Bill Mitchell — Eurozone fiscal rules bias nations to stagnation – exit is the remedy

It is Wednesday and I am doing the final corrections to our Macroeconomics textbook manuscript before it goes off to the ‘printers’ for publication in March 2019. It has been a long haul and I can say that writing a textbook is much harder than writing a monograph not only because the latter are more exciting in the drafting phase. The attention to detail in a textbook that runs over 600 pages is quite taxing. Anyway, that is taking my attention today.

👍 Yay!

I also plan to write some more about Brexit in the coming weeks and Japan (tomorrow). But today, I have updated some ECB data on household and corporate borrowing and the cost of borrowing to see what sort of recovery is going on. With nations such as Germany now recording negative growth in the third-quarter, it is clear that the Eurozone is stalling again. The explanation doesn’t require any rocket science. It is all there in the behaviour of the non-government sector (saving more overall) and fiscal rules that are too tight to offset that saving desire. The reliance on monetary policy is an ineffective tool to provide the offset in non-government saving overall. Fiscal policy has to be reinstated to the primary position and that means nations such as Italy must consider exiting the dysfunctional monetary union that biases nations to recession and stagnation...

It look to me like Brussels and the Continental powers that be are doing their best to sabotage Brexit. As a warming to others wishing to secede from the union? Could be made difficult and nasty to exit. See below.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Eurozone fiscal rules bias nations to stagnation – exit is the remedy
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

See also

Thierry Meyssan explains how Europe turning into the powder keg it has been historically.

Voltaire Net
Secession from the European Union
Thierry Meyssan