Category Archives: Macroeconomic policy

Michael Hudson: Will Greece Let EU Central Bankers Destroy Democracy?

Yves here. This is a long and important post. Hudson reports that he has gotten a great deal of correspondence from Greece saying that articles like this arguing against the pending stripping of Greece by banks are being translated and circulated widely to provide moral support. If you cannot read this piece in full, please be sure to read the discussion at the end of how Iceland stared down its foreign creditors.

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Cross posted from CounterPunch.

Promoting the financial sector at the economy’s expense

When Greece exchanged its drachma for the euro in 2000, most voters were all for joining the Eurozone. The hope was that it would ensure stability, and that this would promote rising wages and living standards. Few saw that the stumbling point was tax policy. Greece was excluded from the eurozone the previous year as a result of failing to meet the 1992 Maastricht criteria for EU membership, limiting budget deficits to 3 percent of GDP, and government debt to 60 percent.

The euro also had other serious fiscal and monetary problems at the outset. There is little thought of wealthier EU economies helping bring less productive ones up to par, e.g. as the United States does with its depressed areas (as in the rescue of the auto industry in 2010) or when the federal government does declares a state of emergency for floods, tornados or other disruptions. As with the United States and indeed nearly all countries, EU “aid” is largely self-serving – a combination of export promotion and bailouts for debtor economies to pay banks in Europe’s main creditor nations: Germany, France and the Netherlands. The EU charter banned the European Central Bank (ECB) from financing government deficits, and prevents (indeed, “saves”) members from having to pay for the “fiscal irresponsibility” of countries running budget deficits. This “hard” tax policy was the price that lower-income countries had to sign onto when they joined the European Union…..

At issue is whether Europe should succumb to centralized planning – on the right wing of the political spectrum, under the banner of “free markets” defined as economies free from public price regulation and oversight, free from consumer protection, and free from taxes on the rich.

The crisis for Greece – as for Iceland, Ireland and debt-plagued economies capped by the United States – is occurring as bank lobbyists demand that “taxpayers” pay for the bailouts of bad speculations and government debts stemming largely from tax cuts for the rich and for real estate, shifting the fiscal burden as well as the debt burden onto labor and industry.

Bribes Work: How Peterson, the Enemy of Social Security, Bought the Roosevelt Name

Bribes work. AT&T gave money to GLAAD, and now the gay rights organization is supporting the AT&T-T-Mobile merger. La Raza is mouthing the talking points of the Mortgage Bankers Association on down payments. The NAACP is fighting on debit card rules. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute supported the extension of the Bush tax cuts back in December. While it seems counter-intuitive that a left-leaning organization would support illiberal extensions of corporate power, in fact, that is the role of the DC pet liberal. This dynamic of rent-a-reputation is greased with corporate cash and/or political access. As the entitlement fight comes to a head, it’s worth looking under the hood of the DC think tank scene to see how the Obama administration and the GOP are working to lock down their cuts to social programs.

And so it is that the arch-enemy of Social Security, Pete Peterson, rented out the good name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the reputation of the Center for American Progress, and EPI. All three groups submitted budget proposals to close the deficit and had their teams share the stage with Republican con artist du jour Paul Ryan. The goal of Peterson’s conference was to legitimize the fiscal crisis narrative, and to make sure that “all sides” were represented.

Now this tidy fact is not obvious if you check the Peterson Foundation publicity for its “Fiscal Summit:”

Quelle Surprise! Consumer Confidence Falls on Oil Prices, Housing, Job Outlook

Is the latest consumer confidence release yet another example of elite disconnect? One of the things that has become striking is the degree to which the chattering classes in New York and Washington DC seem utterly unaware of what is happening in the rest of the country. New York City is doing reasonably well based on the heroic efforts by the officialdom to prop up the major capital markets firm; DC is recession immune and more recently awash in lobbying funds. The influences range from visual signals (I had a friend visiting from Boston remark how striking it was that there were so few shuttered storefronts here in NYC) to continued Administration cheerleading (a constant since the 2009 bank stress tests). And since major media stories about the economy are driven by sources in these two cities, it feeds into business reporting.

