Some hard truths for 2012

Some new research has given me hope that the politicians will soon be in a position to use the fiscal tools at their disposable to solve the economic crisis. We might call it the pigeon recovery. The ABC News reports that Pigeons can count and so I propose we round up a bunch of them from some of those nice European buildings ship them (humanely) to Brussels and the Eurotower and let them count up the unemployment numbers (well they might have to go to Eurostat in Luxembourg). Then they could calculate the real GDP and income losses and by way of a new Google Pigeon-to-English translator convey to the politicians the urgency of the situation and that jobs are created when people or governments spend and that income is created as a consequence and people become more prosperous. Then some homing pigeons could fly some Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) material to the offices of the politicians to give them something to read instead of the latest nonsense from the IMF or some other institutions that have forgotten that unemployment matters and financial ratios are of limited relevance. Once the pigeons have done their work – the Euro leaders will sit down and realise that an orderly break-up of the monetary union is the best long-term strategy for all of them. Speaking of which here are some “hard truths” for 2012.

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Mainstream macroeconomics textbooks do not impart knowledge

I have spent most of today working on a Chapter for the upcoming macroeconomics textbook that I am writing with Randy Wray (UMKC). It is a difficult task getting the balance between the content and the pedagogy more or less correct. One has to be interesting but not simplify to the point of distraction. Moreover one has to seek to impart knowledge. Which then takes one down the epistemological path as to what constitutes knowledge. How much simplification is too much? How much abstract modelling is feasible? Questions like that. But an overriding objective is to ensure that students who are using the book receive an education which means they should expand their critical faculties based on an expansion of knowledge. One of the worst aspects of my profession is that the vast majority of textbooks that students are forced to learn from do not advance these objectives. Whatever else one might conclude about their presentation etc, they mostly can be reduced to being considered as propaganda instruments. Most of them tell outright lies about the way the monetary system operates. The current crisis and the unusual policy interventions (particularly those employed by the central banks) have brought these lies into stark relief. We can conclude that mainstream macroeconomics textbooks do not impart knowledge they are dogma.

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If a government won’t create jobs, it must provide income support

You can sense the fear in people’s lives at present as the economic crisis seems to be worsening and various so-called opinion leaders are telling us we are in danger of lapsing into a depression like the 1930s unless there is drastic action taken by governments. For example, the IMF’s latest salvo. Then you hear them say that the action necessary is more fiscal austerity. And you know it will definitely get worse. My own superannuation fund sent us letters last week suggesting that they are in danger of being unable to meet their liabilities and benefits – current and future – will likely be cut. How much? Fear tells us a lot. Action: all those retiring will take lump-sums and invest in cash – eliminating the risk but solidifying the cuts and – further undermining the viability of the fund. That what is happening everywhere. A moment’s reflection tells us that this fear is being deliberately created by the elites who are elected by us to advance our best interests. These elites are using fear – and deliberately perpetuating falsehoods to keep us ignorant – in order to usurp democracy and take control of the wealth creation processes so they can tilt the field further in their favour. This crisis could be over in a few weeks or months with appropriate policy interventions. It has now dragged on for years. That is because it is taking the elites that long to organise their on-going coup.

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100 per cent forecast errors are acceptable to the IMF

Imagine you had a headache and some economist tells you that you can cure the headache by bashing your head against a wall. So you duly bash your head against the nearest brick wall and not only does it hurt (perhaps drawing blood depending on the severity of the blow) but you note the headache is now worse. The economist then concludes you didn’t bash your head hard enough and instructs you to stick to the “rule” and give it another try – only this time go harder. Blood is now flowing, the head is traumatised and the headache gets even more unbearable. Welcome to Greece which is being bullied by the Troika (EU, ECB and the IMF) in a similar way. The latest IMF medium-term forecasts for Greece reveal a staggering failure by that institution to understand causality and the impacts that their austerity programs have on real economies. Without a blush, the IMF presented the world yesterday with revised forecasts for Greece which reveal their previous forecasts will be around 100 per cent wrong over just over a 6-month horizon. That sort of error is beyond any accepted professional standards. The IMF’s response – bash your head even harder.

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Australian labour force data – everything is bad

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) published the Labour Force data for November 2011 today. The data shows that employment has fallen, the participation rate has fallen and unemployment (and the unemployment rate) have risen. Monthly working hours have also fallen. This is the worst combination that can occur indicating that job creation is declining, workers are leaving the workforce because of the lack of job opportunities and labour underutilisation is rising. So while the Government and the uninformed were celebrating yesterday’s National Accounts data which showed that three months ago Australia was growing (below trend), today’s results are more immediate – they are a depiction of where things are now. The Government is undermining employment growth by insisting on its obsessive pursuit of a budget surplus. The most striking expression of how poor the Australian labour market is performing is the continued deterioration of the youth labour market. That should be a policy priority but unfortunately the government is largely silent on that issue. My assessment of today’s results are that – everything is bad.

