A budget that “needs improvement” &“exceeds expectations”

A budget that “needs improvement” &“exceeds expectations”

The budget headline is a £127bn deficit and current account stabilisation where the Tories had planned further reductions in expenditure. I am on the side of those who say, it’s not too bad and could have been worse. It, in the words of most performance management systems, “Exceeds expectations”, although most of those were set by themselves. There remain some unsolved problems and some risk but I think this response from Jeremy Corbyn and the Green Party misses the mark, it is not austerity light. There's much more, overleaf ...

More on growth & debt

More on growth & debt

The problem with the Truss mini-budget was not that they had an ‘unfunded’ deficit but that there was no mechanism between the deficit and investment. Rich people tend to save and for the deficit to do any social good, the banks would have to lend to investors i.e. entities looking to buy or make capital goods; which they have never done. Private sector domestic investment has usually been funded by retained earnings!

The lesson here is that the markets were not frightened of the deficit, just its purpose.

See also Growth vs public debt management on this blog. …

Growth vs Public Debt management

Growth vs Public Debt management

You don’t have to be a modern monetarist to believe that the UK has a debt crisis. There are a number of well evidenced and widely believed economic theories that support the use of a Government deficit to induce growth which is the surest way to reduce national debt. Those that argue austerity is a choice are bang on the money.

Debt fetishists need to get this, but so do those who argue that we should fund some desirable programme, be it pensioner’s winter fuel allowances, doctor’s recruitment or student debt forgiveness because we can fund a defence budget. How we use and deploy our military is of course a matter of other priorities but arguing we need to accept austerity by applying the cuts elsewhere is ignorant.

Investment led growth requires expenditure in increasing the productive capacity of the techno-economy, although there is some recent writing and research that traditional industrial policy focused on startups and R&D doesn’t work and that looking at public service outcomes is a more effective growth measure. I’d add that investment in labour force skills is another investment which means that University [& FE] funding and student finance should be considered investement, although none of this seems important to this Government who are prioritising reducing the public debt before investment. Housing is not an investment in productivity; the reason for doing this is social, and not based on macroeconoic policy goals.

You can’t grow the economy while reducing the deficit! It works the otherway round.  …

Labour and the Cuts (again)

Labour and the Cuts (again)

Two comments on the Reeves announcement to cut albeit fake investment projects and the pensioner’s winter fuel allowance. On the fuel allowance payment, this is not means testing the entitlement, it will be linked to Pension Credit entitlement, the threshold for which which is slightly less than the state pension paid to someone with full contributions record. It also ignores the fact that additional income is taxed. This entitlement limit is £11,500, about half, under the national living wage, and the amount required to sponsor an immigrant is £29,000. I quote these figures to show how necessary and low the contribution-based pension is. This is mean and unnecessary.  

On the macro-economics, the “golden rules” were designed to protect investment against short-term debt management fetishism. Until now no-one has ever argued that you shouldn’t borrow to invest, and while I usually argue that investment in human capital is a legitimate use of the state’s borrowing capability, which some consider to be a stretch, that can be no doubt the roads and railway lines warrant being borrowed for.

Jeremy Hunt and Owen Jones both accused Reeves of implementing cuts that she had always planned to do. If the labour front-bench did not know that the last Tory budget was fake, then they should have done. I’m also taken with the Twitter correspondents here and a thread here who point out that it is not just modern monetarists who state that the constraint on the capacity of the economy is its inputs and neither the money supply or the borrowing capacity. …

Labour’s macroeconomics

Labour’s macroeconomics

An article reviewing the politics behind the Starmer and Reeves’s speech to #lab23 and pointing at the arguments of some of the critics of their line on macroeconomics. I also look at the supply side initiatives they propose and question if it’ll be enough. I note that even funding these supply side measures will remain difficult while they maintain the harshest aspects of their fiscal responsibility rules and their promises on tax i.e. no increases in VAT, income tax and no new wealth taxes. I comment that the growth target is a necessary goal but they don’t specify a credible means of achieving it. This could easily be corrected even if one thinks that these fiscal rules are necessary. Conference also passed a union backed motion on critical infrastructure calling for the renationalisation of energy and railways. For the full article, use the read more button …

Is Brexit worse than expected?

Is Brexit worse than expected?

I was talking to a friend, who asked if anyone had predicted the current chaos caused by Brexit, which led me to look for and find my personal manifesto for remain [ or on medium ], both published in May 2016

I got the economy, rights, and the loss of freedom of movement right. I was also right on sovereignty and remain so on peace and hope!

I didn’t predict the collapse of offshore fishing industry, food rationing, or an energy cost crisis or that we would have a trade agreement that didn’t allow people to come here to work, although on fish & food, others did. I, and I think most people, have a better understanding of what we’ve lost. I think we’ll be back. …

Trade Friction and free movement.

I co-authored this, published at Brexit Spotlight by Another Europe.

It is little wonder then that the Conservatives are under acute pressure to revise their trading arrangements with the EU in order to re-open access the European single market. But it seems likely that – at least for the time being – Brexit ideology will not allow any serious recognition of the economic reality.    …

Trebles all round!

Trebles all round!

This week, the Labour front bench, in a trinity of acts, supported the autumn statement and thus austerity in principle, criticised Tory immigration policy on the grounds of competence and repeated their promise to not join the EU, its single market, or adopt the EU’s freedom of movement in the next parliament (if they win).

