Excessive credit, rentier capital and crises

Steve Keen has a new book out.  It’s called: Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? Steve Keen is professor of economics at Kingston University in the UK.  His earlier book (Debunking economics) is a brilliant expose of the fallacious assumptions and conclusions of mainstream economics, i.e. ‘perfect competition; general equilibrium and ‘rational expectations’ of economic ‘agents’.

The failure of mainstream economics to see the coming of the global financial crash and the ensuing Great Recession is now well documented – see my own coverage here.  This failure has led several mainstream economists to disavow its usefulness.  One such recently was Paul Romer, a former New York university professor and now the chief economist of the World Bank.  Last fall, before taking up his appointment at the World Bank, Romer wrote a paper accusing his fellow macroeconomists of forming a monolithic intellectual community, which deferred to authority, disregarded the opinions of those outside of their group and ignored unwelcome facts. They behaved more like cult members than genuine scientists. Romer compared modern macroeconomics to string theory, famously described as “not even wrong.”

This did not go down well.  And now there has been a rebellion among his 600 economists (yes, 600!) at the World Bank.  They have insisted that he no longer be in charge of managing them, after he demanded that they drop their long-winded economic jargon and adopted a simpler style of prose.  Romer responded ironically to this demotion of his power at the World Bank, “Apparently the word is out that when I asked people to write more clearly, I wasn’t nice. And that I slaughter kittens in my office.”

But I digress.  The point of this Romer story is to show that those who dispute the assumptions and conclusions of mainstream economic apologia are not likely to get much of a hearing.  As I said in my post on Romer’s critique, that he won’t succeed in getting “mainstream economics yanked back into reality”. And so it has proved.

Steve Keen, however, continues his attempt to provide an alternative closer to economic reality.  And his new book also makes a prediction: that another crash is coming and even picks out some likely candidates where it is likely to kick off.  Now readers of this blog know that I think it is the job of economics, if it really sees itself as a science, to not only present theories and test them empirically, but also to make predictions.  That is part of the scientific method.  So Keen’s approach sounds promising.

But all depends, of course, on whether your theory is right.  Keen reiterates his main thesis from his previous work: that, in a modern capitalist economy credit is necessary to ensure investment and growth.  But once credit is in the economic process, there is nothing to stop it mismatching demand and supply.  Crises of excessive credit will appear and we can predict when by adding the level of credit to national income.  In the major capitalist economies leading up to the crisis of 2007, private sector credit reached record levels, over 300% of GDP in the US. That credit bubble was bound to burst and thus caused the Great Recession.  And this will happen again.  “A capitalist economy can no better avoid another financial crisis than a dog can avoid picking up fleas – it’s only a matter of time.”

So what of the next crisis? With his eye on credit growth, Keen sees China as a terminal case. China has expanded credit at an annualized rate of around 25 per cent for years on end. Private-sector debt there exceeds 200% of GDP, making China resemble the over-indebted economies of Ireland and Spain prior to 2008, but obviously far more significant to the global economy. “This bubble has to burst,” writes Keen.

Nor does he have much hope for his native Australia, whose credit and housing bubbles failed to burst in 2008, thanks in part to government measures to support the housing market, lower interest rates and massive mining investment to meet China’s insatiable demand for raw materials. Last year, Australian private-sector credit also nudged above 200% of GDP, up more than 20 percentage points since the global financial crisis. Australia shows, says Keen, that “you can avoid a debt crisis today only by putting it off till later.”

This idea that it is the level of credit and the pace of its rise that is the main criterion for gauging the likelihood of a slump in capitalist production also lies behind the view of another heterodox economist, Michael Hudson in his book Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy. Hudson’s main contention that the FIRE economy – finance, insurance, and real estate – cripples the “real” economy and is slowly reducing most of us to debt bondage.

Hudson goes further.  For him, the old system of industrial capitalism – hiring labor, investing in plants and equipment and creating real wealth backed by tangible goods and services – has been eclipsed by the re-emerging dominance of a parasitic neo-feudal class.   It is this elite, not industrial capitalists, who are the foundation of most of our economic woes.  The 2008 crisis was not a typical boom and bust housing crash of capitalism but the logical conclusion of financial parasites slowly bleeding most of us dry. “Today’s neoliberalism turns the [free market’s] original meaning on its head. Neoliberals have redefined ‘free markets’ to mean an economy free for rent-seekers, that is, ‘free’ of government regulation or taxation of unearned rentier income (rents and financial returns).”

