Saturday, June 23, 2018

the Left,Trump and Republicans

George Will says to vote Democratic

Osita Nwanevu:
These folks are actually proud that they don't know how to do politics. "Mueller will save us." "Good Republicans will save us." "A recession (!) will save us." 
What will save you are a long-term electoral strategy and structural reforms aimed at politically dismantling the GOP. 
Another part of the package is passing policies that have significant, positive, & easily comprehensible impacts on people's lives when Dems are in power. Free stuff's great. People like free stuff. You "pay" for it by raising taxes on the wealthy & corps, which people also like
Listened to Chapo which was thought-provoking.

How do you sideline the 30 percent who are Trump supporters?

Clean house in the Democratic Party. We need a strong socialist movement which should include a resurgent labor movement and poor people's movement.

Make it so the white nationalists/anti-immigrants no longer have a veto.


flattening yield curve

Who’s Afraid of a Flattening Yield Curve? by David Glasner

Friday, June 22, 2018

Dillow on growth

THE INFINITE DESIRE FOR GROWTH: A REVIEW by Chris Dillow


productivity and anti-immigration/ anti-trade

You keep productivity up by maintaining real full employment.

Bob Allen's new "poverty machine" and its implications by Branko Milanovic

Per Martin Sandbu (paywalled) at the Financial Times, Italy has slow productivity growth. This has led to anti-immigration and xenophobic-populist parties succeeding. Sandbu points out the way to increase productivity is to maintain full employment and close the output gap, not by paying workers less. 

Germany has become more competitive by paying workers less. Krugman doesn't seem to emphasize this and doesn't seem to emphasize Sandu's story. Italy needs better fiscal policy since it can't do a devaluation. 

Better fiscal policy can be a substitute for a devaluation. 

Labour UK wants the central bank (Bank of England) to focus on productivity growth. This would entail a dialogue with fiscal policy makers since they would need to pull their weight.

Simon Wren-Lewis doesn't like this.

A new mandate for monetary policy by Simon Wren-Lewis.


Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

TV

C.B. Strike is interesting with Tom Burke and his assistant Holliday Grainger. Sherlock: "conventional is the enemy of interesting." Stargate Atlantis's John Sheppard: "42, the ultimate answer to the great question of life, universe and everything." (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, and Jackie Robinson's number.)

Labour monetary policy reforms

Labour pledges to boost Bank of England role with productivity target by Jim Pickard and Chris Giles 

Labour has said it will set the Bank of England a new 3 per cent target for productivity growth but refused to specify when this should be achieved.

John McDonnell, shadow chancellor, will on Wednesday launch Labour’s final report on the UK’s financial system. 

Written by Graham Turner, an economist at GFC Economics, the report will make a series of recommendations, including that the BoE should move to Birmingham. 

But its most eye-catching proposal is that the central bank should target productivity “to better help drive economic growth”. The bank’s mandate would be expanded to include a 3 per cent productivity growth target. 

“The Bank of England and government should sign an accord at the start of the next government, detailing how each will work towards achieving this 3 per cent target,” the party said. “The Bank of England will be required to report, after each Budget, on the government’s plans in light of this 3 per cent target.” 

However, the party was unable to explain whether the target would cover a period of months or years or even decades. “It is open for consultation,” it said. 

 The report, called Financing Investment, highlights Britain’s poor rate of productivity growth and emphasises the low level of investment into manufacturing, ICT and other critical sectors. 

Its other recommendations, some of which have been previously announced, include setting up a Strategic Investment Board; using RBS, the publicly-owned bank, to deliver more lending to small companies; and establishing an applied sciences investment fund to deliver state funding to research and development.

Raising productivity growth is a key aim of all political parties because increasing each worker’s output would help raise the national growth rate, increase incomes and bring more tax revenues into the Treasury. 

Productivity growth has never exceeded 3 per cent a year in Britain. Over the past decade it has increased by just 0.2 per cent a year. 

Last November, the Office for Budget Responsibility calculated a “strong productivity” scenario in which Britain’s public finances would move into surplus by 2022 if annual productivity growth improved to 2 per cent a year by the early 2020s. 

In the same month, Philip Hammond, chancellor, admitted in the Budget that productivity growth had been “stubbornly flat” for years. 

However, one of the few aspects all the BoE’s policymakers agree on is that central banks only have the ability to smooth booms and busts in the economy, and have no power over the underlying productivity growth rate. The BoE estimates the likely growth of productivity and sets interest rates on that basis. 

Last autumn, Mark Carney, BoE governor, criticised those who wanted the central bank to solve problems such as productivity. The BoE “cannot deliver lasting prosperity and it cannot solve broader societal challenges,” he said, adding that calls for it to solve poor UK productivity “confuse independence with omnipotence”. 

The BoE refused to comment. 

Simon Clarke, a Tory MP, said: “Labour’s refusal to put a timeframe on their target shows their attempt to meddle with the Bank of England’s independence is already unravelling.”

Bernanke on QE at AEI

Lessons learned from 10 years of quantitative easing (video, June 7, 2018)


accomplices

Paul Krugman:
Sorry, Mr. Donohue, this IS who you are. People like you made a deal with racists so you could get deregulation and tax cuts. Every step you took was leading to this moment.

John Harwood:
new from US Chamber President Tom Donohue: “Thousands of children are being forcibly removed from their parents by our government. There is no other way to say it, this is not who we are and it must end now”

Big Business and old-timey conservatives famously made a deal with Nazis against the Communist and SocDem left in Germany. Didn't turn out well.

I agree with Krugman, but I sort of feel this way about liberals and neoliberals. Their incrementalism, minor-tinkering and focus on technocrats instead of mass mobilization are partly complicity in the situation we find ourselves in. They're attacks on the Left and socialists certainly don't help things.

They focus on a small number of 3rd party types who refuse to support Democrats, but to me those people are numerically insignificant compared to non-voters and to working class and middle class voters who are voting against their interests.

Center left parties have moved towards the right and have lost support b/c of it, not just in the US but in Europe.

By not delivering a robust, prosperous economy, certain elites have enabled Trumpism.