Mark Blyth Mackenzie Lecture 2015 - Mark Blyth provides a critical assessment of austerity policies across Europe and their effectiveness and impact. www.gla.ac.uk/stevensontrust/
Yes, but he talks a little fast. I agree that austerity is not a good plan for the reasons stated. What I don't like is saying or implying economics is a zero sum game. It isn't. When people make a deal they both think they are benefiting from that deal. On top of that there can be productivity and wealth growth through increased productivity. It is the increase productivity that austerity kills.
I would argue that generating profits through ever more absurdly designed financial instruments and speculation is exactly a zero sum game. Blythe talks often about how the remuneration available by going into finance is drawing off top talent that would otherwise go into industry and engineer the increased productivity you talk about. Investment banks are supposed to generate value (and profit) by providing efficient allocation of resources to the market but more and more the system is trending towards how best to skim off the top, decreasing total efficiency across the economy.
I agree that the financial part of the economy is zero sum if that but there is the rest of the economy, farming, mining, forest products, industry, and computers that produce real wealth.
Wait where do you get the impression that Mark is implying that economics is zero sum? He states that the reason the British economy didn't collapse in 1850 is because economics is not zero sum and what that branch of liberalism forgets is that growth factors into how much debt and deficit a nation can sustain.
Peter Nachtwey: You haven't been paying attention. Farming ((1) relies on annual bank loans during growing seasons, banks aren't making loans; a big complaint from the Obama bailout, (2) there is a land-grab going on and banks are foreclosing if you are 27 cents late on payment.) Mining (1) people are shifting away from coal to alternate forms of energy which is a threat to this arcane industry, (2) who benefits from the mining? Certainly not the miners. Forest products: Public lands, preserves and reserves are being swept clean of timber which is being sent whole to China where it is stripped, sawn, and then sold back to us at top dollar. Computers: People don't buy computers when they are out of work. All that you have enumerated creates wealth for owners and investors but not for the workers. Even Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, knew that if you don't pay your workers well, they won't buy your products. You must be a Republican to be so concerned that the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor.
Most lectures are like this. Every bore gets a turn at feeling important. Especially if it's a University or Library with a particular program or dept on top with the featured lecture being funded by a particular foundation...1.2.3.
You can't make people borrow either. All investment in a capitalist economy is for profit and the expectation that an investment will provide them with that. Lots of businesses , which do meed to borrow from banking sector , are sitting upon large quantities of cash/liquidity but cannot see anything profitable to invest in.
If you haven't read "Austerity: The History of a Bad Idea" (how do I make italics or underline?) it's really good. A good faith effort to communicate rather than a gatekeeper written book- in other words, not in academese either.
Yep, but he is wrong. Look at what he predicted - didn't happen -like for example Euro stopped dropping and rose after his speach. Not to mention that Baltic states who, according to him should have failed, are a success story of austerity.
@@konfunable There are success stories in places where austerity was applied not because of austerity but in spite of. They could have been better with no austerity. Maybe.
If the Scottish government had a sense they would pay Mark Blyth whatever he asks to come and be their principal financial adviser. I would start the 'crowd funding' right now if I thought it would work. And if they are doing it already - all power to them.
I just love listening to Mr. Blyth. He is so well informed and eloquent, its just pleasure to watch. Also, I begun reading his latest book Austerity: A History of a Dangerous Idea just a week ago. Nice stuff. Thanks for the upload!
I appreciate his simplicity. What I get from this is that in the USA we do not have a spending problem. We have a revenue problem which I have thought was true for many years. Of course we have a spending problem but it has to do with priorities. The situation currently sucks. I find it rare that I listen to a man who at once has smarts, self- confidence, candor and humility. What a find!
