What our leaders are saying<\/strong><\/p>\n In this Melbourne Age article – It’s about the economy: Gillard<\/a> – we read that our Prime Minister:<\/p>\n \nJULIA Gillard has painted Tony Abbott as an irresponsible spendthrift, putting economic management at the core of her bid for re-election at a no-frills campaign launch in Brisbane.<\/p>\n “The real risk for debt and deficit in this campaign is Mr Abbott,” Ms Gillard said. “Mr Abbott is the risk to our budget surplus and to the future of the government’s balance sheet.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is what our Prime Minister said in her campaign launch<\/a>. If you cannot cope with obscenity look away and scroll forward quickly.<\/p>\n \nThe simple facts that the global financial crisis caused debt and deficit for economies around the world and when we look at other major advanced economies, they have a debt, on average, 15 times greater than ours … [The Opposition leader] … doesn’t tell you that when you look at the debt of this nation, it’s the equivalent of someone who earns $100,000 a year having a $6,000 loan. That’s where our nation is positioned.<\/p>\n Now let me say this: I want to repay that debt. I definitely want to see this nation repay that debt, and that’s why I’ll bring the Budget to surplus in 2013 and it’s why each and every day of this campaign, every time I have announced that we would spend on a new priority, we have also announced we would make the matching savings because I will not delay bringing the Budget to surplus by one hour, by one day. The Budget is coming back to surplus in 2013.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Prime Minister was interviewed<\/a> by a leading political journalist on the Today program (August 15, 2010).<\/p>\n She said the Opposition was “too big a risk – too big a risk for our one-point-three-trillion dollar economy particularly when Mr. Abbott is racing towards $30-billion of spending and what we know now is he’s spent almost a billion dollars each day of this campaign and that spending would halve our budget surplus. It’s too big a risk”.<\/p>\n It gets worse.<\/p>\n She was asked about economic management and she said:<\/p>\n \nNow the task emerging as we are, strong from these difficult economic times is to keep building for the future and that requires the Budget back to surplus …\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Opposition leader Tony Abbott was asked in an interview<\/a> this week (August 15, 2010) about his “pledge to get rid of the deficit and reduce debt”. He was specifically asked: “Why are you so confident of reducing debt when at this stage the figures don’t stack up?” His reply was (in part):<\/p>\n \n… Firstly, we will be getting all of our policies independently costed … Secondly, we will be releasing also later this week a kind of full balance sheet, if you like, of all our spends and saves, and I am confident people will be persuaded once those two things have happened that spending will be less and debt will be lower under us.<\/p>\n Then there is the question of my own competence. First, I was a senior minister in the most economically competent government in at least a generation. Second, as health minister I was responsible for the most complex, large-spending portfolio in the Commonwealth and there were no roof batt scandals or school hall rip-offs on my watch. Finally, and I’m not in the business of saying this is the be-all and end-all, but for what it’s worth I do have an economics degree and I note that Julia Gillard lacks such a degree, as does Wayne Swan.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Note the so-called “most economically competent government in at least a generation” was that government that saw the explosion of private sector indebtedness; a massive degradation of public infrastructure including schools, hospitals and road; virtually no growth in real wages; and the best labour underutilisation rate they could achieve was 9.9 per cent (see below).<\/p>\n They set up the conditions for Australia to go down the tube with the rest of the World in the recent downturn.<\/p>\n I guess he also studied economics at one of those Departments that students should boycott. Certainly when you consider his next statement:<\/p>\n \n… this idea that the spending spree got us through the recession is just … nonsense. If spending got you through recessions, why was there a recession in America? Why was a recession in Britain? Spending does not get you through recessions – having a fundamentally strong economy gets you through recessions …\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Enough said really. They had recessions in the US and Britain because they didn’t spend enough. Australia also didn’t spend enough but the spending gap was smaller. China certainly spent nearly enough and kept its economy growing strongly although there was some rising unemployment.<\/p>\n An economy cannot be strong without sufficient aggregate demand (spending).<\/p>\n Today, the Opposition released their costings and have according to ABC news<\/a> promised “to deliver $6.2b surplus”. The report says:<\/p>\n \nThe Coalition says it would deliver a budget surplus of $6.2 billion – almost double of that forecast under Labor … in 2012-13 … and in 20013-14 a surplus of $7.3 billion.<\/p>\n The Government’s budget forecasts have predicted a return to surplus in 2012-13 of $3.5 billion.