Recent economic data from both the UK and US should have taken the wind out of the sails of those in the Anglosphere who – despite clearly contradictory evidence from mainland Europe – continue to argue that fiscal tightening is needed for economic growth is to recover.
One of the beauties of the modern age is that documents that once would have been either inaccessible, or taken years of sleuthing to locate, are now readily downloadable from the Web. One such set of documents is the transcripts of the meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) in 2007, all of which have now been released.
Last week, several newspapers ran a story in which the Labor Opposition criticised the New South Wales Liberal government because the number of first home buyers had plunged after the first home owner’s grant was ended for existing homes. A photo of acting Opposition leader Linda Burney looking out sternly and sincerely accompanied the article, as she intoned in The Sydney Morning Herald’s text that the Liberals had abandoned first home buyers:
A friend just copied me the attached image. Apropos of current events. I can’t resist sharing it.
I am now in an industrial dispute with the University of Western Sydney over two matters: a charge of “Serious Misconduct” which they leveled at me during the unsuccessful campaign to stop UWS abolishing our Economics degree; and their failure to act on my application for a Voluntary Redundancy within the time required by UWS’s Enterprise Agreement.
As a public figure, I’m quite accustomed to seeing my name and face in the media. But it was still quite a surprise to load The Sydney Morning Herald’s site on Monday last week and see my craggy visage staring back at me from the front page:
This article begins with a tweet from the US economic blogger Noah Smith, who posts at Noahpinion:
Here we go, I thought – yet another mainstream attack on my non-mainstream economics. But why on earth would he see Minsky – my simulation program for modelling the economy as a fundamentally monetary system – as basically absurd? Because “DSGE modelling is so much better”, perhaps? Or because there are so many other good system dynamics programs already, why produce another one?
In the last four decades, there have been only a handful of central bank and Treasury papers that I thought genuinely added to human knowledge. The economic-oriented departments within governments have in general been even more dominated by neoclassical orthodoxy than academic departments – and for good, bureaucratic reasons.
The usual suspects are talking up the prospects for Australian property prices as the New Year approaches, with permabull and Australian Property Monitors senior economist Andrew Wilson forecasting 3-5 per cent growth nationally, and BIS Shrapnel managing director Robert Mellor calling for between 2 and 8 per cent growth for Sydney.
A mature age student who will commence doing a PhD with me in 2013 has need of work prior to commencing his degree.
He has a background in finance, risk measurement, and anti-money laundering. He has also worked as a security guard, and traffic controller, and is willing to consider any other temporary work.
