The Cellar - Austerity

Read a really interesting comment piece in the Guardian, which I think sets out very well the reasons why austerity measures are simply not the answer to the financial crisis currently engulfing Europe.

Quote:

Last week was an awesome warning of where go-it-alone austerity can lead. It produced some brutal evidence of where we end up when we place finance above economy and society. The markets are now betting not just on the break-up of the euro but on the arrival of a new economic dark age. The world economy is edging nearer to the abyss, and policymakers, none more than in Britain, are paralysed by the stupidities of their home-spun economics. Yanis Varoufakis, ex-speechwriter for former Greek prime minister George Papandreou and now an economics professor in the US, said last week: "There is precisely zero chance of austerity working. It is the same as thinking you can escape from gravity by waving your arms up and down."

Another analogy I heard recently was that it's a little like the old medical practice of bleeding. As the sick patient is bled, they get weaker, and sicker, and thus the need for more bleeding. All because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what bleeding does to the patient.

The article goes on:

Quote:

It could hardly be more sobering. Money has flooded out of Spain, Greece and the peripheral European economies. Signs of the crisis range from Athen's soup kitchens to Spain's crowds of indignados protesting in the streets against austerity and a broken capitalism. Youth unemployment is sky-high. Less visible is the avalanche of money flowing into hoped-for safe havens in the US, Germany and even Britain. The last time the British government could sell government bonds at interest rates as low as today's was in the early 1700s.

Quote:

Virtually everywhere you look there are signs of a weakening world economy. At home, manufacturing suffered its biggest plunge for three years, and this in an economy already suffering its longest depression since the 19th century. American jobs growth is petering out. Unemployment in Europe averages 11%. Even China witnessed a sharp fall away in factory activity in May.

As the article asks, if everybody is chasing austerity, where is the growth going to come from?

And why are we in this ridiculous situation?

Quote:

Yet none of this should be a surprise. We live in the aftermath of one of the biggest financial and intellectual mistakes ever made. For a generation the world, with the London/New York financial axis at its heart, surrendered to the specious theory that lending and financial contracts could grow many times faster than the underlying economy. There was a blind belief that in a free market banks could not make mistakes. Free markets didn't make mistakes – only clumsy bureaucratic states made economic mistakes. Or so they said. Financial alchemists, guided by the maxims of free market fundamentalism, could make no such errors.

Quote:

And because governments had guaranteed their deposits, as in Ireland, or had to inject capital into them as Spain has been doing all last week, this private bank debt has steadily become public debt. Here is a classic case where all the gains were privatised, and all the losses were socialised. It was the much-maligned state that had to step in and clear up the mess left behind by the private sector. The free market wasn't so free after all – in fact it proved astonishingly expensive for the public purse. People across Europe still pay the price.

So, now the banks are uber cautious and lending has slowed to a near halt, which is crippling the recovery. Governments meanwhile, up their ankles in new debt from stepping into the banking crisis, are also cautious, with costs rising fast (welfare etc) and a move to reduce deficits sitting uppermost in their minds.

Quote:

But the larger problem is intellectual. The dominant ideology of the day – from the same roots that delivered the crisis – forbids it. A consensus stretching from US Republicans through to Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats via George Osborne's Treasury continues to claim that the state is the source of economic bad. The state threatens enterprise, invites damaging taxation, and is the root cause of spreading inflation. The state must balance the books just as the private sector must.

This is not just an economic but a moral necessity, they argue. Living within one's means rather than "maxing" out on debt appeals to American, British and German individualistic Protestantism. Inflation is even more a sign of moral degradation: it means reneging on promises, rewarding spendthrifts and penalising savers. We had the good years. Now we must take our medicine. The public and private sectors must retrench simultaneously worldwide. Enterprise and free markets will do the rest. The "march of the makers" will step in to fill the void left by public austerity measures.

Except...that this attitude is steering us to the rocks.

Quote:

This is a first-order moral and economic mistake. Human beings need each other for mutual support. In economic terms this means that no individual, either as a person or a company, can manage existential risk by themselves. That risk needs to be shared and mitigated otherwise the risk is not accepted. There would be no enterprise or innovation – the risks of failure too great. That is why there is a role for both private and public sectors. It is governments who provide the means through which we express our social obligations and pool our risks.

This is the heart of Keynesian economics – a different set of moral and economic propositions than those which prevail. Today we can see an almost laboratory experiment on a global scale of why Keynes was right and his detractors wrong. There is no doubt what Keynes would advocate now: a government-sponsored increase in demand co-ordinated across as many countries as possible and an acceptance of a temporary but closely managed increase in inflation to reduce the real value of debt.

He goes into more detail on this in the full piece. Worth reading :)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...ed-will-hutton