At the end of the day he is still a bourgeoisie capitalist who benefits tremendously from the bad things he is pointing out. What he is trying to do is sway the discourse so that when the populists finally wrestle the economic system back to something like the 1950s where finance is constrained, that he finds himself on the right side of the mob. He probably realizes that he's too Scottish to be welcomed into whatever English (who are still 57% of the UK population) populist movement that tries to take power, and so he wants to try and steer the discourse to create and then align himself with a multi-cultural coalition of Scots, Irish, Welsh, Black, Asian(Indian sub-continent) and the English people that are high in openness as they go after the wealthy capitalists who don't share their politics. It's fairly standard scapegoating where you can put the blame of a large group who all benefited at the feet of a portion of that group, even thought everyone in the group is to blame. It's standard populism and he's trying to change the narrative to support left-wing populism which aligns with him instead of right-wing populism which is against him. It's not a bad plan on his part, but he's still just another bourgeoisie that is trying to evade class retribution for wrongdoings which he condemns but still has greatly benefited from.
Fascinating talk. I couldn't help but notice the similarity of some of the Scottish accents to an American accent in the Q&A discussion (for example, the moderator). Are there regions of Scotland where this is the case?
When will these academics learn not to use the introduction to a public lecture as a forum in which to share material of no relevance to any other than a minority of the student body. You have a brilliant speaker in Mark Blyth; spare the internet community your institutional drones ;).
I should hav watchrd this video 10 years ago. He is explain ung a complex problem in an understandebel way. This shows two things. One, he knows what he is taking about, two, he is a great teatcher. An absolutte plesure to listen to. And of course, I copletly agree with everithibg he is saying here.
I suspect he wouldn't really want to stick his hand in the hornet's nest. But yes I would agree, we (the world) needs people with his kind of intellect.
The larger the country the more the holdings of another currency so that the larger country can purchase whatever it is they want to purchase from said country. It's just currency holding in readiness to pay isn't it?
1h 08 The reason macro prudential measures can't stop housing bubbles is fairly obvious. Land is a natural monopoly that parasites of the wider economy unless held in check. The alternatives now are indeed inflate the bubble, or stagnate the economy. No wonder Draghi is choosing the former. Pre 1988 the UK had fairly strong rent controls and social housing which kept the real estate cycle subdued, Germany still has much the same hence their house prices have actually fallen over the last 20 years. The ideal method to control it is the oldest, to tax land as the Physiocrats suggested.
schumanhuman 1h 18 Corporation tax is in a permanent race to the bottom, when one haven is shut down it merely leads to offshoring the offshoring. Only a few countries have any leverage at all here, and they are unwilling. Better to tax inelastic goods that cannot flee then corporations will pay for the privilege of using land. Rognlie has already exposed the flaw in Piketty within his own data, the returns have not gone to capital primarily, but to housing ie land value.
schumanhuman 1hr 23 Brown calling and end to boom bust was beyond hubris. The tragedy was he was warned over a decade in advance the exact nature of the economies path. In 1997 Economist Fred Harrison wrote the following www.businesscycles.biz/chartsbusiness/chaos1997.htm Harrison made sure economic advisers received this analysis, yet nothing was done. This work is how Vince Cable got his reputation for calling the crisis, yet he has sat complicit in a government which has already set the groundwork for the next economic crisis. We may expect a mid cycle bust around 2019 and a full correction around 2026/7.
Must found this lecture...agreed with most of it...just thought that banks mortgages are assets and liabilities... people's mortgages are assets and liabilities...always goes both ways about everything..depends on what the use is
Sum up all the income in the country, including income gained from investments, and sum all the income in the country excluding investments, and divide the second number by the first number.
I feel bad for what the Greeks suffered, but I gotta admit... *sniggers* Most of this was Greek to me! :D Seriously, though, none of this made a lick of sense to me. Money and finance are like magic to me. It just kind of happens, and no matter how many explanations I've heard (including from this guy that the hosts took forever to let on the podium), it doesn't get any clearer. Is this just beyond some people's grasp, and if so, what do you do? This clearly affects everyone's lives, but if you can't understand what's so negatively affecting you, how can you advocate for change? In whom do you place trust when you can understand the thing yourself?
