Bill Mitchell — Leopards do not change their spots

Only a short blog post today as it is Wednesday. My father, in fact, used to say that ‘leopards do not change their spots’, when referring to people who in one period behaved one way and then when sprung would pretend they were reformed. I was thinking about that when I noted that the queue to the magical reinvention door is getting longer by the day. This is the process, whereby a person, who previously advocated neoliberal macroeconomic policy interventions from the sidelines (as an academic economist or media commentator) and/or executed them from a position of power (say, as a Treasurer or Minister of Finance), starts attacking present day governments, who inherited their own fiscal surplus obsessions, and are, like they did themselves, driving their economies into the ground as a result of the same obsessions. Who is in the spotlight today? None other than the former Australian Treasurer, Paul Keating who was reported in the press this morning (October 30, 2019) – Paul Keating slams Liberal party ‘surplus virus’ (paywall) – as being critical of the current government for keeping the “Australian economy ‘idling at the lights'” as a result of “running Australia’s budget like a ‘corner shop'”. He urged the government to stimulate the economy with fiscal policy. Now before we get too excited, and this applies to all the goons who come out claiming they wanted fiscal stimulus all along, these characters typically blow their cover and reveal their true DNA when they reflect on their own track records on the subject. But it is an interesting, if not amusing, pastime watching these characters try to revise their CVs to look like they ‘knew it all along’ as they try desperately to retain relevance and get on the right side of history. We are not that stupid though.…

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Leopards do not change their spots
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Paul Keating — the age of impermanence

Paul Keating opened his April 21 speech to a crowd of 600 students with a joke the crowd seemed to miss. He talked about old Prime Ministers being taken off the bookshelf as a “musty old edition” that gets an airing every now and then – hey, he even joked that his own book was booby trapped.

The speech went on to outline Keating’s insights about the future, including:today’s students will grow up in the ‘age of impermanence’ and work in a ‘cloud economy’ rather than an industrialised economy

• politics has the capacity to define and channel a new age
• the diversity of the globe should be celebrated rather than feared, particularly as the power of “non-state actors” like Google, Facebook and Apple – and even the Islamic State and Al Qaeda – change the global balance of power
• economic power is shifting from the “static lumps” of the industrialised age to a new age where “economic units of transcontinental internationalism” will have more influence
• we must find a nuanced foreign policy that gives us security in Asia, rather than trying to find a “sole guarantor” to protect us in Asia
• open minds and strong leaders need to emerge, to make sense of the new world and leverage public life to make change

Labor Herald
Paul Keating: the age of impermanence

Paul Keating, former prime minister of Australia

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