The argument of this paper is thus that a government can never run out of money. It can rather, by definition, afford to provide full employment and all the other things mandated by the constitution in the directive principles of public poli….CounterCurrents
Basically Modern Money Theory shows that there is no solvency risk for a government that issues its own currency. It can’t go bankrupt. It’s not possible for it to run out. You cannot spend more than tax revenue and go bust, because you can always issue more currency. But you can put your own constraints: so in (the US there is debt limit, no other country has this, the US has had it since 1913. But the debt limit has always been raised as needed, so it was a constraint that was never constraining. But sometimes there is a pressure like a political pressure recently by Republicans to try to enforce policy change. You can impose a debt limit constraint and force the government to default on its promise to pay on bonds, or social security, that is a self imposed constraint. In fact Congress can just get rid of the debt limit all together, because it is stupid.) (In India the Fiscal Reserve and Budgetary Management Act is a similar constraint that should be abolished) . There is no reason why the government cannot continue to spend simply by issuing more currency. The government debt is nothing other than private sector savings. If you have your own currency, you can always afford to spend more, so you can always afford full employment. The policy implication of modern money theory is thus that you can afford full employment and all the other things mentioned in the directive policies. There may be inflation but you cannot run out of money….
In other words the government does not understand that it can issue credit to millions of household and state government and other accounts to create demand and create work and create the money that will later come back in tax, to replace the failed global corporations, but it is in any case not the tax that is financing government spending but the money that the government has created in order for the households and small firms to be able to pay tax.
Stephen King from HSCB warns that the global authorities have alarmingly few tools to combat the next crunch, given that interest rates are already zero across most of the developed world, debts levels are at or near record highs, and there is little scope for fiscal stimulus.
"The world economy is sailing across the ocean without any lifeboats to use in case of emergency," he said.
In a grim report - "The World Economy's Titanic Problem" - he says the US Federal Reserve has had to cut rates by over 500 basis points to right the ship in each of the recessions since the early 1970s. "That kind of traditional stimulus is now completely ruled out. Meanwhile, budget deficits are still uncomfortably large," he said....
The US cannot easily launch a fresh New Deal. Public debt was just 38pc on GDP when Franklin Roosevelt took power in 1933, and there were few contingent liabilities hanging over future US finances.Looks like all we can afford is depression, and, of course, war.
HSBC's Mr King says the global authorities face awful choices if the world economy hits the reefs in its current condition. The last resort may have to be "helicopter money", a radically different form of QE that injects money directly into the veins of economy by funding government spending.Lots of data on the global economy in the article though.
It is a Rubicon that no central bank wishes to cross, though the Bank of Japan is already in up to the knees.
Yes, comrades, we need to talk about crises again, the term recession simply does not explain what is really going on! Just in case you might not have noticed or perhaps the mainstream media where you live ignored it, the obvious has happened and the end of the so-called recession has disappeared into the fantasy novel. Once again there is a slowdown in growth and the financial markets are not particularly happy. This time, Germany and China are showing signs of slowdown. Globalisation has not ended the potential towards crises in the capitalist economic system; in fact, the greater interconnectedness of the world economy has exacerbated the situation and ensured that the contagion spreads.This analysis would make Michael Hudson proud.
For those who believe the fantasies of neoliberal economics, the shock of these latest failures of neoliberalism must come as a surprise. But for those of us that have been warning of the stupidity of squeezing wages and destroying work conditions, rising inequality in income and wealth, the dangers of export-led growth when wage incomes are being squeezed meaning that unless governments become the sole purchasers of goods and services that are being produced (and they are not) that obviously there comes a point when working people cannot purchase goods and services as their incomes are too low, wiping out of savings has happened and personal indebtedness leads to default and bankruptcy. Neither of these things helps to maintain capitalist growth, accumulation and profitability in the long run; forget that, it hasn’t even lasted in the short run.
