Tag Archives: Neoliberalism

How the destruction of industrial Britain casts a shadow over present-day public finances

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A new report by Christina Beatty and Steve Fothergill, Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, Sheffield Hallam University

  • UK manufacturing employment has fallen from 8.9 million to just 2.9 million overthe last fifty years, and 500,000 jobs have disappeared from the coal industry. This has destroyed the economic base of many communities, especially in the North,Scotland and Wales.
  • The main effect ofthis job loss has been to divert vast numbers of men and women out ofthe labour market onto incapacity related benefits, these days Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) which accounts for almost 2.5 million adults of workingage. The highest claimant rates – 10per cent or more of all 16-64 year olds – are nearly all in older industrial areas.
  • ESA and the additional benefits received by ESAclaimants – Housing Benefit and Disability LivingAllowance for example – are a £30bn-plus annual claim on the Exchequer.
  • Low pay in former industrial areas depresses tax revenue and inflates spending on in-work benefits. Spending on Tax Credits, for example, exceeds £850 a year per adult of working age in much of older industrial Britain – double the level in parts of southernEngland.
  • The Treasury has misdiagnosed high welfare spending as the result of inadequate work incentives and has too often blamed individuals for their own predicament, whereas in fact a large part ofthe bill is rooted in job destruction extending back decades.
  • The welfare reforms implemented since 2010, and strengthened since the 2015 general election, hitthe poorest places hardest. In effect, communities in older industrial Britain are being meted out punishmentin the form of welfare cuts forthe destruction wrought to their industrial base.
  • Across most of older industrial Britain the loss arising from welfare reform is expected to exceed £750 a year per working age adult by 2020-21.
  • There is an alternative – a genuine rebalancing ofthe economy in favour of industrial production and a revival of regional economic policy.
  • Policy makers need to take a long-term perspective, look at the differences between places, and stop thinking in silos.

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The key to restore broad economic prosperity is to force big corporations to compete more. And to open their patent vaults.

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But what if both camps are right about the effects they observe and wrong about the causes? What begins to make sense of this odd picture is a problem that previous generations of Americans also had to confront—a concentration of economic control that enables a few corporate bosses to manipulate technological advance entirely outside of any open and competitive marketplace. Put another way, what can explain both of these problems is that the masters of America’s biggest technological corporations increasingly enjoy the power to speed the rollout of technologies that favor capital and to slow those that disfavor their own private interests.

Back in the 1930s, America suffered from a similar set of ills, and the government took direct aim. Specifically, starting in the second half of the New Deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration combined stepped-up antitrust enforcement with the forced licensing of key patents held by monopolistic enterprises. Today, few people know this history, but the policy laid the groundwork for the long era of prosperity and technological progress that followed, including the birth of Silicon Valley.
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Poor growth and/or increases in inequality owe as much to global forces as domestic policies

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Note two things here. First, there are a lot of dots with very low income growth, low enough to deserve the label “stagnant”. Second, wherever similar-coloured dots are on an upward slope, higher-income groups left their lower-income compatriots behind. Aside from the very lowest deciles (who are often cared for with welfare benefits), that very often seems the case. Again, Lakner and Milanovic looked into this, and wrote: “Some examples with particularly low real growth rates among rich economies include almost the entire lower halves of the income distributions in Austria, Germany, Denmark, Greece and the United States. They all had overall 20-year growth rates of less than 20 per cent which translates, in the best case, as 0.9 per cent per capita annually.”
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Macroeconomic policy, not technology, undermines workers bargaining power

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Well, a big part of the story is that the UK (like the U.S.) has a very weak labor market. This was a result of conscious policy decisions. The Conservative government put in a policy of austerity that had the effect of reducing demand in the UK and slowing the rate of job creation. In this context, of course employers get to call the shots.

