Bill Mitchell— Forget the official Rule, apparently, there is a secret Fiscal Credibility Rule

It is Wednesday and only a relatively short blog post. Yes, some more on that Fiscal Rule that seems to be causing people to lose sleep (not me). First, we had the Duck Test debate about the British Labour Party Fiscal Credibility Rule. Those promoting the Rule have been at lengths to deny its neoliberal framing, language and concepts. Not an easy task when the Rule talks about a currency-issuing government wanting to avoid “putting the rent on the credit card month after month”. Sounds like a duck to me. Then there was the ‘all critics (me) are stupid’ approach because they (I) apparently didn’t understand the Rule, simple as it is in construction. That didn’t end well either. Now, rather innovatively, we have the introduction of the Secret British Labour Party Fiscal Credibility Rule – which tells us that the actual British Labour Party Fiscal Credibility Rule, you know, the one published by the “General Secretary of the Labour Party on behalf of the Labour Party” is not the real rule. There is another one that us silly billy types have failed to detect and only those who have close personal contact with the members of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England could possibly know about. So in our ignorance we have no right to criticise the Rule or to impute nasty motivations from the MPC (not that we did impute anything anyway). And, to put the icing on the cake, we now are told that the Chancellor can abandon this ‘Secret’ Rule whenever he/she likes and does not require the imprimatur of the MPC anyway – so butt out all of you. Of course, only those who are part of our insiders’ club can know anything about this. Summary: Losers getting more lost each time they try to come up with a justification for the duck!

The latest salvo in the Fiscal Credibility Rule descent in stupidity came in the form of a blog post from Rule co-designer Simon Wren-Lewis – Bill Mitchell’s fantasy about Labour’s fiscal rule (June 14, 2019).…

Here comes the SWL smackdown I was waiting for. 😄

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Forget the official Rule, apparently, there is a secret Fiscal Credibility Rule
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

See also

Lars P. Syll’s Blog
My philosophy of economics
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University