Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
|
so while i saw footage and/or stories of the sort that seem almost requisite for a g-x (7/8 to 20) meeting of peaceful demonstrators being attacked by riot police....
CBC News - Toronto - G20 protest violence prompts over 400 arrests
i think the real problem with the g20 is the incoherence that's being generated in policy terms by this farce called neo-liberalism/monetarism that will not finish dying.
to wit:
Quote:
Guest post: El-Erian on a disappointing G20 compromise
Posted by Guest writer on Jun 28 13:00.
Pimco’s chief executive Mohamed El-Erian considers whether the G20 Summit in Toronto created a constructive compromise on financial stability, or generated a losing plan to turn around a slowing global economy.
________
We are digesting this morning an unusually long communique from the G20 Summit in Toronto. This self-congratulatory statement is worth reading for what it says and how it says it-both of which make me worry even more about the future of a post-global financial crisis world that is in desperate need for better cross-border policy coordination and harmonization.
Some will attribute the length of the “G20 Toronto Summit Declaration”-49 main points and another 82 in 3 annexes-to the pronouncement in the very first paragraph that this was the “first Summit of the G20 in its new capacity as the premier forum for our international economic cooperation.” And we should have no doubt that the G20 is a much more representative global policy forum than the outmoded G7/G8. Yet, there may be much more to the unusual length of the communique.
I suspect that many veterans of multilateral gatherings will see this communique as typical of those drafted by a committee whose members have different views and priorities, and speak to different national audiences. Indeed, we are already seeing the G20 communique being spun very differently in national capitals.
If anything, the outcome of the G20 is a confirmation of what many expected and feared-namely, and in sharp contrast to the April 2009 G20 London Summit, an inability to reconcile divergent views of the world. If anything, we are being exposed this morning to the realities of different national historical experiences, different national initial conditions, and different national views on how economies should and do work.
The differences are most visible in the sections on fiscal adjustment and growth. They are also evident in the discussion of financial sector reform. Indeed, there is something for everyone!
Before we rejoice too much about the ability of the G20 to deliver constructive compromises, we should think carefully about the consequences of leaving major issues unresolved and, thus, essentially kicking the can down the road when it comes to serious analysis and courageous decisions. Consider the following three points as a partial illustration of this risk.
First, the communique illustrates the extent to which we now live in a multi-polar world with no dominant economic party and with excessively weak multilateral coordination mechanisms. The result is what game theorist label a “non-cooperative game,” with a very high likelihood of sub-optimal outcomes.
Second, taken at face value, the communique speaks to a relative world in which the US will be the only major country to pursue expansionary policies while others focus on addressing budgetary consolidation-either because they have to or because they wish to. This is yet another factor that points to an increasingly unstable global configuration over time.
Third, we will likely face growing bilateral frictions due to the inability to use this weekend’s G20 gathering to properly address what I argued in a Friday FT column to be an incomplete and narrow characterization of the “growth now” versus “austerity now” debate.
The bottom line is as follows: I worry that, absent some urgent mid-course corrections, this weekend’s G20 gathering has failed to mark a much needed turning point for a slowing global economy with persistently high unemployment in industrial countries. Instead, it reinforces the concern than we are in for a future of muted growth, deleveraging, periodic debt dislocations in some countries, and higher protectionist pressures. Populations in Europe and the US may have much more to worry about than seeing so many of their teams knocked out early from the World Cup tournament in South Africa.
________
The writer is chief executive and co-chief investment officer of Pimco. El-Erian’s previous commentary on the G20’s earlier Busan summit is available here.
|
FT Alphaville Guest post: El-Erian on a disappointing G20 compromise
and.....
Quote:
The Third Depression
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 27, 2010
Recessions are common; depressions are rare. As far as I can tell, there were only two eras in economic history that were widely described as “depressions” at the time: the years of deflation and instability that followed the Panic of 1873 and the years of mass unemployment that followed the financial crisis of 1929-31.
Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline — on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.
We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.
And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.
In 2008 and 2009, it seemed as if we might have learned from history. Unlike their predecessors, who raised interest rates in the face of financial crisis, the current leaders of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank slashed rates and moved to support credit markets. Unlike governments of the past, which tried to balance budgets in the face of a plunging economy, today’s governments allowed deficits to rise. And better policies helped the world avoid complete collapse: the recession brought on by the financial crisis arguably ended last summer.
But future historians will tell us that this wasn’t the end of the third depression, just as the business upturn that began in 1933 wasn’t the end of the Great Depression. After all, unemployment — especially long-term unemployment — remains at levels that would have been considered catastrophic not long ago, and shows no sign of coming down rapidly. And both the United States and Europe are well on their way toward Japan-style deflationary traps.
In the face of this grim picture, you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery. But no: over the last few months there has been a stunning resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy.
As far as rhetoric is concerned, the revival of the old-time religion is most evident in Europe, where officials seem to be getting their talking points from the collected speeches of Herbert Hoover, up to and including the claim that raising taxes and cutting spending will actually expand the economy, by improving business confidence. As a practical matter, however, America isn’t doing much better. The Fed seems aware of the deflationary risks — but what it proposes to do about these risks is, well, nothing. The Obama administration understands the dangers of premature fiscal austerity — but because Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress won’t authorize additional aid to state governments, that austerity is coming anyway, in the form of budget cuts at the state and local levels.
Why the wrong turn in policy? The hard-liners often invoke the troubles facing Greece and other nations around the edges of Europe to justify their actions. And it’s true that bond investors have turned on governments with intractable deficits. But there is no evidence that short-run fiscal austerity in the face of a depressed economy reassures investors. On the contrary: Greece has agreed to harsh austerity, only to find its risk spreads growing ever wider; Ireland has imposed savage cuts in public spending, only to be treated by the markets as a worse risk than Spain, which has been far more reluctant to take the hard-liners’ medicine.
It’s almost as if the financial markets understand what policy makers seemingly don’t: that while long-term fiscal responsibility is important, slashing spending in the midst of a depression, which deepens that depression and paves the way for deflation, is actually self-defeating.
So I don’t think this is really about Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.
And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.
|
Op-Ed Columnist - The Third Depression - NYTimes.com
you'd think this neolibeal hogwash would dissipate given its obvious political failure, it's empirical failures and its inability to provide anything remotely like a coherent vantage on the continuing crisis of transnational capitalism...
intellectual paralysis is powerful.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|