This is an election year in the UK and unless something dramatically changes, the Labour Party will be in power for the next term of Parliament and will have to manage a poly crisis that they will inherit from 40 or more years of neoliberalism. Note, I don’t confine the antecedents to the Tory period…
Fiscal Policy
On November 27, 2023, the Economic Affairs Committee of the British House of Lords completed their inquiry into the question – Bank of England: how is independence working? – by releasing their 1st Report after taking evidence for several months – Making an independent Bank of England work better. The report is interesting because it…
Today, I consider the latest development in the entrenchment of neoliberalism in the Australian policy sector, specifically, the latest decision by the Treasurer to excise his powers under Section 11 of the Reserve Bank Act 1959, which allowed the Treasurer to overrule RBA policy decisions if they considered them not to be in the national…
It’s Wednesday, and today I discuss the latest US inflation data, which shows a significant annual decline in the inflation rate with housing still prominent. But for reasons I discuss, we can expect the housing inflation to fall in the coming months. I also discuss how on-going fiscal ignorance allows the Australian government to avoid…
The resurgence of economic orthodoxy is a great example of how declining schools of thought can maintain dominance in the narrative for extended periods of time if the vested interests are powerful enough. In the case of the economics profession, mainstream New Keynesian theory persists because it serves the interests of capital. Recently, the IMF…
The IMF regularly conduct ‘missions’ to member countries, where a group of highly paid economists trot out to a capital city somewhere, hole up in some luxury hotel, and have a few meetings with Treasury officials and the like and then shoot through after the short visit back to whence they came and produce their…
Given I wrote a detailed CPI analysis yesterday (Wednesday), I am using today as if it was my Wednesday post where I cover a range of topics. I was criticised on social media last week for combining in last Wednesday’s post – Launching the CofFEE Financial Resilience Barometer – Version 1.0 (October 18, 2023) –…
The British Labour Party officials and politicians have all been cock-a-hoop over the last week in Liverpool as they participate in their Annual Conference with the latest modelling suggesting they may win a “landslide 190-seat majority” at the next national election leaving the miserable and incompetent Tories with only 149 seats (currently 352) (Source). The…
During the – 1997 Asian financial crisis – when the IMF intervened and imposed harsh structural adjustment packages on the impacted countries (cuts in spending and interest rate hikes), we learned that IMF officials would swan in from Washington to, for example, Seoul, for a weekend, hole up in expensive hotels and by the end…
I read an interesting report this morning, which resonated with some other work I had been looking into earlier in the week. The Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS) released a report yesterday (September 27, 2023) – Inequality in Australia 2023: Overview – which shows that “The gap between those with the most and those…