At Jacobin, Seth Ackerman did an interview with J.W. Mason about The Class Struggle on Wall Street that considers the trade-off between relative profit and wage shares of income. Whether you agree with his analysis or not, Josh teases out some of the implications of the relationship, both for profit expectations and for political prospects.One assertion I would question is "there is absolutely no reason to expect an uptick in inflation." Well, yes, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition, either. While there may indeed be no reason to expect inflation, inflation's chief weapon is surprise... surprise and fear... and ruthless efficiency,And this is also why I think it would be impossible to empirically confirm Egmont Kakarot-Handtke's "law" of profit. There is no "real" yardstick with which
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One assertion I would question is "there is absolutely no reason to expect an uptick in inflation." Well, yes, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition, either. While there may indeed be no reason to expect inflation, inflation's chief weapon is surprise... surprise and fear... and ruthless efficiency,
And this is also why I think it would be impossible to empirically confirm Egmont Kakarot-Handtke's "law" of profit. There is no "real" yardstick with which to measure aggregate profit. If Egmont is right that "[m]acroeconomic profit depends in the most elementary case alone on deficit spending, that is, on the change of private or public debt," then he is wrong that his profit "law" can be tested empirically and "will be confirmed without exception."
Josh Mason also talks about the "tightrope we have to walk" in thinking about the relationships between profits, wages, inflation and productivity. Not only is the rope tight, it is also tied in knots with "inflation" and "productivity" referring to ratios between incomes, costs and outputs. Egmont's theory reminds us of yet another tightrope -- the tightrope central bank authorities must walk between inflating the money supply through the expansion of credit and persuading the public that such inflation is not inflationary.
The conventional persuader is unemployment. One doesn't have to subscribe to the NAIRU doctrine that insufficient unemployment accelerates inflation to concede that policy-induced unemployment tips the scales against wage increases and thus insulates the profit share of income from the latent inflationary consequences of credit expansion. Yes, the trick here is how to sustain compound profit inflation without accelerating price inflation! How to debase the coin of the realm without debasing the coin of the realm. It's a beauty contest.
There is, after all, no other way of keeping profits up!