ELR Comes to the UK
The following story, which appeared in The Guardian on Sunday 29 July, was forwarded to me by Malcolm Sawyer:
“Million jobless may face six months’ unpaid work or have unemployment benefits stopped”
In a sense, the UK, under Conservative Prime Minister Cameron, is looking to adopt a quasi-employer of last resort (ELR) scheme in which the ELR wage is set equal to existing unemployment benefits (Note: the Conservative scheme involves compulsory labor for benefits). (more…)
Randy Wray and Mat Forstater, two leading contributors to the MMT School, have replied to my recent blog on the MMT controversy. Their replies warrant a brief response.
I agree that it does not matter very much who first identified the euro’s potential for failure. Along with other Keynesians, MMT-ers were early to identify the euro’s structural flaw – namely, its conversion of the financial status of national government into provincial government status via removal of government’s power to access money creation through a government controlled central bank. In many ways Warren Mosler (1995) is the godfather of interest in this issue. (more…)
Led by Randy Wray (see this and this), supporters of so-called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) are declaring that they were the first to identify the problems of the euro and that MMT has now proved itself to be the correct approach to monetary theory.
As regards these two claims, permit me to quote the following:
“5.3 Will capital still be able to veto policy?
…First, financial capital may still be able to discipline governments through the bond market. Thus, if financial capital dislikes the stance of national fiscal policy, there could be a sell-off of government bonds and a shift into bonds of other countries. This would drive up the cost of government borrowing, thereby putting a break on fiscal policy (Palley, 1997, p.155-156).” (more…)
Conducted by Philip Pilkington and posted on Naked Capitalism on April 18, 2012.
His latest book, From Financial Crisis to Stagnation, was recently published by Cambridge University Press, 2012.
A 20% discount is available when you purchase using this discount code.
[Select country location & enter code “palley2012” at checkout to get the discount]
Philip Pilkington: At the beginning of your book From Financial Crisis to Stagnation you refer to the 2008 crisis as a ‘crisis of bad ideas’. Could you please briefly explain why you refer to the crisis in this way?
Thomas Palley: A central and critical element of my book is its emphasis on the role of economic ideas in generating the crisis. This feature fundamentally distinguishes it from mainstream explanations that tend to represent the crisis in terms of surprise events and economic shocks (e.g. black swans).
My book starts with the fundamental idea that economies are made, not found. The way economies are organized and function is significantly the product of social choices, not the product of nature. Over the past thirty years we (society) have embraced a set of economic ideas that shaped economic arrangements – including the pattern of income distribution, the power of corporations and finance relative to labor, and the way in which the economy generates demand.
(more…)
In his novel, The Jungle, the American muckraking author Upton Sinclair wrote about the horrendous work and sanitary conditions in the Chicago meat packing industry of the early 20th century. It is sometimes said Sinclair aimed for the heart but hit the stomach. That is because he aimed for progressive social and economic change but instead prompted the founding of the Food and Drug Administration. (more…)
The eurozone’s public finance crisis continues to fester, reflecting both political and intellectual failure. The intellectual failure is the crisis has been interpreted exclusively as a debt crisis when it is also a central bank design crisis resulting from the euro’s flawed architecture. The flaw is the inability of eurozone governments to harness the central bank’s power to assist government finances. This systemic weakness explains why U.S. and U.K. government bonds are weathering the storm, whereas Spain confronts default rumors despite having roughly similar debt and deficit profiles. (more…)
Published in the FT Economists’ Forum, July 18, 2011
The global economy is suffering from severe shortage of demand. In developed economies that shortfall is explicit in high unemployment rates and large output gaps. In emerging market economies it is implicit in their reliance on export-led growth. In part this shortfall reflects the lingering disruptive effects of the financial crisis and Great Recession, but it also reflects globalization’s undermining of the income generation process. One mechanism that can help rebuild this process is a global minimum wage system. That does not mean imposing U.S. or European minimum wages in developing countries. It does mean establishing a global set of rules for setting country minimum wages. (more…)
TO: President Obama
FROM: Thomas I. Palley
RE: How to avoid stagnation and restore shared prosperity
DATE: Labor Day, 2010
Mr. President,
With hopes of a V- or U-shaped recovery fading, there is the increasing prospect of an L-shaped future of long stagnation, or even a W-shaped future in which W stands for something worse.
The reason for this dismal outlook is economic policy is trapped by failed conventional thinking that can only deliver wage stagnation and prolonged mass unemployment. (more…)
There is much debate over whether the Federal Reserve should tighten or further ease monetary policy. This dichotomous framing overlooks another possibility, which is whether the Fed should change the mix of its stance, tightening in some areas and further easing in others. (more…)
The great German physicist Max Planck remarked that “Science advances one funeral at a time.” The situation is worse in economics which is subject to regress, as happened when the valuable but imperfect insights of Keynesianism were supplanted by the ideological blinkers of neoliberalism. (more…)