Serious people would address the context which has denied workers bargaining power. It is not “technology” as Harris and his elite Trumpians would like to pretend, it is macroeconomic policy. But Harris has no time for talking about macroeconomic policy. He dismisses a plan put forward by Labor Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn to produce full employment as, “either naive or dishonest” adding “but they reflect delusions that run throughout Labour and the left.” Continue reading →

The derivatives exposure of Deutsche Bank is €55,000 billion

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The two global banks with the largest derivatives exposures are J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank. The derivatives exposure of J.P. Morgan is around $70,000 billion and of Deutsche Bank €55,000 billion. These figures are, respectively, about one-and-a-half times the total value of all the assets in the USA, and twenty times German national income. But the numbers in the balance sheets of these banks are much lower. Deutsche Bank declares its investment in derivatives at €768 billion: not a small amount, but only a modest fraction of the bank’s exposure. Deutsche Bank’s financial position is set out in Fig. 9.
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Big executive pay not for performance, but for underperformance.

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We’d probably expect to see a pretty tenuous relationship between companies’ share price performances and the rewards of those at the top of them. We’d also probably expect to see a one-way ratchet, where pay goes up in good times for a company, but rarely falls in bad times. We probably expect to see executives quite often rewarded for luck, rather than skill.

And guess what? Those things are precisely what the latest data does suggest. The financial data firm MSCI has taken a sample of 428 large listed American companies and examined their performance between 2006 and 2015. And MSCI has found that shareholder returns at those firms whose boss earned below the median of their sector outperformed those firms whose boss earned above the median.

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The Surprisingly Swift Decline of US Manufacturing Employment

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So why did American trade policy make such a big difference, even though tariffs didn’t fall? Pierce and Schott can’t say for sure, but they speculate that it has to do with patterns of investment.

Giving Chinese companies confidence that tariffs would stay low encouraged them to invest in production capacity aimed at supplying the American market. And giving American companies confidence that tariffs would stay low encouraged them to build supply chains around Chinese manufacturers.

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Brexit reading list

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‘If you’ve got money, you vote in … if you haven’t got money, you vote out’

Brexit Is Only the Latest Proof of the Insularity and Failure of Western Establishment Institutions

We can’t leave the negotiations with Europe to the Tories

Labour is partly to blame for the racists’ capture of the EU debate

A farmer’s guide to Brexit

It’s NOT the economy, stupid: Brexit as a story of personal values

The Tory leadership election is a sort of X Factor for choosing the antichrist

John Harris’ Progressive Alliance speech

Why did we vote to leave? What an analysis of place can tell us about Brexit

Britain’s Limited Options

Right-Sizing The Financial Sector In Post-Brexit Europe

How David Cameron’s Plan To Screw Labour Cost Him The EU Referendum

Reversing Brexit

At which step do you think that this whole ‘Brexit’ farce will collapse?

A response to Paul Mason’s ‘Labour: The Way Ahead’

Labour is stuck but the people who want to leap to a new politics are scattered across the party

Austerity is the cause of our economic woes. It’s nothing to do with the EU

 

 

EU citizenship and a “constructive destruction” of the EU

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The next European project must make a compelling offer to all European citizens, one that goes beyond nation-state affiliation. It must be based on the principle that all European citizens have political equality: in elections, before the law and in taxes. Cicero called this ius aequum. A government for the people and by the people. A nation state is not the only frame for a democracy. Continue reading →

Brexit: ever growing economic inequality and the public spending cuts that accompanied austerity

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The outcome of the EU referendum has been unfairly blamed on the working class in the north of England, and even on obesity.7 However, because of differential turnout and the size of the denominator population, most people who voted Leave lived in the south of England.8 Furthermore, of all those who voted for Leave, 59% were in the middle classes (A, B, or C1). The proportion of Leave voters in the lowest two social classes (D and E) was just 24%.8 The Leave voters among the middle class were crucial to the final result because the middle class constituted two thirds of all those who voted. Continue reading →

Let’s go out into the country, and reinvent our politics.

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But even so, let me make three warnings.

We’ve seen ugly things happening up and down the country, and the license given to horrible, malign forces by the way the Leave campaign conducted itself. Notwithstanding those awful events: please let’s not think of the vast majority of the people I’ve talked about as stupid, or deluded, or bigoted or hateful. I don’t believe 17 million people are like that. In fact, I think I’m confident enough to say I know that.

If you woke up on Friday morning thinking the country was suddenly in the hands of a social tribe you didn’t know much about and you were suddenly terrified about the future, bear in mind: that is how millions of people in this country have been living for decades.

Please understand that the Labour Party has left a vacuum in these places which has been growing for ten or fifteen years. And if the result is denied, certainly while all of this is still raw, Ukip – with or without Nigel Farage, or maybe something even nastier – may well sweep through a lot of England and Wales, and the terrain for meaningful progressive politics will be destroyed. That’s how high the stakes are.
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‘If you’ve got money, you vote in … if you haven’t got money, you vote out’

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Great piece.

For six years now, often with my colleague John Domokos, I have been travelling around the UK for our video series Anywhere But Westminster, ostensibly covering politics, but really trying to divine the national mood, if such a thing exists. I look back, and find all sorts of auguries of what has just happened. As an early warning, there was the temporary arrival of the British National party in electoral politics from 2006 onwards, playing on mounting popular anger about immigration from the EU “accession states”, in the midst of Gordon Brown’s “flexible” job market, and a mounting housing crisis.

A few years later, we met builders in South Shields who told us that their hourly rate had come down by £3 thanks to new arrivals from eastern Europe; the mother in Stourbridge who wanted a new school for “our kids”; the former docker in Liverpool who looked at rows of empty warehouses and exclaimed, “Where’s the work?”
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Don’t leave anyone behind

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Since 1976 a lot of Britons who do not live in London (or not the nicer parts) have been doing very badly.  The economy is trash if you aren’t connected to the various London money spigots because Britain insisted on de-industrializing.

So, we have a very large number of people who have done very badly for 40 years.  They were given an opportunity to vote against the status quo, and they did so.

Now, I am going to tell you a very big secret.  It’s a secret that the great sages and the sensible people have been telling humanity for thousands of years.

The secret of living in a good society is leaving no one behind.
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The (American) coporate take-over of Britain and EU

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By comparison with the British system, however, this noxious sewer is a crystal spring. Every stream of corporate effluent with which the EU poisons political life has a more malodorous counterpart in the UK. The new Deregulation Act, a meta-law of astonishing scope, scarcely known and scarcely debated, insists that all regulators must now “have regard to the desirability of promoting economic growth”. Rare wildlife, wheelchair ramps, speed limits, children’s lungs: all must establish their contribution to GDP. What else, after all, are they for?

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The sale of the Land Registry makes no sense

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So the Land Registry is a natural monopoly and, as goes the Competition and Market Authority’s main argument, these kinds of services should be publically owned. Handing a monopoly over to a private company in search of profit risks harming consumers – the new owners may simply charge a higher price for the service, or in this case put the data, the Land Registry’s most valuable asset, behind a paywall.

The Law Society says that the Land Registry plays a central role in ensuring property rights in England and Wales, and so we need to ensure that it maintains its integrity and is free from any conflict of interest. Continue reading →

John McDonnell: Time to end the new age of the robber barons

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We have a chance now to build Another Europe in which we work with socialists across the EU to end austerity and take on those who attack workers’ rights and avoid taxes.

This is not anti-business. It’s anti-freeloader. If we allow these practices to continue they will undermine the foundations on which all genuine wealth creation is built. It will create an environment that benefits rent-seekers over wealth creators. It is time we brought an end to the new age of the robber barons. The health of our economy demands it.

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Share of economic growth enjoyed by workers is at its lowest since the second world war

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And the longer the slump goes on, the more the public tumbles to the fact that not only has growth been feebler, but ordinary workers have enjoyed much less of its benefits. Last year the rich countries’ thinktank, the OECD, made aremarkable concession. It acknowledged that the share of UK economic growth enjoyed by workers is now at its lowest since the second world war. Even more remarkably, it said the same or worse applied to workers across the capitalist west.

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