I will be giving a run through on what is going on and why our lives feel as though we are living through the Shock Doctrine (which we are) and then address the proposals of dealing with persistent unemployment under capitalism from the Left on which there is significant disagreement.…
Yet, revealingly, there are some deficit hawks who are treating the rapid shrinking of the deficit as bad news — and not for the Keynesian reason that this indicates the government is failing to do its part in supporting the economy, as Bernanke stressed in his remarks yesterday, but because the disappearing deficit is easing congressional pressure to pass “entitlement reform” (which, as we’ll see below, does belong in scare quotes)....
For the fauxsterian, the question of whether austerity can be expansionary, or whether economic growth falls off a cliff when countries’ public debt ratios surpass 90 percent of GDP, is really all beside the point. Deficit and debt hysteria have simply been a useful tool for pushing specific legislative changes that may or may or may not be related to the budget balance — changes that might be difficult to pass outside an atmosphere of imminent crisis.
A recent Washington Post column by Steven Pearlstein, “The Case for Austerity Isn’t Dead Yet,” more or less endorses this line. The problem with fiscal stimulus, the column tells us, is that it works: it boosts short-term economic growth, thus easing the pressure to pass “structural reform.”Multiplier Effect
The warning bells are ringing, and they are ringing loudly. We've already allowed bad economics to lead to bad politics. Now, it's high time to put a stop to the cycle where bad politics undermines an already fragile economy.Foreign Policy
So, can things fall apart again? Yes, they can.The New York Times | Opinion
The fundamental problems have not been resolved; indeed, the gap between creditor and debtor countries continues to widen. The crisis has entered what may be a less volatile but potentially more lethal phase.Read it at Project Syndicate
Read it at The Guardian (UK)
If the world economy was a video game, the central bankers and politicians have been struggling to master the controls – and remain stuck on the first level.
Read it at VOX.eu
Policy reactions to the Eurozone crisis are seen by many as short-sighted, incoherent, and driven by political expediency. This column disagrees. What we are seeing is a game of chicken among the key political and economic powers in Europe. As the crash looms ever closer, the right deals will be struck and Europe will emerge stronger and with its currency intact.
Read it at Multiplier Effect (with audio link)
Galbraith also talks about the Marxian, Godleyan, Minskyan, and “Galbraithian” (John Kenneth) schools of thought (which he likens to “Millenarian sects”), joined by their acceptance of the possibility and likelihood of crises, and runs through the differences in their approaches to thinking about financial crises.
Read it at The Guardian (UK)
Chatham House report says Britain could only withstand a week of disruption after a major event before spiralling into chaos
The Reinhart-Rogoff study emphasizes common patterns across crises. It eschews complicated statistical techniques, relying instead on simple graphs and averages. And the averages are stunning. For 14 major crises since 1929, the associated decline in real per capita gross domestic product averaged 9.3 percent. For postwar crises, it took an average of 4.4 years for output to return to its pre-crisis level.
But study their charts more closely and you’ll find that those averages mask remarkable variation.....
What explains the variations? Crises don’t happen in isolation. They’re often accompanied by other factors, which differ across episodes. For example, financial crises that happen along with currency crises tend to be followed by much more severe recessions.
Likewise, some panics follow particularly big declines in house and stock prices, which have damaging effects on their own. The most recent recession would likely have been severe — and the recovery slow — even if the financial system hadn’t been stressed, simply because of the decline in wealth and the climb in household indebtedness.
BUT an even larger determining factor is the policy response. Why was the Great Depression so much worse here than in Spain? According to an influential paper by Ehsan Choudhri and Levis Kochin, Spain benefited from not being on the gold standard. Its central bank was able to lend freely and increase the money supply after the panic. By contrast, in 1931, the Federal Reserve in the United States raised interest rates to defend its gold reserves and stay on the gold standard, setting off further declines in output and exacerbating the banking crisis.
Likewise, the policy response largely explains why output fell after the American banking panics in 1930 and 1931, but rose after the final wave in early 1933. After the first waves, the Fed did little, and President Herbert Hoover signed a big tax increase to replenish revenue. After the final wave, President Franklin D. Roosevelt abandoned the gold standard, increased the money supply and began a program of New Deal spending....Read the whole post at The New York Times