Are Fissures in Europe Worse Than Media Reports Suggest?

Thanks to an alert NC reader, we featured in Links more than a month ago the fact that Denmark, contrary to the spirit of the Eurozone, was implementing border controls. Today, a hand-wringing comment by Peter Spiegel, the Financial Times’ bureau chief in Brussels, describes how sentiment against Eurozone integration has risen among the locals. The near-victory of the nationalist True Finns, regime change in Ireland and Portugal, and demonstrations in Spain, Greece, and Portugal suggest that the citizenry is increasingly unhappy. Spiegel describes the Netherlands as “the California of Europe” and describes in some detail how it opposed the recent €440 billion rescue fund, opposed recent efforts to ntegrate the western Balkans into the EU to i, and demanded reform of immigration policies.

Perhaps I am projecting US tendencies onto the EU, but I see the same signs of elite isolation ther as we have here (in the US, it’s a New York-Washington bubble that includes finance, government officials, and major media).

Stephanie Kelton: What Happens When the Government Tightens its Belt?

Yves here. This post is certain to annoy some readers. Note that Kelton does not address under what circumstances it is desirable to have the government run a surplus versus a deficit, merely what the implications are. Bill MItchell is rather forceful on this matter:

The US press was awash with claims over the weekend that the US was “living beyond” its “means” and that “will not be viable for a whole lot longer”. One senior US central banker claimed that the way to resolve the sluggish growth was to increase interest rates to ensure people would save. Funny, the same person also wants fiscal policy to contract. Another fiscal contraction expansion zealot. Pity it only kills growth. Another commentator – chose, lazily – to be the mouthpiece for the conservative lobby and wrote a book review that focused on the scary and exploding public debt levels. Apparently, this public debt tells us that the US is living beyond its means. Well, when I look at the data I see around 16 per cent of available labour idle in the US and capacity utilisation rates that are still very low. That tells me that there is a lot of “means” available to be called into production to generate incomes and prosperity. A national government doesn’t really have any “means”. It needs to spend to get hold off the means (production resources). Given the idle labour and low capacity utilisation rates the government in the US is clearly not spending enough. The US is currently living well below its means. But the US government can always buy any “means” that are available for sale in US dollars and if there is insufficient demand for these resources emanating from the non-government sector then the US government can bring those idle “means” into productive use any time it chooses.

Will Greeks Defy Rape and Pillage By Barbarians Bankers? An E-Mail from Athens

Wow, this is what debt slavery looks like on a national level.

The Financial Times reports that a new austerity package is about to be foisted on Greece. It amounts to asset stripping and a serious curtailment of national sovereignity:

Morgenson Runs Peterson Institute Propaganda Against “Entitlements” Meaning Medicare and Social Security

I’m generally a Gretchen Morgenson fan, since she’s one of the few writers with a decent bully pulpit who regularly ferrets out misconduct in the corporate and finance arenas. But when she wanders off her regular terrain, the results are mixed, and her current piece is a prime example. She also sometimes pens articles based on a single source, which creates the risk of serving as a mouthpiece for a particular point of view. And the one she chose to represent tonight is one that is in no need of amplification, that of the Peterson Foundation’s well-funded campaign to gut Social Security and Medicare.

We Speak on BNN About the US Housing Market

This was the weirdest little booth at NASDAQ. The seat was at an off angle to the camera, and I couldn’t sit up straight without bumping my head against the glass behind me, which is curved. So I look a bit whopperjawed and uncomfortable at the top but I think it came out fine in the end.

Michael Hudson: Breakup of the euro? Is Iceland’s rejection of financial bullying a model for Greece and Ireland?

Yves here. This piece describes how voter opposition may derail rule by bankers via IMF, European Commission, and ECB austerity programs in Europe.

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Cross posted from CounterPunch.

Last month Iceland voted against submitting to British and Dutch demands that it compensate their national bank insurance agencies for bailing out their own domestic Icesave depositors. This was the second vote against settlement (by a ratio of 3:2), and Icelandic support for membership in the Eurozone has fallen to just 30 percent. The feeling is that European politics are being run for the benefit of bankers, not the social democracy that Iceland imagined was the guiding philosophy – as indeed it was when the European Economic Community (Common Market) was formed in 1957.

