable behaviour that many (academic) economists have displayed where they provide expert opinion in public in their guise as an independent economist but at the same time are being paid stipends of one form or another by corporations who would be affected by policy changes that the economists are talking about. This is usually in the context of such economists calling for more extensive deregulation. My view is that a more serious challenge to my profession has to be made. A code of conduct is fine but when the whole carcass of the profession is corrupted and rotten something more comprehensive is required – a major rethink about how we teach economics – nothing short of a scientific revolution is required. The whole body of mainstream economics needs to be trashed.

Happy new year to everyone! It is starting out pretty poorly despite the nice weather and personal fun. On the last day of last year, the British Government released its Giving Green Paper, which apparently provides some detail about how it sees its Big Society concept working. As one commentator said it reads like it was written by a bunch of amateurs. But what it tells me is that the conservatives haven’t really evolved much since Maggie Thatcher declared there was no such thing as society. The Big Society is just a reprise of that concept with some mention of mobile phone apps and ATMs to match the historical period of technology that the latest attack on the welfare of the citizens is occurring. The Big Society is a blatant relinquishment of essential government roles and in that sense is a politically cynical attempt to cover up the impossibility of individual action relaxing systemic spending gaps. My training as a macroeconomists tells me that individuals cannot ease such macroeconomic constraints. Only the national government via appropriately sized budget deficits can do that. Which is exactly the responsibility the British government is recoiling from. The Big Society aka BS. More the fool anyone who believes in it.

Research has shown conclusively in the past that those who undergo mainstream economics training are more selfish, less co-operative, less honest and less generous than other groups. These insidious qualities are reinforced and strengthen over the course of their undergraduate years. There has also been conjecture about the political role played by conservative economists – that is, that they provide authority for the industrial and financial elites to lobby politicians to introduce policy regimes that create the conditions whereby these groups can appropriate an ever increasing share of real income. They have been used to perpetuate the myth that the “business cycle” was dead and hence governments should have limited involvement in the “market economy” which was promoted as being self-regulating and capable of maximising wealth creation for the benefit of everyone. It was clear that this was always a sham and ideologically based rather than ground in any theoretical legitimacy or evidence-based standing. The fact that the mainstream failed to predict the crisis and have no tools in their models to provide a solution to the dramatic private spending collapse reinforced the notion that mainstream economists were ideological warriors. But new research has provided another clue – their brains are thinner!

Most of my blogs are about advanced nations. Many of these nations are being plunged back in time by misguided applications of fiscal austerity and even when growth returns they will take a decade or more to get back to the per capita income levels that prevailed prior to the crisis. Many children and teenagers in these nations will be denied essential education, training and workplace experience by the deliberate choice by their governments to entrench long-term unemployment and to starve their economies of jobs growth. But it remains that these nations are not poor in general and while people are losing houses and other items on credit only a small proportion will starve. Not so the poorer nations that I rarely write about. These are the nations where a high proportion of the citizens live below or around the poverty line. These are the nations that are at the behest of the IMF and suffer the most from their erroneous policy interventions. Today I reflect on how those nations have been going during this crisis. The bottom line is that the way the Fund reinvented itself and reimposed itself on the poorer nations after the collapse of Bretton Woods in 1971 has damaged their growth prospects and ensured that millions of people around the world have remained locked in poverty. Along the way … children have died or have failed to receive the levels of public education that any child anywhere deserves. There is no positive role for the IMF in its current guise.

You know something is wrong when the unemployment rate in major holiday destinations persist at high levels. Typically, these areas have what economists refer to as seasonal unemployment – so that during the off-season (when the holiday makers are back home) there is very little labour market activity but once the vacation period begins there are many jobs and people. I have lived in various surf locations for many years and one such location had a steady-state population of 1000 or so residents and on Boxing Day this swelled to 25,000 and that new population endured for the ensuing holiday period (until the Australia Day weekend – January 26). Many of the surf crew and musicians would take jobs during this period and work very long hours (the surf was typically bad during the summer anyway) and use the savings to eke out an existence for the rest of the year – sometimes also accessing unemployment benefits sometimes not. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics published a bulletin (September 7, 2010) for the Cape Cod area which is one such major holiday region in the US. The situation there is dire and requires an immediate policy response from the US government. Unfortunately, this issue appears to be off the policy agenda. Well, until this week at least. A Democrat from Ohio has introduced a “full employment bill” which aims to eliminate the US central bank (good) and restore the US government’s currency sovereignty for keeps. The problem is that it goes down some dead-ends and avoids facing up to the real issues. So it is a well-motivated full employment bill – sort of!

