Speaking of Revolution without Revolutionaries @adam_tooze here is Lagarde publicly making a case for (ECB-led) coordination between monetary and fiscal policy as if it doesn't go against everything we thought we knew about CB independence.
with some exquisite 'the lady is not tapering' trolling of Margaret Thatcher, who, we should remember, was a Milton Friedman fan and shared his views that coordination between monetary & fiscal policy was an abhorrent inflationary monster of Keynesianism
what @FT forgot to tell you is that Berlin wants to housing back in public ownership
because it's European city where institutional landlords - private equity & complex ecosystem behind - have been most aggressive in turning housing into an asset class
institutional landlords minted EUR 40bn of Berlin houses into assets that they rent out.
roughly the combined value of London and Amsterdam's institutionally owned houses.
this trend - financialisation of housing, or Housing as an Asset Class - will only accelerate after the pandemic.
in 2021 alone, funds targeting residential housing in Germany raised EUR 5 bn from your/my pension fund, insurance company & your rich uncle's private wealth fund
I love infrastructure just as much as any post/Keynesian, and what concerns me (analytically and politically) is not @adam_tooze obsession with infrastructure but financial capital's.
@adam_tooze so we should be talking political economy of Infrastructure as an Asset Class: why and how did private finance sell infrastructure as a transformative economic policy to governments everywhere, formally at G20 since Argentina's (2018, Macri) presidency?
the why according to Natixis: financial capital wants to run our environmental, technological and social transition #WallStreetConsensus
a reminder as you read the #IPCCReport today that governments everywhere, including Biden's, already have an answer to 'what do we do about the climate crisis'
unfortunately for us, and the planet, the answer is 'let's surrender decarbonisation macro to carbon financiers'
Spain's Social Democrats asking Cuba to push on with 'structural reform' as if: 1. we dont know how that went in Europe 2. it's not the very pro-market reforms that are fomenting inequality and social tensions against background of tighter US blockade
Under Diaz-Canel, Cuba has implemented gradual but substantive Washington Consensus:
weakened social safety net (la libreta, comedores en empresas), pushed price liberalisation, unified currencies, allowed more private sector activity, prioritised foreign currency shops
some of these measures make sense if you're living under the mother of all balance of payment constraints.
but we know from Eastern Europe that such measures exacerbate inequality dramatically.
pretending otherwise is silly, especially from 'progressive' politicians