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n When considering their plans it is obvious that if they try to achieve these outcomes, then the swing in non-government spending in terms of percentages of GDP that would be required to make up the spending gap created by the public contraction over the next two fiscal years would would have of proportion that we have never seen before in history. It won’t happen. Read on to see what will actually happen.<\/p>\n The real economy setting<\/strong><\/p>\n The following graph shows the two main components of the labour force underutilisation rate for Australia as measured by the Australian Bureau of Statistics – Table 21. Labour underutilisation by Age and Sex – Trend, Seasonally adjusted and Original<\/a>.<\/p>\n There has been virtually no mention of labour underutilisation in the campaign.<\/p>\n The underemployment rate and the unemployment rate sum to what the ABS call the total labour force underutilisation rate. It is, in fact, a conservative estimate of the total idle labour due to deficient aggregate demand because it excludes the hidden unemployed who are counted by the statistician as being outside the labour force.<\/p>\n The graph shows observations for the February quarter 2008 by age groups (which was the low-point unemployment rate overall for the last cycle. The total labour force underutilisation rate at the peak of the growth cycle was still 9.9 per cent comprising 3.9 per cent official unemployment and 5.9 underemployment (part-time workers who desire more hours of work but cannot find them).<\/p>\n As the downturn ensued these rates rose and by the May quarter 2010 (most recent data for this series) the official unemployment rate overall was 5.2 per cent (it has since risen) and the underemployment rate overall was 7.0 per cent (it has also risen since) given a total labour wastage rate of 12.2 per cent. Given the declining labour market since the May quarter it is clear that the total idle rate is nearer 13 per cent now.<\/p>\n If you examine the different fortunes of the age cohorts you easily see where the burden of recession lies.<\/p>\n Our young workers were already disadvantaged during the last growth cycle (total labour underutilisation of 18.9 per cent was the best achievable by a budget surplus constrained economy) but by the first quarter 2010 this rate had risen to 24.7. When the third quarter results are released we will see this rate higher.<\/p>\n The relatively high waste also extends into the 25-34 year old group.<\/p>\n These are the future workers. They are the ones who will be expected to achieve productivity gains as the baby boomers retire and die off. They are being systematically deprived of work and skills development by poorly conceived government policy.<\/p>\n There has been very little said in the election campaign about this issue. The major policy announcements that have any relevance are offering to pay a pittance to young workers to relocate and\/or threatening nasty penalties if the workers fall through the increasingly pernicious work test framework. At the edges we have heard some talk of new apprenticeships but just the promises made by various politicians are relative to the problem like dots in the ocean.<\/p>\n But neither party is taking responsibility for the lack of job creation in the Australian economy and the fact that the net employment that is being added is largely part-time in nature and driving underemployment up. Neither party is committed to a job creation strategy and have implied they both think it is a matter for the private markets.<\/p>\n They both limit the role of government to disciplining the victims (the unemployed) with increasingly onerous work test. Neither party has announced they will increase the unemployment benefit above its current level which is below the poverty line. Please read my blog – Why are we so mean to the unemployed?<\/a> – for more discussion on this point.<\/p>\n There was an reasonable summary of the problems facing the Australian economy at present by the Melbourne Age economics journalist Tim Colebatch – A deficit of difference<\/a> – published August 17, 2010.<\/p>\n Colebatch noted that:<\/p>\n \nFor all its shortcomings, the stimulus was essential to get us through the financial crisis … without the stimulus – and the bank guarantees that headed off a financial collapse – Australia would have suffered a far worse downturn.<\/p>\n The $21 billion of handouts to households allowed many to pay down debt and others to keep retail demand rising – and shops are big employers. Even the $16 billion for school buildings – delivered only after Australia had begun to emerge from the crisis – has played a key role in the recovery of growth and jobs since work began a year ago.<\/p>\n Why? Because private sector activity collapsed. In the non-residential sector – excluding education – approvals halved from $28 billion in 2007-08 to $14 billion in 2009-10. Bank lending to business has shrunk by $87 billion, or 11 per cent – and for many companies there are no other lending sources.<\/p>\n Think about that. Even now, there are 150,000 more Australians out of work and 180,000 more working shorter time than before the crisis. Growth is sluggish, and GDP per head remains less than two years ago. Ask yourself: what would Australia be like now had the government not pumped all that money into new construction?\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n He noted that while construction normally takes the brunt of an economic slump in the current period it was growing because of the stimulus measures aimed at infrastructure building.<\/p>\n \nWithout the stimulus, construction would have collapsed in 2009-10 as it did in 1990-91 – when 15 per cent of construction workers lost their jobs. That’s another 150,000 people unemployed, with flow-ons throughout the economy costing who knows how many more jobs.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Even so, the national economy is growing very slowly and is in danger of reversing as the stimulus wanes. The Chinese economy which has helped our export sector is also slowing in line with reversals in the UK, Europe and the US. <\/p>\n Private spending throughout the world, including in Australia is very flat and there is an unwillingness by borrowers to re-enter the credit cycle. The only thing that has been keeping growth positive in every advanced nation has been the fiscal policy initiatives, and, to a lesser extent, the lower interest rates.<\/p>\n Most of the main economic indicators for Australia are looking like there will not be a sudden burst of growth any time soon.<\/p>\n I have done a lot of media interviews in the last week or so coinciding with the daily policy announcements by the major parties leading up to the election. When asked what I think about the current state of the economy my reply is precarious and in need of further fiscal support. I am one of the few national media commentators saying this.<\/p>\n Even the letter signed by more than 50 Australian economists which was released this week to give support to the Labor Government failed to take them to task for the poor state of the economy that remains because the stimulus was too small. The letter also failed to demand a stop to the surplus rhetoric.<\/p>\n Please read my blog – The letters economists write …<\/a> – to see why I declined to sign the letter.<\/p>\n A macroeconomics primer for the politicians<\/strong><\/p>\n What parades now as macroeconomic policy is a mishmash of half-truths and fallacy. We trace the origins of the financial crisis before us to erroneous macroeconomic policy stances. The pursuit of public surpluses meant that the maintenance of growth had to rely on the private sector going increasingly into debt. The government balance is the mirror, dollar-for-dollar, of the non-government balance.<\/p>\n In my 2008 book with Joan Muysken – Full Employment abandoned<\/a> we considered the problems with budget surpluses in detail.<\/p>\n Australia is a modern monetary economy which means it has three essential features:<\/p>\n From the national accounting conventions the following must be true – the Australian government deficit (surplus) equals the Australian non-government surplus (deficit).<\/p>\n The failure to recognise this relationship is the major oversight of neo-liberal analysis which then permeates into the mindsets of the politicians and the advisors of the main parties. They are so blinded by neo-liberal myths that neither major party deserves office.<\/p>\n What they do not understand is that, in aggregate, there can be no net savings of financial assets of the non-government sector without cumulative government deficit spending.<\/p>\n The sovereign government via net spending (deficits) is the only entity that can provide the non-government sector with net financial assets (net savings) and thereby simultaneously accommodate any net desire to save and hence eliminate unemployment.<\/p>\n Additionally, and contrary to neo-liberal rhetoric, the systematic pursuit of government budget surpluses is necessarily manifested as systematic declines in private sector savings.<\/p>\n The decreasing levels of net private savings which are manifest in the public surpluses increasingly leverage the private sector. The deteriorating debt to income ratios which result will eventually see the system succumb to ongoing demand-draining fiscal drag through a slow-down in real activity.<\/p>\n The analogy neo-liberals draw between private household budgets and the government budget is false. Households, the users of the currency, must finance their spending prior to the fact. However, government, as the issuer of the currency, must spend first (credit private bank accounts) before it can subsequently tax (debit private accounts). Government spending is the source of the funds the private sector requires to pay its taxes and to net save and is not inherently revenue constrained.<\/p>\n Unemployment occurs when net government spending is too low. As a matter of accounting, for aggregate output to be sold, total spending must equal total income. Involuntary unemployment is idle labour unable to find a buyer at the current money wage.<\/p>\n In the absence of government spending, unemployment arises when the private sector, in aggregate, desires to spend less of the monetary unit of account than it earns.<\/p>\n Nominal (or real) wage cuts per se do not clear the labour market, unless they somehow eliminate the private sector desire to net save and increase spending. Thus, unemployment occurs when net government spending is too low to accommodate the need to pay taxes and the desire to net save.