It's just not on a human level, that's all. In order to understand it, on some level you have to buy into a certain type of instrumental reasoning that's completely detached from what people go through on a day to day basis. Some people are naturally a bit better at abstraction than others, but the vast majority of us can get there if we work at it. If finance is hard for you to understand, then the Marxist theory on the same subject matter might help bridge the gap between the instrumental and wholistic, philosophical relations- you don't even have to become a Marxist to get this sort of value from it. Learning philosophy then coming back to theory helps a lot with getting the tools to process abstractions in more meaningful ways In a way finance _is_ magic; it's only real because we believe in it. We experience it and maneuver through it because we conceptualize the world in terms of movement of capital, and we can just as easily unlearn this framing and break out of the Ponzi scheme
An equitable government spending I think falls in line with the following principals of good government, it's taxation, and how that is spent. I know everyone is generally caught up in the complexities of government, but this one sentence extracted from the Thomas Jefferson Letters at the US National Archives I believe sets the perimeters. "The care and happiness of humans, not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government." Were the economics of a country geared around that rather than solely the expansion of accumulated wealth at the top and corporate and national empire building, there would be à government economic system that benefits the whole of society, eg cooperative good government and less time for globalized wars.
What he gave us with solutions to get out of the deadly whirlpool we were mistakenly thrown was 1) deficit spending plus isue Euro-bonds ! The first is desperately un-fit , since all states are by now running larger than GDP deficits ! Whereas the second one was equally unreal, because himself explained that YIELDS ARE DOWN TO ZERO ! So here is the cream of Bourgeoisie's elite , left without a ' credible ' solution ! Most people maybe did not understand well, or could not follow through , as I could to review several times the RU-vid video back and forth and write down ..... ??? !
Now I have a different set of 'facts' that I did not hear here. Is it not true that money loaned to Greece never touched Greek hands and it was never distributed into the economy in public works, infrastructure, etc, the money mysteriously went into some private sector account, never to be seen again, with the Greeks paying the bill through austerity measures. Similar story in Ireland, the debts of the foreign banks became the debts of the population. It's not incompetence, its a criminal Central Banker warfare offensive conducted against the people of the weaker nations of the EU. How can the EU continue while the trans-Atlantic financial system operates in disintegration? The United States must reorganize the financial system.
HOW MANY DOLLARS did you spend in income tax, that's more than all of what Bank Of America spent or American Airlines? I want to know if my Mom personally spent more than all of Bank Of America. It would blow her mind.
He forgot to mention the main reason inflation is bad for the working class: high positive inflation makes it impossible to save money for retirement. And that's just as true for government pensions. A retirement program, like social security, won't make a return of more than 1% per year under normal inflation. Even if that investment wasn't entirely in Treasury bonds (the people are literally paying themselves interest), any hope of financing private or public pensions then relies on a weird version of ponzi scheme "grow your way out of it" economics, which is not sustainable.
And confusing 1970's definitions of relative poverty for *absolute* poverty, and comparing them to relative poverty 50 years later, is a serious error. The term "poverty" did not refer to anywhere near the same living conditions that it refers to today.
I must say that I thought that I was conversant with this subject. This speaker speaks so rapidly that I can not get anything out of this lecture at all.
I've not got that yet. I'm a little stumped by the 17:15 Greek debt to GDP chart. Essentially flat between 1995 and 2009. I suspect the explanation for that is that the books were cooked to crisp, not that the Greek Fin Min was a paragon of prudence. Given your name I'm guessing you're Greek. Given that you commented here on a point made right at the end of the lecture, you have sufficient interest in the subject to watch an hour and a half lecture and therefore have at least some insight into the subject matter, even if as an interested amateur. Do you have any thoughts on the following quote or other explanation of the remarkably flat Greek debt to GDP over this period shown in the chart? Cheers. "Which is to say that even at the time, some observers noted that Greek numbers never seemed to add up. A former I.M.F. official turned economic adviser to former Greek prime minister Konstantinos Mitsotakis turned Salomon Brothers analyst named Miranda Xafa pointed out in 1998 that if you added up all the Greek budget deficits over the previous 15 years they amounted to only half the Greek debt. That is, the amount of money the Greek government had borrowed to fund its operations was twice its declared shortfalls. “At Salomon we used to