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Monday, October 16, 2023

The de-risking narrative – another in the long line of neoliberal ruses — Bill Mitchel

There have been several interrelated strands in research and practice associated with the dominance of neoliberalism over the last decades. The problem has been that these approaches have been as much enthusiastically promoted by social democratic or progressive forces as they have conservatives. Indeed, conservative political forces have gone down the ‘Trumpian’ far right sink hole and the social democratic parties have moved into the political space vacated – that is, further right than centre. Over the years we have been confronted with social entrepreneurship, new regionalism, corporate social responsibility and self regulation, volunteerism, light touch regulation and more – as part of a so-called ‘Third Way’ where class divisions are dead and the ‘market’ is supreme. More recently, so-called progressive politicians have been touting the ‘de-risking’ narrative as a way of fixing the mess left by the other Third Way approaches. Accordingly, the role for government is to de-risk the vagaries and flux of capitalism, so the entrepreneurs can make profits with surety and if there are issues the government will bail them out. It is a disastrous denial of government responsibility and will fail just as surely as all the rest of the ruses have combined to create the mess societies are in around the globe....
William Mitchell — Modern Monetary Theory
The de-risking narrative – another in the long line of neoliberal rusesThe de-risking narrative – another in the long line of neoliberal ruses
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

5 comments:

  1. “ The federal government has all the cash it needs to build those houses and the only issue is the availability of productive resources.”

    They keep saying this and we obviously don’t have the real resources but then they still want to give people free munnie anyway which is going to create Art degree “inflation” which we already have and it’s a consensus that this “inflation” is a bad economic outcome.,,

    We just went thru 3 years of MMT (giving people free munnie for non production) in response to this pandemic and the resulting “inflation” besides being near unanimously rejected by the people, is also resulting in the most regressive economic outcome imaginable…

    There is a lot more to it than just being able to say “we’re not out of money!” and giving people free munnie for non production… this is what we have currently and nobody likes it…

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  2. The response to the pandemic prevented people from working and disrupted supply chains.

    If you want an example of MMT where productive resources are being used, look at Ukraine. Without MMT, that country will collapse.

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  3. “Inflation” in Ukraine is almost 10%…

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  4. 10% is great, all things considered. Not going to last...

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  5. That is generally considered too high for “inflation!”…

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