From Debt to Banking to Nation Debt to Austerity. Is an Anti-Austerity Alliance of Left Neo-classicals and Post-Keynesians Possible? Is it Desirable? (Part 2) — www.nakedcapitalism. By Michael Hoexter. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives. Part 1 of this post is available here United as they are in their critique of neoclassical economics, it would be a mistake to portray post-Keynesians as united among themselves, a further complication for the emergence of any unified message from anti-austerity economists. Post-Keynesian Thomas Palley has recently likened MMTers proposal that government institute a WPA-style “job guarantee” program to the policies of the Tory Cameron government that unemployment benefit recipients work for free. Palley’s concern is that the MMT job guarantee will undermine public sector unions but MMTers dispute that Cameron’s policy is a job guarantee program.
Palley’s objections to the job guarantee and MMT were also the subject of a caustic review by Randy Wray, a prominent MMT economist. Political and Epistemological Choices The Stakes for Left Neoclassicals Anti-Austerity Action Plan. MMT Movie: Economics for Dummiez. Debt, Deficits, and Modern Monetary Theory. Bill Mitchell is the Research Professor in Economics and the Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity at the University of Newcastle, Australia. The following is an edited transcript of the interview, conducted August 15, 2011. Thanks for joining us, Professor Mitchell. I wanted to talk with you today about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)—the theoretical approach you’ve been integral in developing—and its relevance to current debates over public finances. I know you’ve been quite scathing of mainstream economic discourse.
For example, you wrote in your blog recently that “the economics media is dominated with financial issues – too much public debt; debt ceilings; fiscal sustainability; sovereign risk; and all the rest of the non-issues that have taken center-stage.” Could you take a moment to explain why MMT renders these things non-issues? The most important misperception is that MMT is in some way outlining an ideal or a new regime that could be introduced. Michael Hudson - What We're Becoming (1 of 4) A very British coup – but made in Chicago | skwalker1964.
This post is highly likely to be provocative – and may lead you to think I’m paranoid. If so, ah well. The facts speak for themselves, I think. I only started writing this blog about 6 weeks ago. The government’s decision to cut corporation tax and the top rate of income tax on the grounds that it would lead to growth was such obvious idiocy, and its insistence that there were no realistic alternatives to its worldview so patently untrue, that I had to write about it, so I set up this blog with really only a couple of posts in mind to begin with. I didn’t really expect to write that often, or that many people would read it. And the cumulative effect of becoming informed enough about a wide range of these things to write about them has led me to a very deep conviction – something I now consider to be an inescapable conclusion: The UK is in the middle of a subtle, very British (though Chicago-inspired), very audacious and extremely malignant coup d’état. There.
Media co-opted or neutralised. The Origins of Neoliberalism Part IV: A Map of Hayek’s Delusion. Heterodox economics. The rentier economy « Michael Roberts Blog. There has been some useful analysis on the state of the UK economy following the release of the Q4’2012 GDP figures last week (see my last post, Britain deep down). In my last post, I dealt with the apparent conundrum of the UK unemployment rate falling while the economy stagnated in real terms in 2012. I argued that the employment data hid the reality that more temporary and part-time jobs had been created to replace the loss of full-time, permanent jobs. And this was part of the explanation for the decline in unemployment and the disappearance of any productivity growth in the UK. The other key factor is the lack of sufficient investment growth as profitability remains well below the previous peak, particularly in the productive sectors of manufacturing (see my post, Now the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has come with a new definition of what it calls ‘broad unemployment’.
Like this: Like Loading... Britain's £1m and £100m banknotes. 25 January 2013Last updated at 21:09 ET By Chris Bowlby BBC Radio 4 Carefully guarded in the Bank of England's vaults are a small number of very large banknotes. Called "giants" and "titans", they are not in circulation for good reason - each is worth a sum of money most of us can only dream of. What are they for? "When it comes to a £1m note, everybody thinks, 'What a fantastic thing'," says Barnaby Faull, head of the banknote department at the auctioneers Spink. "What most people don't realise is they do actually exist. " But the £1m pound note - known as a "giant" - is not in circulation and it is inconceivable it will be made available from cashpoints.
But even the monetary value of the giant is relatively small compared to the "titan" - a banknote that promises to pay its bearer £100m. Impractical though they are for everyday use, both play a vital role in the British currency system, by backing the value of the everyday notes issued by commercial banks in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Meme Wars is a textbook for a new way of thinking. Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics Edited by Kalle Lasn with Adbusters. Seven Stories Press, 400 pp, softcover Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics is terrifying—but that's kind of the point. This thought-provoking work from Kalle Lasn and the Adbusters crew, has horrible news for you: the world is completely and utterly fucked up and nothing short of the complete destruction of current societal thinking and cultural values, coupled with a wholesale perspective shift, will change the certain doom we are facing.