<\/p>\n So if you want to reduce labour underutilisation then you would not be cutting public spending when the private sector is trying to save and the external sector is in deficit. Our politicians do not understand this.<\/p>\n While the sovereign government is not financially constrained it still issues debt to control its liquidity impacts on the private sector. Our politicians do not understand this. They are obsessed with reducing the public debt levels by trying to target budget surpluses but in doing so are squeezing the private sector.<\/p>\n The only way the economy can grow in those circumstances is for the private sector to increase its own indebtedness. So we replace risk-free public debt (that is unnecessary anyway) with risky private debt which is an unsustainable strategy.<\/p>\n What the politicians do not understand is that government spending and purchases of government bonds by the central bank add liquidity, while taxation and sales of government securities drain private liquidity.<\/p>\n These transactions, which we term “vertical” (invoking the hierarchy of government and non-government), influence the cash position of the system on a daily basis and on any one day they can result in a system surplus (deficit) due to the outflow of funds from the official sector being above (below) the funds inflow to the official sector.<\/p>\n Please refresh your memory of this by reading the following blogs – Deficit spending 101 – Part 1<\/a> – Deficit spending 101 – Part 2<\/a> – Deficit spending 101 – Part 3<\/a>.<\/p>\n The relevant point is that the system cash position has crucial implications for the central bank, which targets the level of short-term interest rates as its monetary policy position. Budget deficits result in system-wide surpluses (excess bank reserves).<\/p>\n Competition between the commercial banks to create better earning opportunities on the surplus reserves then puts downward pressure on the cash rate. But importantly, these “horizontal” transactions (between non-government units at the same hierarchical level) cannot eliminate the surplus reserves. Only vertical transactions provide net adds to and subtracts from the reserve system.<\/p>\n In this context, if the central bank desires to maintain the current target cash rate then it must provide an alternative to this surplus liquidity by selling government debt (a vertical transaction).<\/p>\n In other words, government debt functions as interest rate support via the maintenance of desired reserve levels in the commercial banking system and not as a source of funds to finance government spending.<\/p>\n If you are uncomfortable with that reality then I suggest you get over it. It is the only functional purpose of debt issuance in <\/p>\n What is the problem with budget surpluses?<\/strong><\/p>\n At this point we can clearly articulate what is the problem with budget surpluses.<\/p>\n Any growth strategy predicated on fiscal surpluses and increasing levels of private debt is inherently unstable and ultimately unsustainable. We should have learned that lesson from the current economic crisis. Unfortunately the politicians and their advisors clearly do not understand what went wrong.<\/p>\n First, the levels of debt rendered private agents increasingly susceptible to small changes in external conditions including policy changes. For example, the increasing fuel prices in recent years endangered the solvency of highly geared households. In turn, debt defaults were less confined than in the past because of the size of financial derivatives market which has grown to drive the proliferation of credit.<\/p>\n Second, private agents eventually had to increase their saving to reduce the precariousness of their balance sheets.<\/p>\n Both sources of instability mean that aggregate demand would fail resulting in unsold inventories, reductions in production levels, job loss and rising unemployment.<\/p>\n The resulting unemployment is involuntary in nature by which we mean labour unable to find a buyer at the current money wage. It also invokes the idea of a systemic macroeconomic constraint that renders an individual powerless to improve their employment circumstances.<\/p>\n Orthodox macroeconomic theory struggles with the idea of involuntary unemployment and typically tries to fudge the explanation by appealing to market rigidities (typically nominal wage inflexibility). However, in general, the orthodox framework cannot convincingly explain systemic constraints that comprehensively negate individual volition.<\/p>\n The modern monetary framework clearly explicates how involuntary unemployment arises. The private sector, in aggregate, may desire to spend less of the monetary unit of account than it earns.<\/p>\n In this case, if this gap in spending is not met by government, then unemployment will occur. Nominal (or real) wage cuts per se do not clear the labour market, unless they somehow eliminate the private sector desire to net save and increase spending.<\/p>\n The non-government sector depends on government to provide funds for both its desired net savings and its tax obligations. The private sector cannot by itself “net save” because saving is a signal to lend and so savers are always in an accounting sense matched by a borrower.<\/p>\n To obtain these funds, non-government agents offer real goods and services for sale in exchange for the needed currency units. This includes, of-course, offers of labour by the unemployed.<\/p>\n Thus, unemployment occurs when net government spending is too low to accommodate the need to pay taxes and the desire to net save. In general, deficit spending is necessary to ensure high levels of employment.<\/p>\n The concept of a budget surplus is often misunderstood. The current Australian Treasurer has recently been talking about a “$40 billion hole in the budget bucket”. Well there is no hole because there is no bucket. To explain this we need to understand what happens when the sovereign government runs a budget surplus.<\/p>\n It is often argued that the surplus represents “public saving”, which can be used to fund future public expenditure. With the current decline in government revenue and the need for a dramatic fiscal injection generating rapidly declining surpluses in Australia, many commentators are erroneously claiming that the Government will run out of funds and will have to postpone or abandon its much-touted infrastructure development plans, including the upgrade of the broadband network.<\/p>\n In rejecting the notion that public surpluses create a cache of money that can be spent later, MMT tells us that the government spends by crediting a reserve account. That balance doesn’t “come from anywhere”, as, for example, gold coins would have had to come from somewhere.<\/p>\n It is accounted for but that is a different issue. Likewise, payments to government reduce reserve balances. Those payments do not “go anywhere” but are merely accounted for.<\/p>\n The following accounting relation, often erroneously called the government budget constraint (GBC) can be used to show the impact of budget surpluses on spending and private wealth:<\/p>\n where G is government spending net of interest payments on debt, i is the nominal bond rate, B is the stock of outstanding bonds, M is base money balances, and T is tax revenue. In an accounting sense, when there is a budget surplus then ΔM < 0(destruction of base money) and\/or ΔB < 0 (destruction of private wealth).\n\nThe budget surplus may be applied to running down debt (that is, forcing the private sector to liquidate its wealth to get cash) but this strategy is finite. In recent years the Australian government followed the pattern of several sovereign governments and established the Futures Fund. This amounts to the Treasury competing in the private equity market to fuel speculation in financial assets and distort allocations of capital.\n\nHowever, this behaviour has been grossly misrepresented as providing future savings. Say the sovereign government ran a $15 billion surplus in the current financial year and then purchased that value of financial assets in the domestic and international capital markets.\n\nFrom an accounting perspective the Government would no longer have run that surplus because the $15 billion would be recorded as spending and the budget would break even.\n\nIn these situations, the public debate should be focused on whether this is the best use of public funds. It would be hard to justify this sort of spending when basic infrastructure provision and employment creation has been ignored for many years by neo-liberal governments.\n\nPlease read my blog - The Futures Fund scandal<\/a> – for more discussion on this point.<\/p>\n The alternative when a surplus is generated is to destroy liquidity (debiting reserve accounts) which is deflationary. The weaker demand conditions would force producers to reduce output and layoff workers with rapid increases in joblessness. Investment irreversibilities driven by uncertainty of future demand conditions then retard capacity growth and prolong the downturn.<\/p>\n So what the politicians do not understand is that the pursuit of public surpluses will necessitate an increase in the net flow of credit to the private sector and increasing private debt to income ratios as long as the external deficits remain.<\/p>\n The current financial crisis is now evident that a threshold has been reached where the private sector, by circumstance or choice, becomes unwilling to maintain these deficits? It also means that reliance on rising indebtednesses to underwrite private spending is now unsustainable and an alternative growth strategy, based on fiscal expansion has to be introduced.<\/p>\n In terms of fiscal policy, there are only real resource restrictions on its capacity to increase spending and hence output and employment. If there are slack resources available to purchase then a fiscal stimulus has the capacity to ensure they are fully employed.<\/p>\n While the size of the impact of the financial crisis may be significant, a fiscal injection can be appropriately scaled to meet the challenge. That is, there is no financial crisis so deep that cannot be dealt with by public spending.<\/p>\n The politicians should study some basic macroeconomics before lying to the public<\/strong><\/p>\n The politicians and their advisors clearly do not understand the flow-of-funds approach to the analysis of monetary transactions.<\/p>\n This approeach highlights both the importance of the distinction between and vertical and horizontal transactions and the fundamental accounting nature of the budget constraint identity.<\/p>\n It shows categorically that the government budget constraint is only ex post<\/em> accounting identity (that is, just records what has gone) rather than being an ex ante<\/em> financial constraint (that is, a statement of revenue constraints on government spending).