deficit spending | The Real Movement

October 10, 2015

The hidden conflict within the fascist state for control of economic policy (5)

I have been going through this process in order to clarify for myself the logic of the current discussion of so-called negative interest rates — an oxymoron if ever there was one. This is part five of the series; part one, part two, part three and part four can be found here. I hope it also will have some use to readers.

Part Five: The dollar and the increasing possibility of 21st Century Currency Warfare

Can monetary policy be rescued from oblivion? Probably not. There are just too many difficulties with the idea of negative interest rates on currency.

As I explained in part four of this series, Haldane proposes that the way around the zero lower bound on monetary policy may be to impose a negative interest rate on the holders of state issued currency. If a way could be found to force the holders of currency to pay interest on the currency in their bank accounts, wallets, pockets — and even in their mattresses — the distinction between credit money and currency could be forcibly imposed on society by the state despite a zero interest rate environment.

Once stripped of its deceptive wrapping as mere monetary policy, what Haldane is proposing is the outright expropriation of your savings account, your checking account and even the currency in your wallet and cookie jar. This goes well beyond monetary policy and begins to encroach on the limits of national economic policy itself. Under the most charitable interpretation, his proposal is well into the sphere of fiscal, even currency, policy despite the attempt to conceal it behind protective coloration as a negative interest rate on currency.

For the moment, however, let’s ignore this potential objection to his proposal. Instead, let’s treat it as a proposal for a measure similar to what FDR did in 1933: pure and simple devaluation of the currency.

What are the difficulties to be considered?

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October 9, 2015

The hidden conflict within the fascist state for control of economic policy (4)

I have been going through this process in order to clarify for myself the logic of the current discussion of so-called negative interest rates — an oxymoron if ever there was one. This is part four of the series; part one, part two and part three can be found here. I hope it also will have some use to readers.

Part Four: The desperate search for an exit from failed monetary policy

“I think we got the Recovery Act right. The primary objective of our policy is having more work done, more product produced and more people earning more income. It may be desirable to have a given amount of work shared among more people. But that’s not as desirable as expanding the total amount of work.” Larry Summers, Washington Post, November 8, 2009

“We didn’t think it would take that long.” Ben Bernanke, USA Today, October 5, 2015

The disappointment with the weak impact of counterfeiting the currency was admitted by Bernanke in a recent interview. This was not supposed to happen according to the dominant monetary theory, and Ben Bernanke in particular, where the prices of commodities are a function of the supply of currency in circulation. According to Bernanke’s “quantity theory of money”, the government had this technology, the printing press, which it could use to manage the US national capital. In fact, following the financial crisis, the policy rate went to zero without providing any real stimulus at all.

The chief economist of the Bank of England, Andrew Haldane, gave a speech in September on the problems faced by monetary policy. Although Haldane never mentions Larry Summers, his speech addresses the same concerns Summers raised in his own November 2013 “secular stagnation” speech. The problem is that monetary policy, on which the United States has relied since 1979, has run into a dead end, the zero lower bound. Had Washington not stepped in and provided a multi-year, multi-trillion dollar fiscal stimulus, capitalism likely would have collapsed. No one will admit it, but this is in fact what has happened after the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

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October 8, 2015

The hidden conflict within the fascist state for control of economic policy (3)

Part Three: The Zero Lower Bound and the Collapse of Neoliberal Monetary Policy

I have been going through this process in order to clarify for myself the logic of the current discussion of so-called negative interest rates — an oxymoron if ever there was one. This is part three of the series; part one and part two can be found here. I hope it also will have some use to readers.

To recap my argument so far:

Keynes in his 1930 essay, Economic Possibilities for Our Children, diagnosed the cause of the Great Depression as the improvement in the productivity of labor. Although at first admitting this improved productivity must sooner or later require reduction of hours of labor, in his 1933 essay, The Means to Prosperity, he ultimately proposed to fix it by a two-fold strategy: First, the state should maintain abundant credit at very low interest rates to facilitate private investment; second, the state had to lift total spending on commodities through deficit spending.