(Overwhelmed yet?) Framed ostensibly as a "real world economics textbook", Meme Wars is also equal parts history lesson, thought experiment, and a collective call to action aimed straight at disillusioned students of all ages, not just the Occupy set. Gilles Raveaud's dissection of Gregory Mankiw's highly popular Economics 10 class at Harvard is cutting, accusing the former George W. Max Temkin (Don't listen to their lies.) From Debt to Banking to Nation Debt to Austerity. Property is Theft. Mises was never keen to speak in terms of ethics, but the following excerpt from Socialism does a brilliant job dispatching the notion that ownership of property must necessarily preclude others from the benefits derived, To have production goods in the economic sense, i.e. to make them serve one’s own economic purposes, it is not necessary to have them physically in the way that one must have consumption goods if one is to use them up or to use them lastingly.
To drink coffee I do not need to own a coffee plantation in Brazil, an ocean steamer, and a coffee roasting plant, though all these means of production must be used to bring a cup of coffee to my table. Sufficient that others own these means of production and employ them for me. In the society which divides labor no one is exclusive owner of the means of production, either of the material things or of the personal element, capacity to work. All means of production render services to everyone who buys or sells on the market. Papers | SPERI.
Paper No.11 Britain’s Post Crisis Political Economy: A ‘Recovery’ through Regressive Redistribution Jeremy Green (SPERI Research Fellow) and Scott Lavery Abstract In this paper Green and Lavery question the foundations of Britain’s much-vaunted economic recovery. SPERI Paper No. 11: Britain’s Post Crisis Political Economy: a ‘Recovery’ through Regressive Redistribution Paper No.10 The Hollande Presidency, the Eurozone Crisis & the Politics of Fiscal Rectitude Ben Clift (SPERI Honorary Research Fellow & Professor of Political Economy, University of Warwick) This paper analyses the political economy of the Hollande Presidency in France, evaluating the economic policies pursued by the French Socialist President since May 2012. SPERI Paper No.10 – The Hollande Presidency, the Eurozone Crisis & the Politics of Fiscal Rectitude (PDF 335KB) Paper No.9 The Social Bases of Austerity: European Tunnel Vision & the Curious Case of the Missing Left SPERI Paper No.9 – The Social Bases of Austerity (PDF 579KB)
Opinion. We have mistaken the symptom for the condition. This is a crisis of growth, not of debt. The misunderstanding of our current circumstances is compounding the problem it was intended to cure crisis Noun (Origin: Greek)A moment of decisive intervention – medically, the critical point at which the doctor’s intervention proves decisive, one way or the other, in the course of the illness and the life of the patient. If this is what a crisis is - a moment of decisive intervention - then we have simply yet to get to the moment of crisis.
Crises are, to a large extent, what we make of them. This may sound like a narrowly academic point; but it is not. To put right what went wrong, it is first imperative that we get our diagnosis of the affliction correct. To see why we need look no further than the origins of the looming fiscal crisis of the state. Nevertheless, this is no manifesto of despair. Amongst them are the following: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Bankers, exposed. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to do About It by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig. The title refers to the fairy tale about the naked emperor whom his citizens believe to be clothed in splendid robes until one child, immune from the groupthink, points out his nudity. This book’s aim, decisively achieved, is to de-mistify the public conversation about banking so we can all understand how threadbare the industry is.
The first part of the book gives a careful explanation of leverage and the role of bank equity. While the examples seem simplistic to start with, it is a useful stepping stone to evaluating the current regulatory debate about banks’ equity ratios. The logic is straightforward: the higher banks’ equity, the less destabilising is the effect of leverage, and the less the scope for contagion between banks in a crisis.
It is only non-viable banks that would be constrained in their activity. Some regulators understand this. A brief history of macro: How we got here. What is Neoliberalism? | USi. BY Doug Nicholls Neoliberalism is a set of economic policies that have become widespread during the last 30 years or so bringing misery to people and the environment as well as war and economic collapse, terrorism and a new form of gullible individualism. Consumerism is so extensive that even electoral politics have become a matter of individual choice on the market.
Yet what is economic is deeply political: it is impossible to split the two. Neoliberalism is a purely political project to maximise profits, and it is not in the best interests of workers. It is a phase of capitalism in which speculative finance capital dominates the productive, real economy and finance houses achieve, in a new way, a superiority over national governments. Society and the economy are turned into a casino run by the superrich on the chips cashed in by the increasingly poor majority. A changed economy has changed the way people think and relate to each other. L.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube. Recovered Economic History: "Everyone but an Idiot Knows That the Lower Classes Must Be Kept Poor, or They Will Never Be Industrious" “…everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.” —Arthur Young; 1771 Our popular economic wisdom says that capitalism equals freedom and free societies, right?
Well, if you ever suspected that the logic is full of shit, then I’d recommend checking a book called The Invention of Capitalism, written by an economic historian named Michael Perelmen, who’s been exiled to Chico State, a redneck college in rural California, for his lack of freemarket friendliness. And Perelman has been putting his time in exile to damn good use, digging deep into the works and correspondence of Adam Smith and his contemporaries to write a history of the creation of capitalism that goes beyond superficial The Wealth of Nations fairy tale and straight to the source, allowing you to read the early capitalists, economists, philosophers, clergymen and statesmen in their own words. And it ain’t pretty. While another pamphleteer wrote: