Modern money and inflation Asad Zaman Milton Friedman was a powerful magician. His words charmed people into believing that night was day, against the evidence…

The post Modern money and inflation first appeared on Economic Reform Australia.

When Labor leader Anthony Albanese couldn’t say whether the unemployment rate was 5% or 4% on Monday, he might have had a point.

It’s 4%. But for a decade – the entire decade leading up to COVID – it never strayed too far from five-point-something per cent.

Melbourne University labour market specialist Jeff Borland points out that in March 2010, Australia’s unemployment rate was 5.4%. Ten years later, before COVID changed things in March 2020, it was 5.3%.

I was interviewed about the history of unemployment in Australia and, more specifically, the history of how Australia has treated unemployed workers. We haven’t always been so punitive. For about 25 years after WW2 unemployment was seen as a collective … Continue reading →

At the risk of being political – and politics is important, it will determine how we are governed for the next three years – economic conditions could scarcely be better for a government seeking re-election.

The economic things that matter most to most people are, in my view:

• jobs – if employment is climbing rather than falling, most people are not at much risk of losing their job

• economic growth and wages growth – if things are getting better rather than worse, even in small ways, people feel better about the future

• the ability to buy a home – if it is getting hard, even for other people or for their children, they are concerned about what the future will become

• mortgage rates – as long as rates stay low they know their own personal budget won’t go out of whack

What’s the boldest thing the Morrison government could do in next month’s budget?

It would be to forecast an unemployment rate below 4% (a rate of three-point-something), then to pledge to go further, to two-point-something.

Neither have happened for half a century; not since the long Coalition reign of Robert Menzies and his successors from the 1950s to the early 1970s, when unemployment was between 2 and 3%.

Astoundingly, both are now within Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s reach in a way they weren’t mere weeks ago.

If you told someone a year ago unemployment was about to dive below 5%, to just above 4%, they wouldn’t have believed you.

If that person was an expert, and you said it would happen despite a Delta outbreak and lockdowns in our two biggest states, they might have said you had little idea of how the economy worked.

At the beginning of last year, The Conversation asked 21 of Australia’s leading economists what would happen in 2021 and 2022. At the time, the published unemployment rate was 6.6%.

None of them thought it would slip below 5% in 2021 or 2022.

Asked when the unemployment rate might eventually even touch 5%, none nominated 2021. Only two nominated 2022. The rest picked dates years into the future. Three picked “not for the foreseeable future”.

In a February 18th front page article in the business section of the New York Times, Eduardo Porter surveys the potential for a job guarantee program. After starting with the caveat issued by Republican politicians—why trust your life choices to bureaucrats?—the piece goes on to present opinions of various experts on employment programs. It is […]

Senior Scholar Rania Antonopoulos recently participated in a webinar for the European Trade Union Institute, during which she discussed the rationale behind and experience with the implementation of the “Kinofelis” direct job creation program—a limited job guarantee for Greece. Watch her presentation below (accompanying slides are here). The Levy Institute’s previous Strategic Analysis for Greece […]

Without public consultation, the boundaries of freeports have been expanded to cover much of the country. What does this mean? By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 17th August 2022 Democracy is the problem that capital is always striving to solve. To maintain its rates of profit, it seeks to drive down the taxes it […]

Josiah Mortimer reports on a night shift worker at an Essex logistics hub who has to walk hours in freezing temperatures