call [the head of the Greek National Statistical Service] ‘the Magician,’ ” says Xafa, “because of his ability to magically make inflation, the deficit, and the debt disappear.” In 2001, Greece entered the European Monetary Union, swapped the drachma for the euro, and acquired for its debt an implicit European (read German) guarantee. Greeks could now borrow long-term funds at roughly the same rate as Germans-not 18 percent but 5 percent. To remain in the euro zone, they were meant, in theory, to maintain budget deficits below 3 percent of G.D.P.; in practice, all they had to do was cook the books to show that they were hitting the targets. Here, in 2001, entered Goldman Sachs, which engaged in a series of apparently legal but nonetheless repellent deals designed to hide the Greek government’s true level of indebtedness. For these trades Goldman Sachs-which, in effect, handed Greece a $1 billion loan-carved out a reported $300 million in fees. The machine that enabled Greece to borrow and spend at will was analogous to the machine created to launder the credit of the American subprime borrower-and the role of the American investment banker in the machine was the same. The investment bankers also taught the Greek-government officials how to securitize future receipts from the national lottery, highway tolls, airport landing fees, and even funds granted to the country by the European Union. Any future stream of income that could be identified was sold for cash up front, and spent. As anyone with a brain must have known, the Greeks would be able to disguise their true financial state for only as long as (a) lenders assumed that a loan to Greece was as good as guaranteed by the European Union (read Germany), and (b) no one outside of Greece paid very much attention. Inside Greece there was no market for whistle-blowing, as basically everyone was in on the racket." www.vanityfair.com/news/2010/10/greeks-bearing-bonds-201010
No: what he is saying is that the EU could never give in to the demands Varoufakis made to go easy on Greece because of the perception that would leave. That would be "the squeaky wheel gets the grease", and that would eventually tank the Euro. So, the EU did everything that was necessary to ensure the lenders got their money back by extracting it from the Greek economy, the evidence of the Greek/German debt scheme disappeared, and some sort of fiscal controls were imposed on the Greek Government. As the Greek economy was on the periphery, it was easy to use the narrative and the methods of Austerity to do this quickly to cast the Greek people as a whole as being deserving of such treatment. However, the vast majority of the burden did not fall on the beneficiaries of the scheme - the Greek plutocrats, oligarchs, and the institutions that supported them. It fell on those least able to cope, or avoid the pain - the poor, and the young. So, no Greece wouldn't disappear, but its glaring economic and political problems would recede from public view.
They might not have been able to tell us we where bailing out the banks but we knew, the crash should have happened the day after 9/11 but my guess is it took some time to package all the losses up and distribute them.
Kings College to become S.H.I.T.E. Could be true, might not be. I do know there's a Curtin University of New Technologies in Western Australia. I also know they studiously avoid using an acronym on official letterheads.
the trouble is bubles and pozzis can go on far longer than clever peoples cash can last/ even if they are doing the right thing.. they become institutional and unchallangable even if its all based on crap
So governments provided money to banks to keep banks operating, however banks starved economy of money flow as the banks struggled along using money received from government to reduce their debts, to return their capital bases to healthy states, at same time banks unprepared maintain credit to mass population because of money banks lost to millionaire companies; Thus millionaire bankers frightened by losses to millionaire companies, starved mass population of reasonable credit, so mass population lacks money to actually spend which economy requires to recover... Is resolution of problem less propping up the banks, than propping up spending by the mass population ? .
+Paul Parker Most likely, also considering the banks have been in public hands they have had any reform or major regulation. The current government's idea is to sell the banks as quickly as possible rather than make them hand out the money. But we mustn't forget that banks can't lend out willy nilly, they did that and lost the money as nobody could pay it back causing a loss of confidence that caused the crash. So the banks not lending as freely as before is them learning a lesson but we still have the problem of that their is not enough money in the system.
There is plenty of money is the system. If you look at M1, M2 and the monetary aggregates you see the cash and you know the cash is migrating to Wall Street and Main Street has no access to capital. Look how the FRB's balance sheet has ballooned from $800 bil to $4.5 tril in the last several years.
Consider differences in bank loans of USA, Australia, Canada and UK... note security for loans with/without walk away and forget housing loans . Impact from toss in keys and walk without risk. Also effects from long term social security payments which enable families and banks to maintain loans longer, re-negotiate them, so their is far less loss.
+Joe Bond You must not forget that the broad money supply M1 and M2 are bank liabilities. These are liabilities the bank can settle in two ways, let the customer withdraw cash or make transfers on behalf of the customer through their accounts at the Central Bank. The latter is settled with a net flow of central bank reserves transfers (they only transfer reserves equivalent to the net transfers of customers with different banks.). Deficits and surpluses are redistributed through lending of reserves and the standing facilities at the Central Bank. The bank of England have a simple version of this in the 2014 quarterly bulletin. A more fleshed out version would be 'Om pengemengden' (about the money supply). (Unfortunately it's in Norwegian but a lot of the basics apply everywhere. If you can read it, just Google the title since I'm to lazy to bother with links myself.) Its the interest rate corridor which usually differ. One unique aspect of the Norwegian baking system are quotas on reserves. Anything above the quota gets 1% or so less than the policy rate. One key note here is that you don't need to have money present for to do banking. Customers won't withdraw it all at once and most of the transactions are settled electronically. So cash is not your primary concern. Reserves can be borrowed at the interbank market. Just make sure that the interest rate you give customers are lower than what you get on your liquidity. Just note that what you're doing when you lend without actual cash at hand is creating money.
I think what we need to also consider is the arbitrary nature of what constitutes poverty. It's dependent on salary more than actual living standards. I think if you asked a person living in poverty (part of Blyth's 800,000 in Scotland) whether they'd prefer the poverty of 1970 to now, they'd pick today. I think perhaps we need to think of quality of living vs. comparative assets/salary. I am not saying it's not important but I think the dialogue is wrong. Also, many metrics, at least for the US, don't factor in gov't support as part of income in determining poverty: www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/09/the-war-on-poverty-after-50-years
Also cuts hitting pensioners! They cannot be guaranteed to vote for austerity, they are not stupid! and they care what is happening to their great grandchildren, the fact that they will most likely never own property. Perhaps they might not mind so much if they are housed in an excellent socially designed communal housing project as we are social beings with loneliness on the whole, not a desirable feature of life. We may well see leasehold shares in such being worth more than real housing as more and more people bid.
he was wrong about Blair he was not the same as MT. the hospitals and infrastructure collapsed in the 80s and it took more than a decade to start fix them
Patti Wilson he probably didnt want to get in trouble with the law, because the answer to your question was known to the good people of Ur in Mesopotamia in about 2200Bc and the good people of Memphis in Egypt, and the aswer is violence, unimaginable amounts of totally unrestricted violence applied to the affluent minority and members of their families. Tend to work, for about 2-3 generations, before new elites arise and it just starts all over again.
In principle, their power follows from their ownership of money-wealth. As in, their ability to sabotage the economy in response to politcal threats, their control of media through ownership of newsapers and TV stations, their ability to buy political nominations and seats on supreme courts through campaign funding, their ability to arrange the privatisation of the military so that in extremis they can dismantle the state militarily (hack up the country) through mercenary companies and mount coups with private armies. It all follows from legal ownership of money-wealth; what they are "worth" officially as an aggregate of individuals. The secret, which is hiding in plain sight, studiously ignored by the press and their bought economists and economics theories, which treat it as impossible, hence all the talk about how it is impossible for the state to finance any increase in public service provision because "there is no money", is to separate them from that money, principally by taxation, but also by triggering a market crash after having imposed transfer and exchange controls, so they can't wire it out of the country first, to wipe them out by bankruptcy, or by abrogating the constution using emergency powers or eminent domain (or whatever it is named, different countries use different terms, but it exists everywhere because it is a default constitutional power of every sovereign state) to seize it outright, as the various Communist regimes did that were installed in Eastern Europe after the Second World War. They declared nationalisation without compensation, wholesale, did it, and enacted laws formalising it. Depriving the 1% of their money deprives them of their power. It's the only real way to get money out of politics without changing the constitution, which they are very likely to prevent. Thereafter you have the freedom and the wherewithal to rebuild and repair the economy for the common good without interference and with all the stashed money looted from the public by these people and their companies evading and avoiding taxes. It is high risk, and there are different approaches, of which the safest is a repeat of the New Deal, which was contingent on the Crash happening first by accident, not design, which weakened the banks' and monopolists' control of Congress and Senate so that the subsequent inquiry wasn't corrupted so as to absolve them and rule out real reform. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that a natural crash will be allowed to happen by the Rentiers because they also know of that history, so it will have to be engineered as if by accident, by a government which has been elected on a different plan. It goes without saying that that is not the Trump team. However, such is the precariousness and unsustainability of the situation, that at some point a crash or currency collapse is inevitable, and the question will be who triggers it and how will it be used, whether by the rentiers-speculators to do another round of Shock Doctrine, 2008 part 2, to loot the public again, or by non-vassal politicians to break them.