By the 1970s, however, this strategy — basically a strategy to avoid reducing hours of labor — ran into the twin economic maladies of stagnation and borderline hyperinflation — sometimes called stagflation in the popular press — leading to the political movement to get rid of state management of the economy entirely. In turn, this effort to get rid of state management is more popularly referred to by the name, neoliberalism, on the Left.

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October 4, 2015

The hidden conflict within the fascist state for control of economic policy (2)

Part Two: The collapse of the Keynesian policy consensus

As I stated in my previous post, the conflict over control of state economic policy can be traced to the Great Depression. Keynes set the state economic policy framework for this conflict by tracing the cause of the Great Depression to the improvement in labor productivity. According to Keynes in 1930, the depression was caused by capital reducing the need for labor faster than it could find new uses for labor. Of course, capital only has one use for labor: the production of surplus value, production of profit. Keynes was essentially confirming Marx’s prediction that the diminishing need for labor would lead to the collapse of commodity production.

According to Marx’s labor theory the price of a commodity is only the expression of the “socially necessary labor time” required for production of commodities. This implied that as the labor required for production of commodities fell, so would their prices. When the Great Depression hit, the problem pointed out by Keynes, that the reduction of labor was outrunning the pace at which capital could find new uses for labor, was expressed in deflation, i.e., generally falling prices.

Marx’s argument that the prices of commodities were tied to their labor value carried deadly implications for capitalism. Since prices paid for commodities was the only way the capitalists could recover their investment. Falling prices implies growing pressure on profit. If the capitalists could not sell their commodities at prices to cover their investment plus profit, capitalist production for profit would come to a standstill.

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October 2, 2015

The hidden conflict within the fascist state for control of economic policy

This article, Devaluations didn’t work, points to what I think is the real reason the Federal Reserve is desperate to raise its policy rate some time this year. It is becoming increasingly obvious monetary policy hasn’t delivered and the bankers are in danger of losing their control of economic policy.

According to the Economist: “Devaluations today haven’t had the positive impacts the end of Gold Standard did in the 1930s”. In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008-2009, bourgeois simpletons are deeply divided over how to replace the extraordinary measures taken to prevent collapse of capitalism with a set of policy tools that can be used to manage the crisis long-term. At the heart of this struggle is the question,

“Why aren’t currency devaluation policies creating inflation?”

To answer this question will require a little bit of economic history.

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June 8, 2015

The Myth of Secular Stagnation, Part Two

In part one of my blog post, The Myth of Secular Stagnation, I explained the background to the debate among bourgeois simpleton economists. The stagnation debate among bourgeois economists begins with the Great Depression and Keynes’ characterization of the problem of the Great Depression as “technological unemployment”. The source of the technological unemployment was the improvement in the productivity of labor, the industrial revolution wrought by capital. For Keynes in 1930, this was not necessarily a malady in and of itself, it promised a future where labor itself would be abolished. The transition to a society of less work might be very painful, but the distress was only temporary.

By 1933, however, Keynes’ argument had changed: although he continued to insist that, technically, the “economic problem” had been solved he now focused on the problem of restoring capitalist profit. The Great Depression was no longer caused by the lack of investment opportunities, instead there was a lack of sufficient state deficit spending. The Great Depression, now having lasted 3 years, required state intervention; “a blend of economic theory with the art of statesmanship”.

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April 18, 2015

Mass hysteria in Greece: Compliments of the European Central Bank

At what point will SYRIZA tell the Eurogroup and ECB to go fuck themselves?

This was the thought that occurred to me after reading Yves Smith’s latest post, “Greece: Default or Grexit?. Smith explains there is an impasse between Greece and its creditors where the options facing SYRIZA are default or Grexit.

Impasse? What sort of impasse?

Everybody knows Greece is broke. Everybody knows Greece cannot squeeze more out of its population to pay the debt. If this were not true, SYRIZA would not be in power. The impasse on display is that Greece is broke and has already defaulted, but no one wants to admit to it. There is no real impasse here; only people who don’t want to recognize losses that are already on the books.

