Bill Mitchell — Retail sales dive in Australia – neoliberal contradictions now obvious

This neoliberal era has a habit of getting ahead of itself and exposing its internal contradictions. In fact, the Capitalist system, as Marx, Keynes and others have demonstrated, it inherently inconsistent. The imposition of neoliberalism has only heightened those inconsistencies and made it more likely that we will move beyond this period in the foreseeable future (fingers crosssed). Last week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest Retail Sales data for August 2017. The data shows that Australia experienced its second consecutive negative month and the August contraction was the largest since 2012. The sharp decline in retail sales is no surprise. Wages growth is flat and in some sectors (retail and hospitality) employers are cutting weekend penalty rates. At the same time, household consumption has been maintained by record levels of household debt – exposing families to bankruptcy risk should interest rates rise. Further, energy companies are gouging prices to record huge profit spikes, which is exacerbating the real wage cuts. The decline in retail sales suggests that households are finally responding to this array of negative data. It doesn’t augur well at all. Corporate greed eventually undermines itself....

Internal contradictions.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Retail sales dive in Australia – neoliberal contradictions now obviousBill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia