What unites the UK government's faltering response on the virus and the economic shock? Reluctance to use the state. I understand this but a generation of free market technocrats need to learn to get over it... newstatesman.com/politics/econo…
Overnight the @Lagarde launched a €750bn QE package. USA said to be considering a trillion. Buy EU governments still trapped by the Maastricht rules, which should be immediately scrapped... newstatesman.com/politics/econo…
Analysts at @Macquarie say: "a fusion of monetary and fiscal levers will lead to MMT-style policies, effective nationalisation of capital, universal income guarantees, and deep changes in work practice.” Spot on. But that's not capitalism... newstatesman.com/politics/econo…
So the entire political class need to learn how to run a command economy - and you cannot do so with monetary tools alone; the fiscal tools have to be deployed - so forget the fiction of central bank independence... newstatesman.com/politics/econo…
There is a whole literature available on transitional measures, arising out of sustainability, climate, circularity and post-capitalism theory... newstatesman.com/politics/econo…
... but as Evgeny Preobrazhensky taught us: transitions have their own dynamics, which act independently of the will of the planners and governments... newstatesman.com/politics/econo…
I don't blame politicians - including a lot of social democrats - for being bewildered by this new reality but absent a theory of "capitalism in transition to something else", they're just throwing darts at a dartboard, blindfold... newstatesman.com/politics/econo…
The @Macquarie analysts get this. But they don't have a theory of what they are dealing with. 👇theaustralian.com.au/business/econo…
I've predicted before that the investment/central bank community would go over en masse to MMT once debt-fuelled capitalism collapsed... because, like MMT theory, they don't understand where value comes from... medium.com/mosquito-ridge…
If you understand - as Smith, Ricardo and Marx did - that labour is the source of value, you can see what collapses in an epidemic: not the financial "roof" but the human "foundations" of the value system...newstatesman.com/politics/econo…
... which would be fine if, like in the Black Death, there was a non-complex agrarian economy. But we've financialised every human action, so when the actions stop, financial complexity amplifies the damage... newstatesman.com/politics/econo…