I read this to mean that it is not capitalism of the past, competition and the accumulation of capital for investment, that is the problem and cause of crises, but the ‘neoliberal’ world of ‘rentier’ capital, ‘feudal’ parasites and ‘financialisation’.  This would suggest that crises could be solved if capitalism returned to its previous role, as Adam Smith envisaged it, as expanding production through division of labour and competition.

Also, for Hudson, the problem of capitalism is not one of profitability and the striving to extract surplus-value out of the productive labour force but one the extraction of ‘rents’ out of industry by landowners and financiers.  “Labor (‘consumers’) and industry are obliged to pay a rising proportion of their income in the form of rent and interest to the Financial and Property sector for access to property rights, savings and credit. This leaves insufficient wages and profits to sustain market demand for consumer goods and investment in the new means of production (capital goods). The main causes of economic austerity and polarization are rent deflation (payments to landlords and monopolists) and debt deflation (payments to banks, bondholders and other creditors).”  (Hudson)

Thus we have a model of capitalism where crises result from ‘imperfections’ in the capitalist model, either due to a lack of competition and the growth of financial rentiers (Hudson) or due to excessive credit (Keen).  Moreover, crises are the result of a chronic lack of demand caused by squeezing down wages and raising the level of debt for households. The latter thesis is not new – as many mainstream economists have argued similarly and it dominates as the cause of crises on the left.  As Mian and Sufi put it, “Recessions are not inevitable – they are not mysterious acts of nature that we must accept. Instead recessions are a product of a financial system that fosters too much household debt”.

The key omission in this view of crises is any role for profit and profitability – which is after all the core of Marx’s analysis of capitalism – a mode of production for profit not need.  Profit is missing from Keen’s analysis.  Indeed, Keen considers Marx’s theory of value to be wrong or illogical, accepting the standard neo-Ricardian interpretation and Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as being irrelevant to a theory of crises.  Hudson has nothing to say about Marx’s key insights.

The post-Keynesians rely on the Keynes-Kalecki equation, namely that profits = investment, but it is investment that drives or creates profits, not vice versa, as Marx would have it.  This view recently reached its extreme in another relatively new book, Capitalism as Oligarchy, by Jim O’Reilly, where, similar to the view of leading post-Keynesian, Engelbert Stockhammer, that is rising inequality that is decisive to crises rather than profitability of capital, O’Reilly argues that “inequality isn’t a side-effect of something we happen to call ‘capitalism’ but is rather the core of what the system is”.

According to O’Reilly, profits does not come from the unpaid labour of the working class but are ‘created’ for capitalists by the sale of goods and services to the consumer.  Profits come from exploiting the consumer, not the worker.  “where does profit come from? It can’t be from workers since they can spend no more than the wage received (!! – MR).  Wages are a source of revenue through sales, but they’re also a cost. For the system as a whole, they must net to zero—workers are simply not profitable.”  Only capitalists have more income than they spend, so they create their own profits (hmm… MR).

Apparently, Rosa Luxemburg was on the case… “Her insight that profit had to come from a source beyond the worker was correct but she erred in accepting the conventional monetary wisdom that capitalism’s “aim and goal in life is profit in the form of money and accumulation of capital.”   In this theory, profits are not the driver of capitalism but the result of investment and consumption.

The argument that credit plays a key role in capitalism; and ‘excessive credit’ does so in crises was first explained by Marx.  As Marx wrote in Volume 3 of Capital, “in a system of production where the entire interconnection of reproduction process rests on credit, a crisis must inevitably break out if credit is suddenly withdrawn and only cash payment is accepted…at first glance, therefore the entire crisis presents itself as simply a credit and monetary crisis”.  (p621) But that’s at “first glance”.  Behind the financial crisis lies the law of profitability: “the real crisis can only be deduced from the real movement of capitalist production” (TSV2, p512).

Looking for a cause is scientific. But dialectically there can be causes at different levels, the ultimate (essence) and the proximate (appearance). The ultimate is found from the real events and then provides an explanation for the proximate. The crisis of 2008-9, like other crises, had an underlying cause based on the contradictions between accumulation of capital and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall under capitalism. That contradiction arose because the capitalist mode of production is production for value not for use. Profit is the aim, not production or consumption. Value is created only by the exertion of labour (by brain and brawn). Profit comes from the unpaid value created by labour and appropriated by private owners of the means of production.

The underlying contradiction between the accumulation of capital and falling rate of profit (and then a falling mass of profit) is resolved by crisis, which takes the form of collapse in value, both real value and fictitious. Indeed, wherever the fictitious expansion of capital has developed most is where the crisis begins e.g. tulips, stock markets, housing debt, corporate debt, banking debt, public debt etc. The financial sector is often where the crisis starts; but a problem in the production sector is the cause.

Undoubtedly the rise of excessive credit in the major capitalist economies was a feature of the period before the crisis.  And its very size meant that the crunch would be correspondingly more severe as capitalist sector saw the value of this fictitious capital destroyed.

But is it really right to say that excessive credit is the cause of capitalist crises?  Marx argued that credit gets out of hand because capitalists find that profitability is falling and they look to boost the mass of profits by extending credit.

It is a delusion or a fetish to look at credit as the main or only cause of crisis.  In a capitalist economy, profit rules.  If you deny that, you are denying that capitalism is the right term to describe the modern economy.   Maybe it would be better to talk about a credit economy, and credit providers or creators and not capitalists.  Thinking of credit only, as Keen does, leads him to conclude that China is the most likely trigger of the next global crisis.  But that has already been refuted by the experience of the last year.

We must start with profit, which leads to money, investment and capital accumulation and then to employment and incomes.   And there is a mass of empirical evidence that profitability and profits lead investment, not vice versa.

Moreover, why did debt and financial rents become ‘excessive’ in the so-called neoliberal period?  The Marxist explanation is that the profitability of productive capital declined in most modern economies between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s, and so there was a rise of investment in finance, property and insurance (FIRE), along with other neo-liberal counter measures like anti-trade union legislation, labour laws, privatisation and globalisation.  The aim was to raise profitability of capital, which succeeded to a limited extent up to late 1990s.

But as profitability began to fall back, the credit boom was accelerated in the early 2000s, leading eventually to the global financial crash, credit crunch and the Great Recession.  As profitability in most top capitalist economies has not returned to the levels of the early 2000s, investment in productive sectors and productivity growth remains depressed.  The boom in credit and stock markets has returned instead.  Fictitious capital has expanded again – as Keen shows.  And rentier capital dominates – as Hudson shows.

If excessive credit alone is to blame for capitalist crises and not any flaws in the profit mode of production, then the answer is the control of credit.  If rentier capital is to blame for the poverty of labour and crises, then the answer is to control finance.  Indeed, Keen argues that the best policy prescription is to keep private sector credit at about 50% of GDP in capitalist economies.   Then financial crises could be avoided.  Hudson recommends annulling unpayable debts of households. And Hudson recommends a nationalized banking system that provides basic credit.

These are undoubtedly important reforms that a pro-labour government or administration should implement if it had such power to do so.  But that alone would not stop crises under capitalism, if the majority of the productive sectors remained privately owned and investing only for profit not need.  As Hudson says himself: “Just to be clear, ridding ourselves of financial and rentier parasites will not usher in an economic utopia. Even under a purely industrial system, economic problems will abound. Giants such as Apple will continue to offshore profits, companies like Chipotle will keep stealing their workers’ wages, and other big businesses will still gobble up subsidies while fulminating against any kind of government regulation. Class divisions will remain a serious issue.”

Trump’s budget balls-up

President Trump’s economic team have release their plans for the federal budget over the next ten years.  It is a combination of wildly optimistic economic growth forecasts, vicious cutbacks in public services and environmental measures; and significant cuts in corporate taxes and personal taxes for the rich.

But what is exercising mainstream economists are the schoolboy errors in the budget logic.  The budget assumes a $2trn increase in revenue coming from fast economic growth to balance the budget by 2027.  But at the same time this economic growth is supposed to pay for $2trn in tax cuts so that there is no loss in revenue.  But if you cut revenue with tax cuts of $2trn, you cannot restore the revenue by growth AND also balance the budget with another $2trn by 2027.  That is double-counting.  One ludicrous part of this calculation is that the budget aims to cut $300bn in estate taxes over the next decade and yet forecasts a rise in estate tax revenue from faster economic growth.  So will estate tax revenue rise or fall? – it cannot be both!

This is an interesting quirk for mainstream economists to mull over, but what those who look to the interests of working people should note in the budget are the huge hits to federal public services (while increasing military and national security spending).  In the so-called ‘Taxpayer First Budget’, the plan is to strip down expenditure on all sorts of civil services by $3.6trn over ten years.  Funding for Medicaid, the health-care program for low-income Americans will be cut by $800bn.  The federal nutrition program (food stamps) that benefits 44m of the poorest Americans (yes, it is that many on food stamps) would be cut by nearly 30%.  The budget director said that too many of these programs “spend other people’s money” and that we should have “compassion for folks who are paying for it”.  So much for the concept of ‘society’.

At the same time, corporate tax rates will be slashed from 35% to 15%; foreign aid grants (outside of military spending) will be eliminated and $1.6bn will be allocated for building the wall on the Mexican border.  Consumer finance protection measures will be removed and financial regulations relaxed.

As for personal taxation, the top income tax rate is to be cut to 33 percent from 39.6 percent.  There will be a cut in taxes on capital gains, 70 percent of which flow to the top 1 percent.  The  estate tax will be eliminated.  This applies to a tiny number of people, couples that have estates bigger than $10.8 million.   The 3.8 percent surtax on high earners’ investment income that has been used to subsidize health care for poorer Americans will be stopped.  And the alternative minimum tax, which currently limits deductions for high earners, will also go.  And there will be lower taxes on cash flow and income that passes from small businesses to their owners, which also primarily benefits wealthier America

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, found “high-income taxpayers would receive the biggest cuts, both in dollar terms and as a percentage of income… Three-quarters of the tax cuts would benefit the top 1 percent of taxpayers,” if the plan were put into effect this year, it said. The highest-income households — the top 0.1 percent — would get “an average tax cut of about $1.3 million, 16.9 percent of after-tax income.” Those in the middle fifth of incomes would get a tax cut of almost $260, or 0.5 percent, while the poorest would get about $50. That split would worsen down the road, the Tax Policy Center says: “In 2025 the top 1 percent of households would receive nearly 100 percent of the total tax reduction.”  Even the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation concluded that those in the top 1 percent of the income scale would save at least 10 times as much, or 5.3 percent. That’s nearly $40,000 extra for those at the top, compared to $67 for those smack dab in the middle of the income scale.

But leaving aside the inequities of the Trump administration’s budget plan and its basic accounting errors, the biggest flaw is in its forecast of average 3% real GDP growth in the US economy over the next ten years.  This forecast is essential in justifying the ‘dynamic scoring’ of the budget revenue projections.  But it is fairyland.  Jason Furman at the Petersen Institute points out that the divergence between this forecast (3%) and the consensus forecast of mainstream economists (2%) is the widest in half a century.  And 1% point of growth each year makes a huge difference.

Furman ran 10m simulations (yes 10m) of the likely possibility that 3% growth could be achieved as a random possibility from the median forecast of economic growth of 1.8% a year.  The odds of getting 3% were 4%.

The real problem is that across the advanced capitalist economies, productivity growth has plummeted in the last ten years of the Long Depression…..

while employment and population growth has slowed.

Thus, the potential growth rates of the top capitalist economies have dropped away. The Trump target of 3% (it used to be 4%) is just not going to happen.  And all this assumes that there is no new major economic slump in capitalist production, employment and investment in the next ten years.  If the history of capitalist economic cycles are to be relied upon, then that is almost ruled out, even if my own forecast of a new slump by 2018 turns out to be wrong.

Brazil: at the end of its Temer?

The news that Brazil’s right-wing President Temer has been caught trying to bribe politicians to keep quiet about corruption allegations increases the likelihood that he will be impeached by Brazil’s Congress this year.  Temer is already the most unpopular president in Brazil’s democratic history.  He only got into office by organising a ‘constitutional coup’ that ousted elected centre-left President Dilma Rousseff on the grounds of so-called ‘budgetary violations’.  An alliance of parties in favour of pro-capitalist measures to cut wages, social benefits and pensions took over Congress to back Temer.  Brazil’s stock markets and currency boomed and international capital returned to invest.

But now all these ‘reforms’ in the interests of profitability are in jeopardy.  Even though the neo-liberal policies adopted by the previous Workers Party presidents Lula and Dilma led to a loss of support among Brazil’s working class and their eventual demise, the Temer-led alliance has never commanded majority support and the latest scandal could see its end.

Where this will leave Brazilian economy and its people is difficult to judge – I look to my Brazilian readers to explain.  But here I can add that the Temer administration’s aim has been clear: to drive up the low profitability of Brazilian industry and capital by reducing the share going to labour; destroying trade union and other opposition trends; and turning to foreign capital for support.

The big reason that the Dilma government fell was the economy.  After the collapse of commodity prices from about 2011, Brazil’s economy dived into a delayed but deep slump.  And it is still in this economic recession.

But Temer and Brazilian capital, after ousting Dilma, were hoping that a general recovery in the world economy would spread to Brazil.  Things would turn around and enable them to cement their rule.  And there have been some signs of such a recovery.  Brazilian business has shown signs of more confidence.

Although commodity prices have not returned to the heady heights of before 2010, they have at least reversed a little from their deep collapse in the period up to the end of 2015.  Moreover, in the last year, it seems that the prognosis of a collapse in China and a slowdown in the US has not materialised.  And China and the US are by far Brazil’s biggest export markets.

Also, the economic recession has led to a large drop in imports of foreign goods.  So Brazil’s trade balance has improved.

And after significant ‘capital flight’ by rich Brazilians under Dilma, foreign investment has started to return to Brazil, given its pro-capitalist government.

One of the results of the deep depression was sharply falling inflation.  So, although wages for the average Brazilian family have stagnated or even fallen, in real terms (after inflation) they have risen, if only to the level of two years ago.

But unemployment continues to spiral as Brazil’s companies cut back on staff and public sector jobs are decimated.

The medium-term future for Brazil’s economy does not look bright, despite the recent optimism of mainstream economists and pro-capitalist politicians in Brazil.  It was a commodities boom that fuelled much of Brazil’s GDP growth prior to 2010.  The country’s share of global non-oil resource exports rose from 5 percent in 2002 to 9 percent in 2012.  Today commodity prices remain high compared with their historic averages, but the exceptional surge in both demand and prices has levelled off.

At the same time, both households and corporations remained burdened with significant debt.  Household debt has grown from 20 percent of income in 2005 to 43 percent of income in 2012, and high real interest rates (averaging 145 percent on credit cards) make this a heavy burden for consumers. On the government side, federal expenses increased from 15.7 percent of GDP in 2002 to 18.9 percent in 2013, mainly due to interest payments on debt. As a result, taxes have already climbed from 29 percent of GDP in 1995 to 36 percent in 2013, the highest level among Brazil’s emerging market peers. As a share of GDP, Brazil’s gross public sector debt is less than a third that of Japan, but its debt service costs are almost 15 times as high.

Above all, there is little sign that Brazilian capital can really develop the productive forces of the economy and its people.  Resource exports and credit-fuelled consumption have not translated into higher investment or productivity. Between 2000 and 2011, Brazil’s overall investment rate averaged 18 percent of GDP, below that of other developing economies such as Chile (23 percent) or Mexico (25 percent), and much below those of China (42 percent) and India (31 percent).

Brazil’s productivity has been almost stagnant since 2000; today it is just over half the level achieved in Mexico.

 

According to McKinsey, the global management consultants, more than half of Brazil’s population remain below a monthly income per head of R$560.  To cut this level of poverty to under 25% would require productivity four times as fast as the current rate. And there is no prospect of that under capitalism in Brazil.  That’s because the profitability of Brazilian capital is low and continues to stay low.

The profitability of Brazil’s dominant capitalist sector had been in secular decline, imposing continual downward pressure on investment and growth.  Sure, the overthrow of the military regimes and the rise in commodity prices turned round the fall in profitability for a while. But profitability now is still well below its best years in the early 2000s.

The graph below shows three indexed (1963=100) measures (M= Maito; Mar = Marquetti; P = mine based on Penn World tables and poly = smoothed average).

Even if Temer survives, Brazil’s ruling elite face a difficult task in imposing control over its working class and cutting public spending and wages, and thus attracting significant foreign capital.  The ruling elite is more likely to flee with its capital at every sign of difficulty.  So Brazil capitalism will be stuck in a low growth, low profitability future with continuing political and economic paralysis.  And that is without a new global recession coming over the horizon.

Reading Capital Today

As we approach the exact date of the publication of Marx’s Capital Volume One 150 years ago (14 September), a host of conferences and books are coming out in the small world of Marxist study on the relevance of Capital today.  The symposium that I am organising with King’s College London will be on 19-20 September, just around the corner from the British Library where Marx did the research for his opus magnum.  But already there have been conferences in Greece on Capital; a conference in New York at Hofstra University, and next week, York University, Toronto.  All have a large participation by leading Marxist scholars.

And the books are also coming out. The first is aptly entitled Reading Capital Today edited by Ingo Schmidt and Carl Fanelli from two Canadian universities and includes contributions from various activists and academics covering the issues of class struggle, internationalism and the Bolshevik revolution, imperialism, social reproduction and the environment. But I’ll only comment on the specifically economic subject: the labour theory of value.

Prabhat Patnaik is emeritus professor of economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Kerala, India.  In his chapter, Patnaik argues that Marx’s value theory is not meant to explain relative prices between commodities.  The real purpose is to show that commodities priced in money reflect the socially necessary labour time involved in the whole economy.  However, that is as far as I can agree with Patnaik’s interpretation of Marx’s theory.

Patnaik seems to accept that there are two systems, one of value and one of price and that Marx’s transformation of value into prices leads to the total surplus value in an economy being different than the total profit.  This is clearly wrong as the work of scholars like Carchedi, Freeman, Kliman and Moseley have shown.  He also seems to think that Marx’s theory depends solely on commodity money (gold) and does not work or apply to fiat money (notes and reserves not backed by gold) – again a wrong interpretation.

It is true, as Patnaik says, that Marx argued that a rise in wages does not lead to inflation of prices as such, but instead to a fall in the share going to profit (see Marx’s famous debate with Weston, a British trade unionist, in Value, Price and Profit).  But from this, Patnaik seems to conclude that the fundamental contradiction in capitalism revealed by Marx’s law of value is that rising wages will squeeze profits (a profit squeeze theory).  There is no mention of how Marx’s value theory leads onto his law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.  For Patnaik, Marx’s value theory appears to differ little from that of Ricardo (two systems of value and prices and the distribution of wages and profits as key to crises).  With this interpretation, Marx’s famous formula for the rate of profit (s/c+v) becomes irrelevant.

A more useful exercise for those interested in studying Capital today is to read the book itself.  And some great Marxist scholars have developed reading courses that can be followed to do so.  The most comprehensive is that by David Harvey, probably the most well-known scholar on Marxist economics in the world today – and one of our speakers at Capital.150 this September in London.   Indeed, David Harvey debated only this month with Patnaik on the latter’s current take on imperialism.

Harvey covers Volume One of Capital in detail here, as well as Volume Two and a recent set of lectures on his take on Capital today.  These lectures are compiled in written form in: A Companion to Marx’s Capital (Verso, 2010) and A Companion to Marx’s Capital Volume 2 (Verso, 2013).

Over the next few months, I shall try to critique Harvey’s and other scholars’ analysis as we head towards the Capital.150 symposium.  But you can see some of the differences that I and other scholars have already raised with Harvey’s views, particularly on the causes of crises here.

David Harvey’s contribution to understanding Marx’s great work has been invaluable.  But there are other readings that have also made an important contribution, if less well known.  For example, out in Los Angeles, Frieda Afary, a philosophy MA and librarian, has been conducting community-based readings of Capital throughout this year.

But perhaps, the most useful guide in reading Capital today is a new book by Joseph Choonara, A Reader’s Guide to Marx’s Capital (not published until July).  Choonara takes the reader through each chapter of Volume One with some clarifying analysis and relevant comment to help.  Choonara says that “It is designed to be read in parallel with Capital itself, with each chapter of this book consulted either before or after digesting the relevant sections of Marx’s work.”  The aim, unlike that of Harvey’s more comprehensive approach in his video lectures, is “instead to dwell on those areas that are the most vital to an overall understanding of the work and those that most often confuse, drawing on my own experience teaching Capital to left-wing audiences of students and workers over the past decade”.  For, in Choonara’s view, Marx attempted in Capital to see capitalism from the point of view of labour and aimed for a working-class audience.  Capital clearly does the former, but whether it achieved its aim of reaching working class readers is more doubtful.  Choonara’s guide can help here.

Choonara says that “Marx focuses on production in the first volume. The second deals with the circulation process, which is the way that capital passes through its various phases (production, but also purchase and sale). The third volume integrates both aspects of capitalism and so deals with the process as a whole, allowing Marx to explore some of the most complex aspects of the system.”  This is important, because the full story of capitalism as Marx sees it requires the reading of all three volumes (and what is often called the fourth – Theories of Surplus Value) as well as Marx’s earlier research notes compiled in what is called the Grundrisse.

This is important, Choonara comments, because “the interlinked nature of the project causes problems for those who just read volume one. This can potentially lead to a crude focus on production, in which issues related to the circulation of capital or questions such as finance and credit that are discussed mainly in volume three are overlooked. That said, it is helpful to see production as forming the foundation for circulation, and so Marx’s ordering of volumes makes sense.”  This contrasts with Harvey’s interpretation: “In this I take issue with David Harvey’s very influential reading of Capital, which tends to flatten down these different levels of analysis, treating them all as equally fundamental.”   Choonara goes on: Harvey’s “idea is that production and circulation should be considered as having the same explanatory priority in the analysis of capitalism, whereas Marx clearly feels that production is in some sense more basic than circulation.”

Choonara is not afraid to take a view on what Marx means, particularly in the more difficult early chapters on value.  In particular, he varies from Patnaik’s view on Marx’s view of money: “there is nothing in this analysis that precludes the replacement of the money commodity with symbolic representations or electronically created credit (the form taken by most money today). To understand this requires going much further into Capital, and in particular the sections on finance and credit in the third volume.”  This follows from Marx’s endogenous theory of money, namely that “more or less money would circulate according to the needs of circulation …. Marx’s argument is that the amount of money simply reflects the total price that has to be circulated and the speed with which it circulates.”

Choonara’s reading also shows that Marx did not have some ‘iron law of wages’, as argued by the classical economists Ricardo and Malthus, leading to the view that it was impossible to raise the real wages of workers by their own efforts as wages were determined by the value of the means of subsistence and the effect of productivity and capital accumulation on that.

Choonara comments: “One peculiarity of the subsequent attacks on Marxist theory is that this iron law is often attributed to Marx himself. The vehemence of Marx’s attack (on the iron law) reflects the fact that if the “iron law” were correct, then struggles over wages, and indeed the formation of trade unions, would be pointless, leading the socialist movement into a dogmatic cul-de-sac by isolating it from the real movement of workers.”

Recently, the eminent Marxist professor Michael Lebowitz seems to claim Marx did fall into this fallacy.  Lebowitz implies that Marx’s accumulation theory that workers cannot raise their living standards through struggle as the gains from productivity growth will all go to capital.  In Lebowitz’s words, Marx accepts the ‘Ricardian default’.

Yes, for Marx, “the rate of accumulation is the independent, not the dependent variable; the rate of wages is the dependent, not the independent variable”. In other words, the pattern of accumulation tends to drive the shifts in wages, not the other way round.  But changes to wages, emerging out of accumulation, can still react back onto the patterns of accumulation (Choonara).

And that perceptive mainstream economist, William Baumol, long ago showed that for Marx “wages need not be equal to the value of labour power… and the omission of any fixed equilibrium was deliberate because Marx wanted to show that workers have the power to raise wages substantially even under capitalism”.  Indeed, they could do so and actually alter “the historical and social element that enters into the value of labour power”, which is not determined by the iron law of nature or ‘subsistence’.

Indeed, that is the lesson of the struggle to lower the working day so comprehensively described in Capital.  As Marx put it: “The Ten Hours’ Bill was not only a great practical success; it was the victory of a principle; it was the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class [ie the capitalists] succumbed to the political economy of the working class.”  This was a gain for the value of labour power that was permanent, as is the 8 hour day in the 20^th century – although only continual class struggle can preserve such gains.

There are many other useful commentaries by Choonara on aspects of Capital: on the nature of alienation, productive and unproductive labour, mental and material labour, complex and simple labour, on accumulation etc. But enough for now, for there will be more to follow over the coming months, as we consider the relevance of Capital, now 150 years old.

William Baumol and the transformation problem

William J. Baumol, who died last week at the age of 95, was one of the pre-eminent mainstream economists of his generation.  He taught for more than 40 years at Princeton University and at New York University, where he retired in 2014. His work touched on monetary policy, corporate finance, welfare economics, resource allocation and entrepreneurship, but he was best known for the principle that came to bear his name: Baumol’s ‘cost disease’.

