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Earlier this month the Athens Development and Governance Institute and the Levy Economics Institute held a forum on the eurozone crisis:  “Exiting the Crisis: The Challenge of an Alternative Policy Roadmap.”  Below are the remarks delivered by senior scholars Jan Kregel and James Galbraith.

In a new, wide-ranging policy note, C. J. Polychroniou traces the roots and evolution of the present “era of global neoliberalism”; an era he portrays as mired in perpetual crisis and dysfunction, and ripe for change. [N]eoliberalism itself is more of an ideological construct than a solidly grounded theoretical approach or an empirically-derived methodology. In fact, the intellectual foundations of neoliberal discourse are couched in profusely vague claims and ahistorical terms. Notions such as “free markets,” “economic efficiency,” and “perfect competition” are so devoid of any empirical reference that they belong to a discourse on metaphysics, not economics. Polychroniou attempts to outline the central principles of a progressive, post-Keynesian economic policy alternative.  His primary target:  changing the relationship between the state and the financial sector. Read the policy note here.

Yesterday, Dimitri Papadimitriou joined Ian Masters to discuss the response to the banking crisis in Cyprus.  The plan on the table, in which Cypriot banks would impose a deposit tax (9.9 percent on deposits above €100,000, and 6.75 on deposits below that) in order to gain access to a €10 billion bailout from the troika, unconscionably makes small depositors pay for someone else’s regulatory blunders — and is likely to be ineffective anyway, said Papadimitriou. The entire episode once again points to the fundamentally unworkable setup of the eurozone, in which each member-nation is (ostensibly) responsible for its own banking system.  For more on these deeper structural problems, see this policy note:  “Euroland’s Original Sin.” Listen to the interview here.

Victoria Chick, a student of Hyman Minsky’s, elaborates on an issue that often strikes non-economists as somewhere between scandalous and baffling:  the absence of any substantive acknowledgment of money in much of contemporary economics and economic modelling. (Particularly interesting around the 12:10 mark, where Chick argues that faulty or outdated language in relation to banking helps reinforce misunderstandings about deposits, lending, and the relationship between the two.) (via David Fields) For more on this question of how to understand money and its role in our economic systems, see this working paper.

The evident failure of the ongoing austerity and “structural adjustment” experiments in Greece and the rest of the eurozone might have prompted some reconsideration of the intellectual foundations of those policies.  Instead, as C. J. Polychroniou observes in his latest policy note, one notable reaction seems to have been to blame the test subjects: In drafting the document for the so-called “Second Economic Adjustment Programme for Greece,” the EU’s neoliberal lackeys contended that “Greece made mixed progress towards the ambitious objectives of the first adjustment program.” On the positive side, it is noted, the general government deficit was reduced “from 15.75 percent of GDP in 2009 to 9.25 percent in 2011.” On the negative side, the recession “was much deeper than previously projected” because, it is claimed, factors such as “social unrest” and “administrative incapacity” (including a lack of effectiveness in combating tax evasion) “hampered implementation.” The antigrowth “fiscal and structural adjustment” program was perfectly designed and would have produced all the anticipated results if the government were better fit to carry out the policies … and if the citizenry did not on occasion make some fuss about them by staging demonstrations here and there or by occupying the square outside the Greek parliament building. In essence, this is what the above statement says. The puny excuses of the EU… Read More

The Bard Economics Program and the Levy Economics Institute present: William H. Janeway Institute for New Economic Thinking and Warburg Pincus Technology Monday, March 4, 2013  4:45 p.m. Bard College Reem-Kayden Center for Science and Computation (RKC), Room 103 Excerpt from Doing Capitalism: “The Innovation Economy begins with discovery and culminates in speculation. Over some 250 years, economic growth has been driven by successive processes of trial and error and error and error: upstream exercises in research and invention, and downstream experiments in exploiting the new economic space opened by innovation. Each of these activities necessarily generates much waste along the way: dead-end research programs, useless inventions and failed commercial ventures. In between, the innovations that have repeatedly transformed the architecture of the market economy, from canals to the internet, have required massive investments to construct networks whose value in use could not be imagined at the outset of deployment. And so at each stage the Innovation Economy depends on sources of funding that are decoupled from concern for economic return.” About the Author:

A forum organized by the Athens Development and Governance Institute and the Levy Economics Institute — “Exiting the Crisis: The Challenge of an Alternative Policy Roadmap” — will take place in Athens, Greece on March 8–9.  The Levy Institute’s Dimitri Papadimitriou, James Galbraith, Jan Kregel, and Rania Antonopoulos are among the academics, journalists, politicians, and organizers participating in the two-day forum at the Athinais Cultural Centre (Kastorias 34–36, Votanikos).  Simultaneous translation (Greek / English) will be provided. Topics include: Major Challenges and Policy Choices European Union: Toward Which Way and for Whom? National Strategic and Security Challenges in S.E. Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean Empowering Democracy: Legitimization, Accountability, Effectiveness, and Social Oversight Productive Restructuring and Sustainable Development Social Cohesion Fairness and Democracy Toward a Social Front for Change: Prerequisites and Priorities For more information and a full list of participants, see here.

