first, it's somehow concluded that QE may be inflationary, while simultaneously calling @bankofengland to clarify how QE generates inflation
@bankofengland 'slaves to which defunct (monetary) economists?' via quick word count in 68 pages report:
* 'inflation' x ≈ 200 times
* 'money supply' x 1
* 'fiscal' x 60
* 'coordination' fiscal&monetary x 2
* 'market liquidity' x 4
Milton alive in spirit, if not theoretical essence
@bankofengland My testimony has sadly failed to convince Committee that you cannot worry about 'deficit financing ' without understanding why it's necessary structurally in sovereign-bond based macrofinancial regime
Coordination fiscal-monetary matters not just because financial system is so different from age of Friedmanite obsessions with inflation, but also because climate crisis
Report reduces complex questions of fiscal-monetary interactions to 'how do we manage peculiarities of institutional arrangement Treasury - BoE?'
hiding theoretical and structural issues in an operational Trojan Horse
one picture that exquisitely captures lack of any macrofinancial lens in this report.
through macrofinancial lens, state issues both reserves and gilts (sovereign bonds) to private finance
gilts do for market-based finance what reserves do for banks
if there is a substantive failure from Bank of England, it's the failure to communicate clearly the macrofinancial role that government bonds play *
we worry about inflation, we insinuate fiscal dominance, we condemn central banks' self-harming insistence on buying sovvies, we remain oblivious to the obvious explanation: they HAVE to
Jay Powell/ Fed have quietly caved to Trump. US central bank independence is now a smokescreen.
not because the Fed lowered interest rates yesterday, as Trump demanded.
Less publicised, but more important, is the Fed decision to purchase USD 40bn of Treasury bills monthly.
The Fed calls this Reserve Management Purchases but it's central bank support for government debt (and for Trump's policies more broadly), a form of monetary-fiscal coordination pervasive in the age of fiscal dominance after WW2.
How much is USD 40bn? Recall the recent hype around stablecoin issuers - the companies that Bessent claimed would strengthen US Treasury demand.
These bought USD 40 bn Treasuries over June 2024-June 2025. The Fed would buy in a month what Tether + Circle buy in a year.
Rentoul doesnt know it but his 'good grief' reflects a monetarist choice of Bank - government relationship.
popularised by Milton Fridman, monetarism wants central banks FULLY independent from democratic decisions.
before 2008, this divorce was fully operational
the monetarist divorce unravelled during the 2008 global financial crisis.
central banks HAD TO buy government bonds and stabilise the financial system because these bonds are the arteries of modern finance, without them, booom.
#WallStreetConsensus & its failure to mobilise trillions in @FT
4 things missing:
a) hegemonic dominance of 'mobilising private finance' in development/climate
b) asking why hegemony
c) mushrooming scaling up initiatives
d) do we want success?
a) Mobilising private finance remains global game - (Bridgetown, Biodiversity COP16, 4th Financing for Development conf) & national game (UK Labour gov, Brazil/Colombia/Chile decarbonisation).
*The world's most powerful political narrative that doesnt deliver
b) hegemonic not (just) because Big Finance is powerful, but postneoliberal, transformative state cant get rid of neoliberal macro - independent central bank dominating fiscal.
without macroinstitutional change- How do we pay for transformation- only one answer: private finance
when Big Finance occupies the state and takes over the social contract, nurses struggle, grandparents struggle, parents struggle, renters struggle, private equity flourishes.
no punches pulled on the Commission's Net Zero Industrial Act, the 2022 attempt to respond to Biden's Inflation Reduction Act with a lot of derisking talk but no money (ahem, European Sovereignty Fund)
Climate policy is industrial policy, and the other way around.
An important reminder that EU's climate policy was once ambitious, state-driven decarbonisation.
the Clean Energy Finance Authority would subsidize foreign demand for US cleantech - or derisk BlackRock renewable assets in say, Kenya with subsidies/guarantees.
nothing in this proposal from a top Kamala Harris advisor suggests US should enable technology transfers to countries wishing to pursue their own domestic cleantech capabilities.
in #WallStreetConsensus, Global South are consumers of American cleantech, with American dollars.