Thursday, May 28, 2015

For once Bloomberg posts something on their website that makes sense.

I thought I was seeing things just now when I came across an article on Bloomberg.com that was entitled, "Here's how to add 2.4 million jobs to the economy." I figured since it was Bloomberg there'd be a bunch of dumb suggestions like get the government out of the way, reduce regulation, cut corporate taxes and that sort of stuff.

To be honest I don't even know why I started reading it because I hardly ever read what's on that site as it's always the same, incessantly wrong, out-of-paradigm neoliberal cheerleading that we hear everywhere.

However, this article was different. So different in fact that I don't know how Bloomberg let this slip through the cracks. It was written by some guy named Peter Gosselin and I have no idea who the dude is, but he seems to get it.

Check it out:
"The U.S. is paying a big price in growth, jobs and wages by practicing the kind of fiscal austerity that it criticizes European nations for pursuing." Read on
In the article Gosselin talks about how government spending cuts are weighing heavily on the economy. He  points out what we have been saying here on MNE and what every MMT person knows: that government consumption  and investment is the second biggest component in GDP and the most easily varied (save for the politics, anyway, and I know that's not easy).

The article states pretty emphatically that government  spending has to be increased; that's the only way to boost GDP and job growth. It also says we "gave up on fiscal stimulus too soon." (We said that here on MNE back in 2009!)

Gosselin also rightly shames clueless Conservative lawmakers and doesn't give the Democrats a pass either. Read below:
Opponents of using fiscal tools, especially higher government spending, focus on what they regard as a greater threat than tepid growth: federal deficits and debt. “Government can’t spend its way back to a strong economy,” said Representative Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican and member of the House Ways and Means Committee.
and...
"The nation’s retreat from tax cuts and spending increases to promote the recovery has been a bipartisan affair. Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican House Speaker John Boehner agreed in 2011 to apply the fiscal brakes by negotiating $1 trillion in spending cutbacks over 10 years and a process to impose more."
Anyway, kudos to Bloomberg--THIS ONE TIME.

I'm sure they'll go right back to doing what they usually do, which is posting up the same ignorant and inapplicable shit that has become a mainstay of their opinion writers. (Cue Caroline Baum right about now.)

1 comment:

Ryan Harris said...

I like a lot of bloomerg stuff, and many of their staff are young people that don't have all the baggage, pessimism and negativity of old people that drives me crazy when I'm trading and just want relevant information about a financial topic without all the opinion and non-sensical analysis. Boesler, their Fed analyst, has made me more money than probably any other analyst in the world, he is sharp and perceptive like Mosler used to be before his slow growth schtick, but in a different way of course, but you can connect the dots with what he says and find great trades. A couple others that cover markets for bloomberg are worth following too, though I mostly follow on twitter.

Bloombergview is another story... It is terrible, all academics like Noah Smith and folks like Baum that haven't a clue. And the guy in Japan, Pesek..good grief. They certainly have tons of opinions. It is like reading any other academic economics, waste of time.