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The government is not like a household, and trying to treat it like a household causes huge damage. George Osborne acted as if he didn’t understand that, and it would seem Rishi Sunak does not understand that either. And like Osborne, Sunak too is already causing a lot of damage by worrying about a deficit in a recession.  Worse still for Sunak deficit obsession seems to have taken on a religious dimension. This suggests that Sunak, like Osborne, only pretends to misunderstand the nature of government debt.  For MMT devotees. You say governments should focus on how much resources are used and not the deficit. But that is only true if interest rates are unable to control inflation in booms or you prefer to use fiscal policy to control booms.  As most people think interest rate policy is both effective at dealing with booms and should be used, then controlling the deficit in booms is important to prevent deficit bias.   Try imagining most people are right, and think ou...

Listan över aktörer som förespråkar den nygamla skatten kan göras lång: Finanspolitiska rådet, Omstartskommissionen, SNS konjunkturråd, ESO, LO samt tankesmedjorna Tiden och Fores.  Ändå betraktas ett återinförande som politiskt omöjligt. Väljarna vill helt enkelt inte ha den. Nationalekonomer gillar att kalla fastighetsskatten för en stabil skattebas. Den går varken att fly eller planera bort, till skillnad från exempelvis skatt på arbete som leder till att mindre arbete utförs, eller skatt på företagande som bidrar till att driva entreprenörer ur landet. Det är alltså ett smidigt sätt för staten att håva in pengar. Om skatten blir för betungande, tvingar den i värsta fall husägaren att flytta. Susanna Silfverskiöld SvD 2 november 2020

Covid response has shown inflation and interest rates no longer dictate limits on debt. Lawrence Summers, whose speech on “secular stagnation” in 2013 was the most perceptive economic pronouncement of the past decade, has argued that macroeconomics is experiencing a “revolution” similar to the seismic shift towards inflation control in the late 1970s.  From now on, there will be “a focus on assuring adequate demand and fairness in our economies”, driven mainly by expansionary fiscal policy. At some point, debt will reach a limit, but most economists are now betting that this is a very long way off. Gavyn Davies FT 1 November 2020 https://www.ft.com/content/aa63c3d3-5331-4984-b6e7-ebd47ea6e246 Secular Stagnation at IntCom https://www.internetional.se/secstag.html Lawrence H. Summers at IntCom https://www.internetional.se/summersmeny.htm

Meeting this challenge will require a radical reorientation in our thinking – seeing our generation as a small part of a much greater whole; a story that spans the eons.  We will thus need to adopt not merely a global perspective, of everyone alive today, but the perspective of humanity itself – the hundred billion people who came before us, the nearly eight billion alive today, and the countless generations yet to be born.  By adopting this ethical lens, we will have a better view of our crucial role in the larger story of our species. Because the greatest risks are not from nature, but from our own action, we can pull back from the brink if we choose. Toby Ord Project Syndicate 30 October 2020 https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ethics-for-existential-risk-requires-intergenerational-perspective-by-toby-ord-2020-10 Toby Ord, a senior research fellow in philosophy at the University of Oxford, is the author of The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity ...

Since becoming the first American company to surpass $2 trillion in market value in August and peaking last month, the iPhone maker has lost $450 billion, wiped out by a 19% slump. Bloomberg 30 October 2020 Nice chart https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-30/apple-loses-450-billion-in-value-since-record-on-iphone-woes

The U.S. stock market could be headed for a lost decade.  The Nikkei 225 index remains about 40% below its 1989 peak “It’s exactly when past returns are most glorious that future prospects are most dismal,” investor John Hussman, another famously bearish investment manager wrote recently .  He’s described today’s menu of choices for passive, long-term investors as “the worst in history.” Bloomberg  31 October 2020 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-31/personal-finance-what-if-stocks-don-t-always-go-up-advice-for-young-investors

Samtidigt som svenskarna har blivit mer positivt inställda märks en tilltagande politisk olust med EU, också i partier som brukade höra till hyllningskören. Det gäller inte minst Moderaterna. Annika Ström Melin Dagens Nyheter 28 oktober 2020 https://www.dn.se/ledare/annika-strom-melin-sverige-maste-ge-sig-in-i-debatten-om-macrons-eu-ideer/

Whether he succeeds or not, the transformation of the state-backed lender and equity investor marks a watershed for the Italian economy with the return of the state as a major player in corporate life, reversing the privatizations that former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi pushed through in the 1990s as the head of the Treasury. Bloomberg 30 October 2020 Nice pic of The Cassa Depositi e Prestiti SpA headquarters in Rome https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-30/inside-italy-s-cdp-the-secret-banking-heavyweight-undoing-mario-draghi-s-legacy

Emergency support winds down in the most vulnerable countries and political tempers fray everywhere.  The question is whether the EU’s confederate states will bite the constitutional bullet and fold their futures together in a genuine fiscal debt union backed by treaty change, or continue rolling out half-measures that never quite solve the problem. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Telegraph 28 October 2020 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/10/28/double-dip-lockdowns-threaten-overwhelm-europes-economic-defences/

https://www.ft.com/content/1798a9b7-54d0-4a1b-948d-f03cc628cd80

This version of history is now under attack as never before. Tony Barber FT 29 October 2020

The most famous quotes in praise of democracy do not make a principled case for it. If, as Winston Churchill claimed, it is the worst form of government bar all the others “that have been tried”, then verifiable outcomes are what matter. If the idea takes hold that China has controlled the virus and avoided a recession, while the US remains beset by both, the signal to the rest of the globe will be unmistakable. Autocracy is the strong horse. Democracy’s rival is no longer an unworkable Soviet dogma, but a pragmatic superpower that is only nominally communist. FT 28 October 2020 https://www.ft.com/content/92ec21e7-2070-4105-b145-1063fa3c6b41 https://www.svd.se/konsten-att-lara-folket-hur-det-borde-rosta