The other option, which is not an alternative to taxation, crash or seizure, but can and should go along with any of them, is wholesale private debt forgiveness, like the Bible says: Jubilee. It's both a way to disempower the rich and to rebuild and repair society after. It's in there (Leviticus 25, Deuteronomy 15) because this has happened before, and because it specifically savages the rentiers to restore dignity and freedom to the poor and enable us to secure our needs and so revive the economy, and God likes all of that (not kidding). Since it's part of the Mosaic Law, it's supposed to be something Judaism does on a regular basis, but they don't because Judaism doesn't keep the Sabbath after all, and Christianity is supposed to do it too, but it hasn't, because Christianity fails to obey Christ and implement the Gospel after all, since neither has ever really been in control of affairs, more's the pity. That failure to keep kosher was what Deacon Stephen was alluding to which got him dragged before the Sanhedrin and elevated to Saint Stephen the first Martyr.
well, for one, you don't trade with them. they are happy to spend all their money, but they want "houses cars and food" in return. we must empower ourselves. to build our own wealth, and maintain our own properties. and say no to their paper money :) hope that helps, or just hate me because I'm preaching work ethic and building ones own net worth
The problem is we have "points" not money after 1971. Money is real, has weight, and is a claim on the past for 5,000 yeares. Points, credits, debt, is a claim on the future. Points do not measure reality. Points measure fantasy, a hope, faith, belief, for a fantasy future from the fantasy Federal Reserve who issues "points". Playing the points game is a problem, a moral hazard, because points don't measure reality. Points measure fantasy, dreams, hopes. We are living in fantasy land, a women and minorities fake life in fake cities. How does it all end? No one knows. Globalism?
Dude, read David Graeber's book Debt: The first 5000 Years. Money has always been fiat money. Coins of precious metals were invented much later that debt money as a means of warfare, literally.
Thank-you, Professor Blyth, for answering the question about the #SNP; it’s economic policy is non-existent. Young Scottish people are being asked to believe in Brigadoon. Latvia, too, is a more apt comparison than Greece. The British share one island; like it or not, they’re in it together ... apart from the one percent.
Muscatelli ruined the once fine FE college system in Scotland and Blyth - who is NOT an economist but a political scientist - despite his good speaking manner, never mentions the deficit and the fact that countries from Greece to Scotland were/are spending more than they're bringing in through taxes therefore 'austerity' or public service cost cutting is inevitable.
Angus Mac he addresses that every time he speaks about austerity. And no, it is not, it is actually counter productive because he shrinks the economy. If you are either unwilling or unable to understand the arguments then maybe you should find something else to occupy your time besides economics.
Why ever pay if someone else is willing? Another way to put it, if someone came up to you just gave you big screen TV would you insist that they take your money?
Tory spending cuts didn't hit disabled people .... it hit people pretending to be disabled ... I used to live with lots of them, it was a culture ...'getting on the sick' ..was a career aspiration ....seriously, it was/is a big thing ...there are communities living 'on the sick' in the UK. ..... Mark wouldn't know .....he would never live in those areas, or mix with those people.
thou art thou How can you say that. There have been major cuts to people on ESA even though they have been proven to be ill. There was a £30 per week cut last year which puts disabled people on the same level as unemployed persons, even though they cannot look for work. That is just inhuman. I am fine with chucking scroungers off the benefits, but do not punish the genuinely disabled at the same time.