Randall Wray joined Suzi Weissman on her “Beneath the Surface” radio show on Friday.  They began the interview with a discussion of the policy blunders that are creating headwinds for the US economy, including the expiration of the payroll tax cut, the decline of real per capita government spending, and, as Wray put it, “the government sucking jobs right out of the economy.”  He’s not referring here to the walking corpse of the theory that regulatory uncertainty is to blame for the slow recovery, but to the fact that government is holding back job growth far more directly: by laying off workers at an unprecedented rate.  For context, look at this chart put together by Floyd Norris (highlighted): They also addressed this Marketplace segment on the “death of inflation,” ongoing threats from the financial system, and some ideas for financial reform that are currently being tossed around.  On the latter, Wray argued that the idea of a financial transactions tax (being considered by a number of EU countries) is a second-best or partial solution.  Instead of sin taxes and other such “economists’ solutions,” as he described them, Wray recommended coming at the problem more directly: by outlawing certain speculative activities and going after practices like high-frequency trading.  They closed with a discussion of the prospects of another financial crisis emerging…. Read More

Tomorrow at UCLA, Randall Wray, Frank Partnoy, and Robert Brenner will discuss “The Economic Crisis:  Causes, Consequences, and What’s Next” as part of the annual colloquium series of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History. The speakers will consider the origins and results of the ongoing global economic crisis. They will give special attention to the rise of finance and the role of financial markets and institutions in its onset, spread, and ultimate consequences. How has the meltdown of Wall Street, its bailout by government, and its apparent recovery affected the macroeconomy and the future of finance itself? Are the great banks and other leading financial institutions now more or less likely to experience new meltdowns in the foreseeable future? Will the real economy see a new surge of growth, continuing stagnation, or renewed crisis? These are only some of the issues that will be addressed at this colloquium. Monday, 25 February 2013 2:00-5:00 pm History Conference Room, 6275 Bunche See the flyer for more information: 

The Congressional Budget Office’s latest report on the budget outlook revealed (perhaps unintentionally) that fixating on Congress and the President as the central players in the federal deficit drama is a mistake.  According to the CBO, the path the federal budget deficit will follow over the next 10 years is just as much (if not more so) a question of Federal Reserve policy. Here’s CBO’s latest 10-year outlook for the federal budget: As you can see, the fastest rising category of spending is not “Social Security,” or even “major healthcare programs,” but rather “net interest,” which CBO projects will grow from 1.4 percent of GDP to 3.3 percent of GDP by 2023 (“a percentage that has been exceeded only once in the past 50 years,” they note).

Why has the world’s premiere deficit-reduction laboratory produced such a dismal failure? European leadership still expects the painful über austerity measures imposed on Greece to result in a dramatic improvement of its debt to GDP ratio. But the experiment in endurance is not succeeding for an important reason: Austerity programs have been rooted in myths about what caused the crisis in the first place. The popular notion that government overspending is the basis of Greece’s deficit woes is simply wrong. Evidence doesn’t support what seems to be a never-ending scolding about profligate spending. Greek national expenditures were at about 45 percent of GDP in 1990, long before the crisis. That share remained stable through 2006. Proportionally, its size was well below that of France, Italy, or even Germany. While Greece has a reputation for a nasty, historically oversized public sector, in the lead up to the crisis it behaved no differently than its neighbors, and its rate of spending didn’t prevent it from catching and surpassing affluent eurozone nations in growth. Rapid spending increases weren’t notable until the 2008 recession. The timeline reinforces the conviction that long-term government extravagance hasn’t been key to the Greek meltdown. Its debt picture was also steady. For years, Greece ran a deficit of 3 to 5 percent of GDP, and roughly a 120 percent… Read More

A couple of links worth sharing on the politics and policy of the budget debate. First, the Wall Street Journal reports that Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles are coming out with a new deficit reduction plan, worth $2.4 trillion.  If it’s anything like the last plan, every lawmaker will claim to love it, journalists will assume its goodness as a fact more established than the shape of the earth, no one will have a clue what’s in it, and it will go nowhere. The details have not yet been released, but one initial question you might have is this:  where does that $2.4 trillion number come from?  Have they taken their original deficit reduction target from 2010 ($4 trillion) and subtracted the amount of budget savings already achieved ($2.5 trillion)?  Apparently not.  Has the deficit picture worsened since 2010?  Quite the contrary.  If you look at healthcare alone, the government is now set to spend almost $1 trillion less over the next decade than what was expected when Simpson and Bowles were coming up with their plan.  If their new plan takes these recent developments into account, it’s not clear how.  The question remains:  why this number? We’ll  have to wait to hear what the justification is (if there is any).  Perhaps this is an issue of different budget windows,… Read More