In yesterday’s blog – Our children never hand real output back in time – I canvassed the recent speech by Japanese financial market expert Eisuke Sakakibara who emphasised that the world recession will be protracted (until 2015 at least) because governments are refusing to support output and income generation with appropriately scaled fiscal interventions. It was a timely warning I think. But organisations like the OECD are pressuring governments to do exactly the opposite. They want governments to accelerate their pro-cyclical fiscal austerity plans – that is, withdraw public spending while private spending languishes. It is a purely ideological demand – and will worsen the recovery prospects of any country that follows that course – Ireland is our beacon! What is required at present are very costly fiscal programs – programs that utilise as many real resources as are idle. Such a strategy would be the exemplar of responsible fiscal policy management.

There was an interesting conference in Tokyo last week which featured academic Eisuke Sakakibara, the former Japanese government vice minister of finance who is characteristically known as “Mr Yen” given his knowledge of banking and world financial markets. Sakakibara predicted a prolonged recession lasting until 2015 because fiscal deficits are being deliberately withdrawn by misguided governments. The neo-liberals are claiming that public debt ratios have to be cut to reduce the “future tax burden on our children”. The reality is that intergenerational burdens work in exactly the opposite way in a fiat monetary system to what the mainstream neo-liberal claim. The misguided fiscal policy direction the neo-liberals are pushing will impose real burdens on our children. They will be less educated, less skilled, less experienced, and have lower income as a whole as a result of the fiscal austerity. Their future possibilities will be reduced as a consequence. In fact, the whole anti-budget deficit argument is just a ploy to seek ways whereby the elites can get more real income now and more real income later for their own enjoyment. Spreading the real output more widely through fiscal interventions frustrates that aspiration. Significantly, our children never hand real output back in time to pay for the public debt incurred at a previous time.

It was the last day of the 12th Path to Full Employment Conference/17th National Unemployment Conference in Newcastle, which I host. The papers were interesting all day and I will report on some of them another day. But overnight, the big news was that the US Senate has finally succeeded in forcing the US Federal Reserve Bank to release details of more than 21,000 transactions it made as a reaction to the rapidly escalating global financial crisis. The lending rose to $US3.3 trillion at its peak and dwarfs the volumes involved in QE1 and QE2 amounts. This is relevant to a debate in the banking literature about the separation of monetary policy functions (setting interest rates) and the broader monetary interventions we have been witnessing in this crisis, which bear close similarity to fiscal policy functions. The question is which macroeconomic policy functions should be accountable to the ballot box. My view is all of them!

It is a fact that the Australian economy escaped recording a technical recession (2 consecutive quarters of negative real GDP growth), having recorded only one negative real GDP quarter (December quarter 2008 = -0.7 per cent). In that quarter, the first of large fiscal stimulus measures began and growth accelerated after that. The downturn, however, did push up official unemployment and underemployment and the legacy of the rationed employment and hours growth is that Australia currently has a broad labour underutilisation rate of 12.5 per cent. Aggregate policy (fiscal and monetary) is now tightening and is being justified by official statements that the economy is about to explode on the back of a very strong commodity boom (mining) and that we are close to full employment anyway. We are being told that unless policy tightens now inflation will break out. The problem with the official rhetoric is that a sequence of data releases is telling a different story. In the past few weeks we have seen exports falling, a weakening construction sector, flat credit demand, and yesterday, a very weak investment outlook. The outlook for next week’s September quarter National Accounts data is becoming increasingly pessimistic. In the meantime, unemployment rose in October. The justifications for the policy tightening are vanishing although I would argue they never were credible in the first place. The miracle Australian economy is a little less shiny at present.