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Australian National Accounts – below trend growth continues

As Summer struggles to makes it appearance on the East Coast (coldest start for something like 40 odd years) the ABS released the Australian National Accounts – for the September 2011 quarter came out today and showed that the Australian economy grew by 1 per cent in the quarter down from the strong 1.2 per cent in June. In real terms, the economy grew 2.5 per cent over the last 12 months which is a good result considering that the March quarter contraction of 0.9 per cent. There are several competing forces contributing to this result. The growth is being driven by private capital formation and household consumption but being dragged down by net exports, harsh government austerity and the run down in inventories, the latter suggesting firms are losing confidence in the immediate outlook. If the private investment boom continues then growth for the foreseeable future should be maintained and approach trend. I would note that the recent (pre-crisis) trend growth was insufficient to mop up both the residual unemployment and the rising underemployment. The case for continued government support for higher growth remains especially with inflation now falling.

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Saturday Quiz – December 3, 2011 – answers and discussion

Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.

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Don’t tell the Germans – the ECB weekly deposit tender failed

Its summer! After reading this blog – The ECB is a major reason the Euro crisis is deepening – many readers have written to me asking to provide more explanation of the “sterilisation” operations that the ECB is engaged in. It is clear that an increasing number of people are becoming interested in arcane things like central bank operations which can only augur well for creating capacity for better public debate. A lot of readers overnight have reacted one way or another to the announcement by several central banks that the swap lines are open again albeit at a lower “cost” than previously. There was also considerable interest in understanding what the “failed” sterilisation yesterday means. The answer is not much but we had better not tell the Germans that the ECB weekly deposit tender failed.

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Saturday Quiz – November 26, 2011 – answers and discussion

Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.

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Austerity begets austerity

It is Friday and in Newcastle today it feels like Winter is back although I am aware that complaining about 19 degrees centigrade is somewhat disingenuous to the Northern Hemisphere and temperate region dwellers. But still we complain – more than one person today has said “isn’t it freezing”. So I have been bunkered down reading a lot. Which isn’t that much different to any other day real – hail, rain or shine. The European laboratory is dominating the daily news though and providing us with scripts that no professional playwright could conceive. This week we have seen the European Commission release its latest gee-whiz (you-beaut) plan to save Europe from itself and like all the previous announcements lots of speeches and photos were taken but the substance is missing. The only development that these plans seem to be leading to is a suppression of national democracy. That is my assessment of the EC’s latest proposal. From an economic perspective it maintains the rule – austerity begets austerity.

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Going right to the top in Europe

I woke up to the headlines this morning about the apparently failed German bond tender yesterday and all the experts predicting doom. In my E-mail box there was around 30 requests for an explanation from readers who had read the news and concluded that it was a major event in the current crisis but didn’t really understand what the implications were. The implications are fairly simple – the bond markets are working out that no EMU government is free of insolvency risk because they all use a foreign currency (the Euro). Germany is better placed to resist the crisis because of the relative strength of its economy but it is not immune from it. Its economy will also deteriorate as the effects of austerity spread out through trade. While the “experts” waxed lyrical about the crisis being confined to profligate EMU states (the PIIGS), it was always clear that the northern strong-hold states were going to be dragged in as the crisis deepened. That is because the problem is the Euro itself and the way the monetary system is designed. All the other emotional stuff about lazy Greeks is a sideshow. Germany is starting to find that out – yesterday, it received its first strong message. The crisis is going right to the top in Europe now.

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At least 172 thousand Brits have their government to blame

It amazes me that politicians actually believe the neo-liberal lies that the path to lower fiscal deficits is to cut the hell out of public spending during a recession when private sector expectations are conservative if not downright pessimistic and their spending is subdued. If you add in the fact that these politicians make these claims en masse – that is, they are all caught in this “fiscal consolidation” madness – then it becomes obvious that the only other route to growth – exports – will also be closed. The latest data from Britain is all bad and suggests that the claims that cutting net public spending would stimulate growth are wrong and also that the way to cut a deficit is not to deliberately reduce economic growth. At least 172 thousand Brits have their government to blame refers to the change in unemployment in Britain since June 2010 (just after the new Government was elected). The unemployed are the human face of the ideologically-driven vandalism that the British government is currently engaged in.

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The British government – moving from denial to blame shifting

The British economy is clearly declining and the Government has moved from denying the decline (it initially spent months talking up its claims that austerity would promote growth) to admitting the decline but diverting the blame to others. The others in this case – are the hopeless Europeans who move from one disaster to another. So now the narrative that is emerging in Britain is that its export-led recovery plans are being damaged by the failure of the Europeans to do something about the crisis there. There are two ways of thinking about that. If Europe was such a problem then it has been a problem for nearly 4 years and so it was misguided to deliberately damage domestic growth (via austerity). The other way to look at it is to note that the British economy has resumed growth under the support of the fiscal stimulus (introduced by the previous government) and then started to experience declining growth virtually from the day the current British government announced its scorched earth policy cutbacks. The recent Euro crisis has really nothing to do with that. It is clear that the British government is moving from denial to blame shifting.

