I blame the vacuousness of the neoliberal imagination - once the script of 'structural reform' doesn't serve any more, what do you do? Infrastructure. All roads lead to nowhere in financial capitalism.
to be clear, public investment in public infrastructure is necessary, and welcome.
I wish it went beyond roads into hospitals, public housing, public transport to definancialise infrastructure
better public infrastructure doesnt automatically change economic structures.
infrastructure policy is not industrial policy.
the Recovery and Resilience Facility has given politicians who know how to cut a lot of money they dont know how to spend.
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remember, Mark Carney's 'tragedy of the horizons' speech identified two main risks of climate crisis:
- physical risks (climate events)
- transition risks - from green policies to accelerate transition to low-carbon
Ben is of course right - #WallStreetConsensus is a development paradigm invented for the Global South, but could easily travel up North to satisfy the portfolio glut's hunger for infrastructure assets.
'give us infrastructure assets!' clamour institutional investors, who wont tell you that partnerships with private finance means the de facto privatization of infrastructure - you have to pay for it to access it, otherwise where are those handsome cash flows gonna come from?
and a visual guide to how the Biden Infrastructure Plan according to BlackRock would look like, with a nod to @KatharinaPistor
good morning to the Bank of England, who's showing us what a committed monetary financier looks like
and a reminder not all monetary financing is the same: this modern/new Keynesian entrenches weak framework for monetary-fiscal interactions, one that actively undermines both the rethink of fiscal rules, and fiscal support for the low-carbon transition.
missed this, the spectre of austerity is haunting Europe, and its apostles include social-democratic voices that should know better - h/t @Europeripheral
here El Pais, newspaper closely associated with Spanish social-democrats (PSOE), writes an editorial that you'd be forgiven to suspect was dictated by German fiscal fundamentalists
- public debt as burden for future generations ✔️
- fiscal space independent of ECB ✔️
my paper on the new Development as Derisking paradigm, or #WallStreetConsensus, or Washington Consensus updated for age of financial globalisation, is now out!
it all started here, a life time ago, when evidence of the portfolio glut chasing development assets in the Global South was not so difficult to come by