Smith argues, “the best of Greece’s bad options is a default while staying within the Eurozone”. She states this option depends on what the European Central Bank (ECB) decides to do; only, it turns out, the ECB can pretty much do whatever it wants. This is not unlike the case in Michigan, where Washington arbitrarily decided to bail out GM and let Detroit go bankrupt.

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February 12, 2015

If SYRIZA-EU negotiations break down: two views on what Grexit means for Greece

Things don’t look very promising for those who hoped Germany would give in to pressure and accept a write down or delay of Greece debt obligations. With that in mind I decided to look at the most likely outcome of a collapse of negotiation: Greece’s voluntary or forced exit from the euro and European Union.

Of course this post is highly speculative and not to be taken as a prediction.

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August 27, 2014

Fuck MMT: The Left had better start looking for an exit from capitalism

Bill Mitchell, an Australian blogger associated with the modern money (MMT) school, thinks the Eurozone has failed, but he is not clear whether the failure results from ignorance, stupidity or malice. And I feel his pain, since I go back and forth on this one myself. It is difficult to figure out whether the European Union (EU) was designed to be ineffective in a crisis or if these people are just too stupid to be managing one of the world market’s most important regional institutions.

Mitchell takes exception with the idea that the European economic mechanism has been crippled by the crisis. According to him, this idea only makes sense if you assume the European Central Bank (ECB) has no role to play in facilitating the fiscal intervention necessary to fight the crisis — an assumption he doesn’t accept:

“The ECB boss [Mario Draghi] felt it his purpose at the gathering, which you can guarantee is plush in all respects (catering, wines, etc), to urge politicians to introduce more “growth-friendly policies”. He claimed in his speech – Unemployment in the euro area – that the so-called “sovereign debt crisis” had disabled “in part the tools of macroeconomic stabilisation”. Which is only true if one accepts that a central bank should play no role in supporting fiscal policy and that fiscal policy should be constrained by innane rules that deliberately prevent it from having sufficient latitude to meet foreseeable crises.”

If you think the ECB can support fiscal policy, then fascist management hasn’t failed — it is just being incompetently managed. But, Mitchell adds, ECB action is constrained by rules that appear to deliberately prevent it from meeting what should have been a foreseeable crisis. If the crisis was foreseeable, but the ECB was hedged in by rules to prevent it responding, this might imply the ECB is working just the way it was designed to work.

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March 10, 2014

Superfluous labor and state debt

In his “Apotheosis of Money”, Robert Kurz makes this statement:

“If State consumption and State credit, crushed together as if by an avalanche, play a central role in this development, this is also due of course, to the fact that the State (unlike a private entity which avails itself of credit) is considered to be a “secure debtor” which means, however, that the State, in the event of a great monetary and credit crisis, will not declare bankruptcy, but will simply expropriate its citizen-creditors.”

The argument Kurz makes here is that the unproductive consumption of surplus value, made possible by the credit extended to the state, is dependent on the state’s ability to repay its debt and must, sooner or later, result

Decreasing federal deficits preceded both the 2001 and 2008 crises. (Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve)

in the state expropriating the owners of capital. I am not especially satisfied with the way Kurz formulates the problem here. My difficulty with Kurz’s formulation is probably best expressed in the words of the bourgeois simpleton, Paul Krugman — for reasons that are not entirely clear to the bourgeois simpletons the long-standing prediction of an impending crisis for Washington’s finances over the last thirty years never finally materialized:

“Fear of a Greek-style fiscal and financial crisis has loomed over much of our policy discourse over the past four years, and has played a significant role in shaping actual policy, constituting the principal argument for austerity in countries that don’t face any current difficulties in borrowing. However, despite repeated warnings that crises of confidence are imminent in floating-rate debtors – mainly the United States, the UK, and Japan – these crises keep not happening.”

Krugman has his explanation for why the predicted crisis “keeps not happening”, but he is a simpleton who thinks the problem is, “as simple and silly” as he is. Labor theory offers a much simpler and elegant explanation for why Washington has never experienced the sort of crisis predicted by bourgeois economists. It is an explanation I will need if I am to finally explain how reduction of hours of labor affects profits in an economy characterized by massive expenditures of unproductive labor time.

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Tag: deficit spending