Marshall Auerback: To Save the Euro, Germany Has to Quit the Eurozone

By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist, hedge fund manager, and Roosevelt Institute fellow

When the euro was launched, leading German politicians used to argue, with evident relish (and much to the chagrin of the British in particular), that monetary union would eventually require political union. The Greek crisis was precisely the sort of event that was expected to force the pace. But, faced with a defining crisis, Ms Merkel’s government is avoiding airy talk of political union – preferring instead to force harsh economic medicine down the throats of the reluctant Greeks, Irish, Portuguese and Spanish electorates. This is becoming both economically and politically unsustainable. If the objective is to save the currency union, perhaps policy makers are looking at this the wrong way around. In the end, paradoxically, to save the European Monetary Union, the least disruptive way forward would be for the Germans, not the periphery countries, to leave.

Philip Pilkington: Beyond growth – are we entering a new phase of economic maturity?

By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and anti-economist writing from amidst the devastated ruins of Dublin, Ireland

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door – JK Galbraith

What’s the easiest way to embarrass an economist? Okay, that’s a bit of a trick question. After all, economics is a pretty embarrassing profession and there are a million questions you could put to an economist that would likely turn his or her cheeks red. You could, for example, approach your typical ‘academic of ill-repute’ and ask them if they saw the bursting of the US housing bubble coming or the unsustainable debt-overload that accompanied it – yep, that would probably do the trick.

One topic that does cause your average economist a lot of brain-bother, though, is the environment. After all, everyone and their cat cares about the environment these days, but such concern seems irreconcilable with the ‘infinite growth’ assumptions of most economists. It has long been pointed out by environmentalists, concerned citizens and the sane how, if we are to prevent global warming from melting the planet, we have to put some sort of a ceiling on economic growth and industrial development. This is a truly pressing concern – yet it appears that economists and policymakers simply cannot integrate it into their worldview.

But here’s an uplifting thought: what if History is doing our work for us? What if we are already entering a sort of ‘post-growth’ world?

Marshall Auerback: IMF’s Predatory Policies Likely to Continue with New Leadership

By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0.

It doesn’t matter who leads the IMF when the institution is governed by ideology.

Greece and Ireland appear to have lost an important political ally with the sidelining of Dominique Strauss-Kahn as both plead for more financial assistance from European partners to avoid an early restructuring of debt. The key word is “appears,” as in truth, arsenic remains arsenic, even if it is coated in sugar by an ostensible champagne socialist like Mr. Strauss-Kahn.

Doug Smith: Shock Therapy For Economics, Part 1

By Douglas K. Smith, author of On Value and Values: Thinking Differently About We In An Age Of Me

In “Economics In Crisis”, professor Brad DeLong notes:

The most interesting moment at a recent conference held in Bretton Woods … came when Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf (asked) Larry Summers, “[Doesn’t] what has happened in the past few years simply suggest that [academic] economists did not understand what was going on?”

DeLong agreed with Summers’ response: “the problem is that there is so much that is “distracting, confusing, and problem-denying in…the first year course in most PhD programs.” As a result, even though “economics knows a fair amount,” it “has forgotten a fair amount that is relevant, and it has been distracted by an enormous amount.” DeLong then goes on to call for serious change in what economics departments do and teach.

In Part 2 of this post, I’m going to address the realities of ‘serious change’; and, in that context, what is troubling for INET about Summers’ presence at the recent Bretton Woods gathering. I’ll do this from my experience in leading and guiding real change as well as by contrasting INET with another, smaller, and more nascent effort called Econ4.

For now, though, let’s put aside the serious lack of self-respect in paying any attention at all to a world historical failure like Summers (Why is this arrogant sophist even on anyone’s C list, let alone A list? Why isn’t Summers wearing sack cloth and rolling in ashes?). Instead, let’s respond to DeLong’s ‘fessing up to the crisis in economics: