Richard Nixon: 1971 Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union

I have highlighted some of the state of the union addresses by Herbert Hoover in the past because I see the Great depression as a time with certain parallels to the present economic hardship. Let’s look at the 1970s instead now.

Here’s Richard Nixon from 1971, with what was considered a conservative agenda in 1971 based on balancing the federal budget and rolling back centralised governance. However, regarding details, Nixon proposes small government ideas on welfare reform and big government ideas in almost all other aspects of his State of the Union Address.

I have bolded what I consider the most important parts

Chart of the Day: Government Deficits as Far as the Eye Can See

The chart below from the blog Pragmatic Capitalism shows the U.S. Federal government deficit for each quarter since 1952. As you can see, almost the entire period is marked by deficits

Functional Finance and Exchange Rate Regimes: The Twin Deficits Debate

In conclusion, while there are links between the “twin deficits”, they are not the links usually imagined. US trade and budget deficits are linked, but they do not put the US in an unsustainable position vis a vis the Chinese. If the Chinese and other net exporters (such as Japan) decide they prefer fewer dollar assets, this will be linked to a desire to sell fewer products to America. This is a particularly likely scenario for the Chinese, who are rapidly developing their economy and creating a nation of consumers. But the transition will not be abrupt

Banking Wasn’t Meant to Be Like This

the banks now browbeat governments – not by having ready cash but by threatening to go bust and drag the economy down with them if they are not given control of public tax policy, spending and planning. The process has gone furthest in the United States. Joseph Stiglitz characterizes the Obama administration’s vast transfer of money and pubic debt to the banks as a “privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a ‘partnership’ in which one partner robs the other.” Prof. Bill Black describes banks as becoming criminogenic and innovating “control fraud.” High finance has corrupted regulatory agencies, falsified account-keeping by “mark to model” trickery, and financed the campaigns of its supporters to disable public oversight. The effect is to leave banks in control of how the economy’s allocates its credit and resources

Milton Friedman, Functional Finance and the Government Budget Constraint

Last week we examined Milton Friedman’s version of Functional Finance, which we found to be remarkably similar to Abba Lerner’s. The only problem with Friedman’s analysis is that he did not account for the external sector: he wanted a balanced budget at full employment, but if a country tends to run a trade deficit at full employment, then it must have a government budget deficit to allow the private sector to run a balanced budget—which is the minimum we should normally expect. Somehow all this understanding was lost over the course of the postwar period, replaced by “sound finance” which is anything but sound. It was based on an inappropriate extension of the household “budget constraint” to government

Chart of the Day: The Ultimate European Government Debt Chart

Check out the below graphic which shows General Government Deficit/Surplus as % of GDP on the Y axis, Government Debt as % of GDP on the X axis, and the Government Debt in Euros as the size of the bubble. Pretty cool!

Milton Friedman’s 1948 Functional Finance Proposal

Milton Friedman’s 1948 article, “A Monetary and Fiscal Framework for Economic Stability” put forward a proposal according to which the government would run a balanced budget only at full employment, with deficits in recession and surpluses in economic booms. There is little doubt that most economists in the early postwar period shared Friedman’s views on that. But Friedman went further, almost all the way to Lerner’s functional finance approach: all government spending would be paid for by issuing government money (currency and bank reserves); when taxes were paid, this money would be “destroyed” (just as you tear up your own IOU when it is returned to you). Thus, budget deficits lead to net money creation. Surpluses would lead to net reduction of money

Stop Censorship, Stop SOPA

Enemies of freedom will always tell you that there is some trade-off between freedom and civil liberties to get you to give up your freedom. This is a false dichotomy and always will be

Where are the safe havens?

My latest post at Credit Writedowns Pro on protecting wealth in a world of recurring crisis is now up. I outlined eight principal investing risks that I see for for 2012 and strategies to avoid those risks. At the same time, the thought you should have in the back of your head is that these are just the known unknowns. But that there are unknown unknowns which create so-called Knightean Uncertainty and make this a dangerous investing climate

Monetary and Fiscal Policy for Sovereign Currencies

This week we begin a new topic: functional finance. This will occupy us for the next several blog posts. Today we will lay out Abba Lerner’s approach to policy

Markets Vanish – “In a Flash”

Government interference extends unstable market conditions longer than would otherwise be true. By doing so, George Eliot’s observation (at the bottom, here) is even more appropriate in

My comments on MMT’s job guarantee idea

Over the holidays, a debate broke out in the blogosphere about the so-called job guarantee idea that the MMT folks have bandied about. I call this controversial idea “Unemployment Insurance for the 21st Century”, something I first addressed in 2009, based on a post by Randall Wray.

My view: a job guarantee will never happen in the US unless we have a deep Depression like the one that began in 1929. Politically, this idea is a non-starter on this side of the Atlantic