Tag Archives: fiscal policy

The old "should the government issue bonds" debate has come up again. I would point the reader to this article at Mike Norman Economics, as well as the Richard Murphy article it refers to. I would argue that there is limited room for debate. The Treasury of the central government certainly can stop issuing bonds, conditioned on there being changes to the legal/regulatory framework for the central bank. The more important question is whether such a policy is a good idea. My argument is that...

How little the two Eastern European countries that we have focused on can be compared with Western countries can be seen very clearly in the development of unemployment (Graph 1). Following the major crisis of 2008/2009, the unemployment rate in Romania hardly rose at all. In Bulgaria it increased significantly, but despite weak economic development after 2013 it is falling at an astonishing rate, almost to the relatively low Romanian level.For Romania, this can only mean that unemployment...

PRIME’s co-director Jeremy Smith and Progressive Economy Forum Council member John Weeks analyse the “bar room budget-brawl” between the Italian government and the European Commission, and argue that the Commission’s wrong-footed response threatens to strengthen the far right – to avoid opening the door to fascism, the EU must ditch its bias towards austerity.No one doubts that Italy’s economy is in a mess. It has been for a long time. It was not always so. From 1971 until...

The old View of the Treasury… Photo with acknowledgment to Social.shorthand.com “The Treasury building: a surprising history” This article was first published on the Progressive Economy Forum websiteAusterity has severely damaged Britain’s physical and social infrastructure. Coupled with a fall in real...

A giant end-of-month spending spree in August has ballooned the Federal defiicit to $980 bln and 4.8% of GDP.This is the largest nominal deficit since 2009 and the largest as a percentage of GDP since 2012.The MMT gods should be cheering this. They're not. Weird.

MMT. And he also talks about rent extraction! "So why are UK politicians obsessed with balancing the books rather than helping their citizens to lead healthier lives? The answer seems to be that the many UK politicians are strongly influenced by the desires of a powerful financial sector. While a finance sector is important, it is also predominantly a rent extraction industry. It mainly acquires wealth either on the backs of other people’s labour or their debts (interest). Progressive...

The provincial election of June ended 15 years of Liberal electricity policy in Ontario. Anger over high electricity prices continued to be an election issue, contributing to the Liberal loss of power and official party status (reduced from 55 to 7 seats). The PCs have formed Government with 76 seats, while the NDP is official opposition with 40 seats, and the Green Party won their first seat. The PC Government has moved quickly to act on some of their election promises and other unannounced...

Stephanie Kelton and I have been trying hard to keep Democrats from, again, rushing into the trap of denouncing Republicans for running federal deficits. Yes, Republicans are hypocrites about debt and deficits. That does not mean that Democrats should repeat Clinton and Obama’s embrace of the Republican’s economically illiterate, harmful, and fake hysteria about debt and deficits.... In general, good government is good politics. The Democrats should focus on adopting and supporting...

The BoE’s decision to raise the Bank Rate to 0.75% is a mistake. It is a mistake comparable to those made by Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve in the years between 2003 and 2006.  Mark Carney It is a mistake that must be understood in a wider context. Not just the political context – which promotes...

From a new paper by Antonio Fatas: “This paper studies the negative loop created by the interaction between pessimistic estimates of potential output and the effects of fiscal policy during the 2008-2014 period in Europe. The crisis of 2008 created an overly pessimistic view on potential output among policy makers that led to a large adjustment in fiscal policy during the years that followed. Contractionary fiscal policy, via hysteresis effects, caused a reduction in potential output that...