The inconvenient truth is that the UK economy needs unskilled EU workers to do the work, It’s not the net fiscal impact that’s the issue. We have a massive labour shortage, we need migrants to do the work, it’s about the output. It’s not all highly skilled work as we define it either, it’s hospitality, agriculture, and health care. And today we define highly skilled as highly paid; even if only the highly skilled were desirable, they are not synonymous.

I have thought long and hard to find a way of compromising with those who want to pander to racists on free movement, and I can’t find a way of doing it while solving both the macro-economic problems and remaining true to our internationalist principles. All this “control immigration” or a fair “points based” immigration policy which involves stopping people is just pandering to racism.

Differentiating from the Tories on competence is morally vacant.

Accepting the debt fetishism at the heart of the Tories “New Economic Policy” is also morally vacant, and self defeating, you can’t cut your way to growth and austerity causes poverty, homelessness and is killing the NHS. Labour’s next manifesto and government must offer hope. They will lose votes from Corbyn’s voting coalition, and as far as I can see it’s deliberate.

You’d think they’d learn that voters always have somewhere else to go! Some demographics, historically Labour voters, are choosing to vote Tory.  …

Inflation

Inflation

The Bank of England was made ‘independent’ of the Treasury in 1997, although not really, so that it could take the blame for any decisions to increase interest rates, such as those taken earlier this week (£) when the Bank increased bank rate to fight inflation.

How does that work? Inflation is believed to have one of two causes, one is that there is too much demand, chasing too few goods and consumers bid up prices. The other is that import prices are rising and thus have an impact on the domestic price level. These are known as demand-pull, or cost push. The current inflation would seem to be caused by the increase in the cost of imports especially primary energy products, exacerbated by a fall in the exchange rate.

The monetarist theory is that there is a real world and money view of the economy.

i.e.

Prices x Product = Money Supply x Velocity of Money

PQ = Mv

This equation is derived via definitions and algebra and thus there is no proof of causality. Monetarists say that reducing the money supply will reduce prices. This assumes that in the short term both the velocity of money and the amount of product are static. Recent econometric studies suggest that the velocity is not constant, and there has always been a problem of defining what money supply is as it must include some credit and so is very difficult to constrain. We should note that consumer credit can be increased very rapidly so can no longer be consider static.

There can be no doubt from studying economic history, that increasing interest rates to reduce the money supply causes a recession, unemployment and poverty. It’s also highly likely that unionised workers will demand higher wages to defend their living standards. In a world where business is internationally mobile, business will defend its profits by increasing prices and/or off shoring the work; this is the wage-price spiral where an economy has high inflation, both cost push and demand pull and low growth.

The drivers of growth and/or the floor to a recession are investment, exports or government expenditure, especially benefits. Increasing interest rates makes investment and the national debt more expensive. It makes exports cheaper in their foreign markets but of course the big factor in the export price uplift is Brexit. Higher interest rates increases the income on savings and the expense on business and domestic borrowing. A squeeze on profits will cause capital to go overseas, especially if the exchange rate is high although this may be ameliorate by the increasing yield in bonds. The other cause of the economic malaise is the poor investment rates by both the private and public sector in the UK.

There can be no doubt that increasing interest rates will cause unemployment. This is how it reduces demand.

The other option to monetary policy is product supply, direct investment such as the EU’s Horizon Europe programme or price regulation to cause a profit squeeze, tax the energy companies and banks, build more houses, control profits, transfer income from the wealthy to  the poor because the poor spend more of their income and of course rejoining the EU’s single market to reduce both import and export frictional costs.

High interest rates are a choice, a choice of theory and a choice of policy. The inconvenient truth is no-one knows if it works.

ooOOOoo

I conclude with some links to key commentators, professional economists. David Blanchflower, writes in the New Statesman, “The Bank of England is recklessly driving the UK into a deep recession”, he warns of the threat of unemployment, elsewhere on his twitter feed he is highly critical of the Bank and its Governor, Andrew Bailey, He is also quoted in a video clip by C4 on twitter, stating that unemployment hurts people more than inflation, which can be seen to be a declining threat. Anne Petifor exposes the role of the global capital markets in ‘managing’ food and energy costs, Richard Murphy provides a modern monetary critique of the theories. I particularly like his calling out of the role of import prices and speculators,

There is a third reason why the BoE policy will not work. It’s not just the assumption that people have too much to spend that the BoE get wrong. They have actually totally failed to identify the proper cause of this inflation.

The inflation we’re suffering is the result of shortages of oil, gas, fertiliser and food, in the main. Some of these are real (food, in particular). Others are being stoked by speculators who are profiting from them, which is why oil companies are declaring such big profits now

Richard Murphy – On Twitter

The featured image has been taken from Blanchflower’s New Statesman article where he asserts its a BoE MPC authored chart. This I assume can e used under the OGL license.  …

Labour’s macro-economics, “Back to the Future”

Labour’s macro-economics, “Back to the Future”

Starmer made another speech on economics on Monday 25th July. It is reported in the Guardian.

Starmer has been trying to pitch Labour as the party of fiscal prudence and will say: “With me and with Rachel Reeves [the shadow chancellor], you will always get sound finances; careful spending; strong, secure and fair growth. There will be no magic-money-tree economics with us.”

From the Guardian,

This article looks at growth and debt, Starmer and Reeves flirtation with Osbornomics and Reeves' rejection of nationalisation on the grounds of cost, I note countervailing views from Murray and Long Bailey and note that Reeves places herself in the sad queue of shadow chancellors undermining Labour's election chances by 'telling the truth'. There's more overleaf ...