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The hypocrisy of the Euro cabal is staggering

As they say in the classics – “some of my best friends are” … and in my case I might have added German. The Euro crisis – that is, the crisis that has arisen because the creation of the Euro stripped member nations of their capacity to defend their economies against negative private spending episodes – is being worsened because of the incredible resistance by Germany and the Troika (EU, ECB, IMF). The Brussels-Frankfurt consensus – which claimed the creation of the Eurozone would engender stability and growth is shattered – irretrievably humiliated one might venture to say – yet the cabal that hides behind that “consensus” maintains power and influence. The hypocrisy that the cabal engage in is staggering. Their narrative is almost totally dislocated from the reality. They regularly disregard their own rules to favour the vested interests that keep them in power. And meanwhile, they are overseeing a collapse of all the ideals they claimed their system was designed to achieve.

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Australian labour market – staggering along

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) published the Labour Force data for October 2011 today. The data shows that employment barely grew and thanks to an artificially low labour force growth rate was just sufficient to allow unemployment to fall slightly. However, most of the drop in unemployment was due to a slight decline in the participation rate. The data is not bad but it is certainly not good and points to a weak economy overall. How long that remains is anyone’s guess in these uncertain times where governments have largely abandoned any plans to provide fiscal support to help the economies grow. The recent acceleration of the crisis in Europe should not impact negatively on our labour market if the Government is flexible enough to abandon its obsessive pursuit of a budget surplus. The black spot in the data today is the continued deterioration of the youth labour market. That should be a policy priority but unfortunately the government is largely silent on that issue. Overall, the Australian labour market is just staggering along.

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Economy faltering – Australia’s wind-up Treasurer “We will cut harder”

On May 10, 2011, the Australian Treasurer delivered his Budget Speech 2011-12. At the time I wrote these blogs – Australian Federal Budget – more is not less and Time to end the deficits are bad/surpluses are good narrative. Some 6 months later the Australian government received news (November 07, 2011) – Swan warned on surplus timeline – that indicated the economy was slowing and tax revenue was going to be much lower than estimated. It is becoming obvious to most people now (what was clear months ago) that the Government’s obsession with achieving a budget surplus is undermining the growth prospects of the economy. They should never had withdrawn the fiscal support in the first place but now they should definitely abandon this surplus obsession. The Australian Treasurer was like a wind-up doll yesterday when told the economy was faltering. All he could say was “We will cut harder”. Moronic.

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Qantas should be nationalised (again)

At Melbourne airport last night the Qantas jets looked resplendent with their red flying kangaroo and the “Spirit of Australia” logos. I chuckled to myself about the sheer audacity of an airline that continues to promote itself as if it is our “national carrier” yet is systematically trying to undermine aspects of our culture that we value highly. It is dangerous territory to try to define a national identity. But in Australia we continually emphasise fairness as a hallmark of our national aspiration. Yet, reality is often different to our romantic perceptions and imagery. This blog is an extended version of an Op Ed I wrote for the Fairfax media today on the Qantas dispute, which has gained some attention abroad and been the topic of choice in Australia over the last week. The reality is that the gung-ho union-hating management of the airline are now engaged in a death battle with the union movement and aim to destroy working conditions once and for all and turn the airline into a cheap, low quality outfit principally flying out of Asia while still trading on the fact that we consider it to be (as a historical artifact) an Australian icon. The only way forward for Qantas is for the Australian government to nationalise it and get it flying in the national interest.

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Saturday Quiz – October 29, 2011 – answers and discussion

Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.

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US opinion polls expose mainstream economic theory

I am currently quite interested in the formation of consumer expectations after being asked by a major financial institution to consider constructing a new series for them. So in developing the project I have been enmeshed in technical detail the last week or so. I am also interested in the way different polls are interpreted. In the last few days two major polls in the US have been released. They are broadly in agreement but there are some interesting differences. The other interesting aspect of the polls is that they provide further evidence against the way the mainstream of my profession thinks about the economy. They reveal that individuals are not likely to behave as Ricardian agents. The mainstream theorist claim that individuals will spend once governments cut deficits and politicians have used this assertion to justify imposing (or suggesting) harsh fiscal austerity. The reality is very different as these polls suggest.

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Australia – falling inflation belies all the boom talk

The Australian Bureau of Statistics released the Consumer Price Index, Australia data for the September 2011 quarter today and it revealed that the easing in the inflation rate detected in the June quarter has continued. The last three quarters have delivered inflation rates of 1.6 per cent in March 2011, 0.9 per cent in the June quarter and now 0.6 per cent in the September quarter. If that trend continues the annualised rate will fall below the Reserve Bank of Australia’s (RBA) lower inflation targetting bound. The annualised inflation rate fell from 3.6 per cent in the June quarter to 3.5 per cent in the 12 months to September 2011. The ephemeral factors associated with the impacts of the natural disasters (floods and cyclones) that our food growing areas endured earlier this year are now dissipating. The major factors driving inflation now are utility price increases, travel and accommodation. The RBA’s preferred inflation measure (explained below) grew by 0.3 per cent. That will put downward pressure on interest rates. You might ask whether the “bank economists” (the private sector mavens who always think inflation is about to accelerate out of control) predicted this significant easing. The answer is that they predicted that inflation for the September would be running at twice the actual rate. That is, a 100 per cent error – which raises the question yet again – why does the mainstream media rely on their input to guide the public on where the economy is heading.

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