He did live in those areas, and did meet those people. His background was hard - his mother died and his father left him with his granny and disappeared. She was an alcoholic but what saved him was going to a good state school. At that time education was fully funded by the state where he lived and everyone of all different classes went there. So he mixed with both the poor and the middle class kids there. He loved books, and together with good teachers he passed his exams and qualified to attend university. He was so poor, he was given a full grant to complete his undergraduate degree. He went onto pursue graduate studies whilst getting grants, and working as a bartender. He got offered a research post in the USA, and the rest is history. And as for his analysis about austerity hitting the disabled, your critique is missing out one thing. Governments like to look good, and one way to surpress unemployment figures is to move people off the official count. A lot of people on long term unemployment ended up sick, and ended up on Incapacity Benefit. So, arguing that these should have been moved back into work with the appropriate support is a reasonable suggestion. What is unreasonable is that the filtering process - ATOS examinations - also found terminally ill people fit for work. What happened? Austerity. The Tories wanted to cut public spending so they said 2 things: 1) there's a lot of fraud, and 2) there's a lot of people on incapacity who could work and aren't. These assertions are not true. Fraud rates have never been above 0.75% of benefit claims, according to the DWP's own data. Moreover, appeals against withdrawal of ESA have a an amazing success rate of 70% - if the appellant lives long enough to make their appeal. In one of the hardest cases, a patient with a terminal brain tumour was found fit for work despite being significantly disabled by his condition. He started his appeal but died 6 weeks later. He wasn't alone thousands die each year after being found fit for work. And the DWP has done nothing to address the situation. All these appeals that the DWP have lost are costing the tax payer money. Last year it was £100m. So this "toxic environment" policy against the disabled has real consequences, and causing unnecessary suffering. This is shameful cost of austerity.
austerity is not a policy but is an end result of unsustainability spending. if money supply is endless then why any body want to cut back in the 1st place
What do you mean by that last sentence? Btw, there are no natural limits on the capacity of a government to buy things denominated in their own currency, only self imposed limits such as the useless 3% deficit and 6% surplus limits of the EU. Absolutely useless and suicidal in both a political and economic sense if properly enforced. Especially since the euro zone has 1.3 trillion in non performing loans on top of a sovereign debt crisis. Only a proper boost in aggregate demand would work, either by deficits, debt write offs, stimuli aimed at industry rather than speculators ect... Just don't do austerity. For the counterpart of the government's surplus is a private sector deficit. THAT PRIVATE SECTOR DEFICIT IS YOU. (or foreign nations.)
When a currency falls, it makes a country's exports cheaper and more attractive to foreign buyers, while at the same time imports become more expensive, this may be followed by a balance of payments crisis, with currencies presenting economic slowdowns. Economic slowdowns usually harm general population. Are there limits to these words : "there are no natural limits on the capacity of a government to buy things denominated in their own currency" ? What limits for each country, how will each country's own crisis then influence other countries economies... Remember Zimbabwe, Argentina, Turkey, Russia, Greece, Europe before looking further back in time... How about everywhere {:-O
The problem is not austerity, the problem is when you do it. If you're doing it in the middle of a deep recession, it greatly deepens the recession- and at a time when borrowing is extremely cheap. The right thing to do is spend during a recession and save (austerity) during a boom.
what if you did not or could not do the RIGHT THING. what if you did not save or have any thing to save during the boom? no one want to lend low interest rate to Greece, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico what now? the timing of needs of is may not up to the borrower.
BooBaddyBig Yeap! We saw that in Brazil. President Lula increased the goverment expend and loans in the 2008-2012 crises to keep the economy "warm. After that the govermment should have bring austerity to control the national debt and its interest. Instead, his loyal muppet and succesor, President Dilma increased everything. "Keeping the poor rich" as she loves to say. Stupid cow. Almost half of our gdp is interest. So, the result is.a broken nation and a decade lost .
Its not The Kardashian so obviously @Randy Ross finds it boring. He was looking out for the fake tits and buttock lips and butt implants and didnt see any so he is very disappointed
+Kenneth Clymer "You mean because you're too stupid to understand it?" A bit unfair considering that this is fairly complex stuff. Without a background knowledge of economics and political science it is perfectly understandable why a person would not understand it, but that does not make them stupid any more than you are stupid for not understanding a lecture on gauge theory and local transformations in quantum field theory.
