It’s been a week of grand fiscal statements. Tuesday, it was for Australia as I discussed yesterday – Australian fiscal statement – rising unemployment amidst a moderate fiscal contraction (March 26, 2025). Then yesterday in the UK, the Labour Chancellor delivered the British Government’s – Spring Statement 2025. Both statements come at a time when…
Fiscal Policy
Last night (March 25, 2025), the Australian government delivered the latest fiscal statement for 2025-26 (aka – The Budget – and, in doing so tried to win renewed electoral appeal given its waning popularity and a national election that has to be held in the next 6 or so weeks. So it offered the tax…
Edward Elgar, my sometime publisher, is interested in me updating my 2015 book – Eurozone Dystopia: Groupthink and Denial on a Grand Scale (published May 2015). I have held them off for a few years because there have been notable developments such as Brexit, COVID-19, and more since I finished that work, which are still…
The making and unmaking of British ‘monetary Keynesianism’
Tuesday 25 March, 1.00pm-2:30 pm, 2025
Room 341, Level 3, Social Sciences Building (A02), University of Sydney
Speaker: Dr Sahil Dutta
It is hard to keep track of the major shifts in world politics that are going on at the moment. I am in the camp that saw the extraordinary confrontation between Trump/Vance and Zelensky as demonstrating how embarrassing the US leadership has become. I am not a Zelensky supporter by any means but the behaviour…
“Fiscal support can manage the direct economic fallout from extreme weather events.” That quote came from an interesting new research paper published in the 98th edition of the Bank of International Settlements Bulletin (February 10, 2025) – Macroeconomic impact of extreme weather events. The paper seeks to tease out what the economic impacts and policy…
The last several decades of what is termed the neoliberal era has led to some fundamental changes in our social and economic institutions. It was led by the interests of capital reconfiguring what the polity should be doing, given that most of the significant shifts have come through the legislative or regulative capacity (power) of…
Governments that adhere to the mainstream macroeconomic mantras about fiscal rules and appeasing the amorphous financial markets have a habit of undermining their own political viability. As Australia approaches a federal election (by May 2025), the incumbent Labor government, which slaughtered the Conservative opposition in the last election, is now facing outright loss to a…
There are repeating episodes in world macroeconomics that demonstrate the absurdity of the mainstream way of thinking. One, obviously is the recurring debt ceiling charade in the US, where over a period of months, the various parties make threats and pretend they will close the government down by failing to pass the bill. Others think…
Last week, I wrote about – The decline of economics education at our universities (February 6, 2025). This decline has coincided and been driven by an attempt by economists to separate the discipline from its roots as part of the political debate, which includes philosophical views about humanity and nature. In her 1962 book –…