<\/p>\n It also shows that if the sovereign government runs cumulative surpluses which destroy net financial assets then the non-government must accumulate deficits in the form of increasing indebtedness which are unsustainable.<\/p>\n Please read my blog – Stock-flow consistent macro models<\/a> – for more discussion on flow-of-funds macroeconomics.<\/p>\n While the approach is not for the introductory student if you persevere you can get the point. The following table is taken from a paper I wrote in 2008 and shows a simplified transactions table of the three sectors (government, private domestic, external).<\/p>\n Here, Gross Domestic Product, Y, is equal to Private expenditure, PX, plus government expenditure, G, plus exports, X, minus imports, M. The ROW account reveals that imports minus exports and transfers paid by the external sector, TF, equals the balance of payments deficit. Every item in the Production (GDP) account is matched by a corresponding negative entry in some other column. Taxes net of transfers are received by the government. Net property income, taxes and transfers, TF and TP, are paid by the external and private sectors, respectively.<\/p>\n The final row totals reveal that public sector net borrowing, PSNB, equals the private net acquisition of financial assets, NAFA (private savings less investment) minus the balance of payments surplus (or plus the deficit), BP.<\/p>\n From the perspective of a stock-flow consistent approach to macroeconomic modelling, this gives the fundamental accounting identity that government savings (surplus) or tax revenue net of government spending and payment of interest on bonds is equal to the non-government sector’s dis-saving.<\/p>\n That is, public sector net borrowing equals the private net acquisition of financial assets (private savings less investment) minus the balance of payments surplus (or plus the deficit). As governments have moved away from deficit spending at levels typical of the post-war period of full-employment, private sector debt levels have escalated.<\/p>\n The reason why this has happened is that causality flows from fiscal policy to the private sector simply because economic influences over the rest-of-the-world account change quite slowly, with income effects dominating over the price effects that are championed by neoclassical theorists.<\/p>\n In contrast, fiscal policy responds immediately to government decisions about spending and taxing. The transmission mechanism behind these changes is complex, as it operates within a portfolio setting, by changing relative rates-of-return between real investment, the equity-premium, and the term structure of bonds.<\/p>\n The other way of expressing all this is to use the more familiar sectoral balances terminology that I have introduced often in this blog.<\/p>\n To refresh your memories go to this blog<\/a> and read the Question 1 answer.<\/p>\n Consider the accounting identity for the three sectoral balances:<\/p>\n (S – I) = (G – T) + (X – M)<\/p>\n This sectoral balance equation says that total private savings (S) is equal to private investment (I) plus the public deficit (spending, G minus taxes, T) plus net exports (exports (X) minus imports (M)), where net exports represent the net savings of non-residents.<\/p>\n Thus, when an external deficit (X – M < 0) and public surplus (G - T < 0) coincide, there must<\/strong> be a private deficit. <\/p>\n Please note that is bolded – there MUST<\/strong> be a private deficit.<\/p>\n So the major parties have as their central macroeconomic platform the increasing indebtedness of the private sector. The Australian household sector already hold record levels of debt and has been saved from mass bankruptcy by the fiscal stimulus.<\/p>\n When will one of the senior journalists understand this and probe the Prime Minister about her constant mantra that her government will get back into surplus by 2013?<\/p>\n While private spending can persist for a time under these conditions using the net savings of the external sector, the private sector becomes increasingly indebted in the process.<\/p>\n The following graph is derived from data available from Australian Bureau of Statistics<\/a>. It shows the sectoral balances for Australia from 1974 to 2010.<\/p>\n While the external balance (current account deficit) has fluctuated with the commodity price cycle, it has continued to deteriorate slightly over the longer term.<\/p>\n Accordingly, the dramatic shift from budget deficits to surpluses from the mid-90s onwards has been mirrored by a corresponding deterioration in private sector indebtedness.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/billmitchell.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/Australia_labour_underutilisation_May_2010.jpg\" "\\"Australia_labour_underutilisation_May_2010\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/billmitchell.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/gbc.jpg\" "\\"gbc\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/billmitchell.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/Flow_of_funds_transaction_table.jpg\" "\\"Flow_of_funds_transaction_table\\""){kind=spacer}
<\/a><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/billmitchell.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/Australia_sectoral_balances_1973_2010.jpg\" "\\"Australia_sectoral_balances_1973_2010\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n