US stocks close down 3.5% as Covid concern mounts FT 28 October 2020 https://www.ft.com/content/617f7ad3-6831-4e47-b66a-3efccd1972a6 But the pandemic never went away, and the threat of an autumn rebound in cases as cooler weather returned was long identified as a potential risk.  That’s far from a black swan, an improbable and unforeseen event that has an enormous impact. So why do investors seem surprised? https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-stock-market-traders-got-surprised-by-the-jump-in-covid-19-cases-11603905496  

Liable to change rapidly and unpredictably, especially for the worse. Google’s English dictionary, provided by Oxford Languages.

That’s Robert Shiller, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and Yale professor, urging a cautious approach to investing in the top-heavy stock market in an op-ed for the New York Times. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/its-been-years-since-investors-have-been-this-fearful-of-a-stock-market-crash-nobel-prize-winning-economist-warns-11603685224 Consider a separate measure of stock valuations that I helped create — the Cyclically Adjusted Price Earnings (C.A.P.E.) ratio. This is a measure that enables the comparison of stock market valuations from different eras by averaging the earnings over 10 years, thus reducing some of the short-term fluctuations of each market cycle.  It now stands at a level that was higher in only two periods, both of which were followed by stock market crashes: the 1920s, in the lead-up to the Great Depression; and early 2000, just before the bursting of the dot-com bubble. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/23/business/people-fear-a-market-crash-more-than-they-have...

When I first developed the Taylor rule, which has been widely discussed for three decades now, I based it on an average inflation rate A decade ago, I wrote a paper with John C. Williams, now the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, titled “Simple and Robust Rules for Monetary Policy,” in which we emphasized the importance of rules-based policymaking John B. Taylor Project Syndicate 16 October 2020 https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/fed-average-inflation-targeting-should-still-be-rules-based-by-john-taylor-5-2020-10 Federal Reserve is keeping the federal funds rate in a range far below what its own monetary-policy rules would prescribe. But since history shows that this deviation cannot last indefinitely, it would be better to normalize sooner rather than later. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/fed-interest-rate-policy-deviation-from-monetary-policy-rule-by-john-taylor-5-2021-08 The Taylor Rule https://www.internetional.se/taylor.html

Ekvationen var enkel. Den bolsjevikiska regimen åtnjöt inte internationellt erkännande, vilket kunde göra överläggningar med västmakterna om den polska östgränsen betydligt lättare än i en situation där de vita segrat. Både röda och vita ryska ledare skulle enligt Piłsudski vilja komma åt det nya Polen, så det verkade även fördelaktigt att se till att åtminstone den ena sidan slogs ut. Den polska östgränsen, utarbetad av de allierade, låg längs med floden Bug i öster och motsvarade i grova drag dagens gräns. Bortsett från att ha stoppat världsrevolutionen att nå västerut har polsk-bolsjevikiska kriget gett upphov till en mängd mer eller mindre bestående processer. Till de senare hörde att de baltiska staterna och förmodligen även Finland fick ett andrum.  Deras självständighet tolererades i det stora hela av Sovjetunionen, åtminstone tills ett tillfälle att ompröva den nya ordningen uppenbarade sig. Nu dröjde det tjugo år före den sovjetiska aggressionen mot dessa länder 1939–1940,...

As Stephanie Kelton notes in her book The Deficit Myth, governments with access to a printing press are “currency issuers” (exceptions include, most obviously, members of the eurozone).  As such, all their spending could, in principle, be financed via the creation of cash. Taxes may serve other purposes — the redistribution of income and wealth, the discouragement of “sinful” behaviour — but, in the world of MMT, they serve no useful macroeconomic role. The alternative of multiple business failures and mass unemployment is of no use to anyone. In the process, however, we are in effect borrowing from our collective economic futures.  The political process will decide whether that bill comes in the form of higher taxes, more austerity, rising inflation or eventual default.   Stephen King FT 22 October 2020 https://www.ft.com/content/bcb523c3-7448-4cd6-a2d2-69b8f13be8f3   The author is HSBC’s Senior Economic Adviser and author of ‘Grave New World’

I sin bok ”Postdemokrati”  (2005) beskrev den brittiske statsvetaren Colin Crouch hur vi hade hamnat i ett postdemokratiskt tillstånd och vad detta innebar.  I en ny bearbetad version av boken, ”Post-democracy after the crises” (Polity Press) återknyter han till sina resonemang i skuggan av de kriser som drabbat oss under 2000-talet.  Samhället och särskilt demokratin behöver sina gycklare, de som vågar och orkar utmana, de behöver djävulens advokater som tvingar alla att skärpa till sig och förklara vad de egentligen menar.  Men detta förutsätter också att det finns arenor, scener, miljöer och sammanhang där kritiken faktiskt tas på allvar. Har vi det i dag? Torbjörn Elensky SvD 21 oktober 2020 djavulens-advokater-ar-demokratins-raddare Heder, Sanning och rätt

Our political process can’t reduce spending and/or raise taxes enough to balance the budget, so the debt grows and grows.  As it does, paying the interest plus the accumulated debt load pulls more capital away from more productive uses.  This depresses economic growth, thereby generating even more spending and debt. This has to end, and I think it will do so in the event I’ve called The Great Reset. John Mauldin 16 October 2020 https://www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlinethoughts/caught-in-a-debt-trap