Baumol’s cost disease is the idea that personally delivered services — musical performances, medical care, education and garbage collection, for example — naturally and inevitably increase in price year after year. Improved technology may allow bagels and cars to be produced more efficiently and therefore more cost effectively, but, as Baumol famously observed, a Mozart string quartet requires today the services of four musicians, the same manpower it took in the 18th century.

This idea had immediate relevance in public policy, particularly in the areas of health care and education, because it showed why important public services could not be measured for cost-effectiveness in the same way as manufacturing in the capitalist sector.  They provided services for need, not profit.

“The critical point here is that because politicians do not understand the mechanism and nature of the cost disease, and because they face political pressures from a similarly uninformed electorate, they do not realize that we can indeed afford these services without forcing society to undergo unnecessary cuts, restrictions and other forms of deprivation,” he wrote in his 2012 book The Cost Disease.  It is a matter of public choice not ‘efficiency’.

Baumol was prolific in his economic research, particularly in looking at the role of ‘entrepreneur’ as innovator rather than as capitalist.  He also produced one of the main mathematical economics textbooks of the 1960 and 1970s – it was pretty dry, as I remember.

Baumol was a liberal.  He advised Hillary Clinton and various Democrat leaders and was strong advocate of public healthcare and education.  And he was a trustee for Economists for Peace and Security, a liberal UN body of economists opposed to nuclear weapons, along with Kenneth Arrow (who has also recently died) and JK Galbraith.

But what is less known is that in the early 1970s Baumol engaged in a mainstream debate with leading Keynesian Paul Samuelson on the validity and purpose of Marx’s value theory.  Samuelson had launched an attack on Marx’s theory as it began to gain some traction among student activists in those revolutionary days ((Paul A. Samuelson’s “Understanding the Marxian Notion of Exploitation: A Summary of the So-called Transformation Problem between Marxian Values and Competitive Prices, “J. Econ. Lit., June 1971, 9 (2), pp. 399-431).

Like Eugene Bohm-Bawerk tried to do in the late 1890s, and like Keynes in the 1930s, Samuelson wanted to expose the fallacies of Marx’s theory in case economics students became infected with Marxism.  Keynes called Marx’s value theory “scientifically erroneous and without application to the modern world’ (Keynes, Laissez-Faire and Communism, quoted in Hunt 1979: 377).  Samuelson’s approach was to argue, not that Marx’s value theory was illogical because values when measured in labour time could not equal prices measured in markets (as Bohm-Bawerk claimed), but that his theory of value was irrelevant to an explanation of the movement of market prices and therefore to any understanding of modern economies.

Samuelson argued that Marx’s ‘transformation’ of labour values into prices of production was unnecessary.  Market prices are explained by the movement of supply and demand, so what need of a value theory?  Indeed, it could be erased.  “The truth has now been laid bare.  Stripped of logical complication and confusion, anybody’s method of solving the famous transformation problem is seen to involve returning from an unnecessary detour… such a transformation is precisely like that which an eraser is used to rub out an earlier entry (i.e. value – MR) after which we make a new start to end up with a properly calculated entry (i.e. price – MR)”.

Well, Baumol carefully took Samuelson to task in his essay, The transformation of values: what Marx really meant. In so doing, he made an important contribution in explaining and validating Marx’s theory of value. Baumol points out that Samuelson, along with post-Keynesian Marxists like Joan Robinson, misunderstood Marx’s purpose in the so-called transformation of values into prices.  Marx did not want to show that market prices were related directly to values measured in labour time. “Marx did not intend his transformation analysis to show how prices can be deduced from values”.  The aim was to show that capitalism was a mode of production for profit and profits came from the exploitation of labour; but this fact was obscured by the market where things seemed to be exchanged on the basis of an equality of supply and demand.  Profit first comes from the exploitation of labour and then is redistributed (transformed) among the branches of capital through competition and the market into prices of production.

For Marx, that only labour creates value is self-evident. “Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish…. This constitutes the economic laws of all societies, including capitalism. And every child knows, too, that the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs, demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour”, Letter from Marx to Kugelmann, 11 July 1868, MECW, vol.43, pp.68-69.

Total surplus value is produced from exploitation of work forces employed by various capitalists – the difference in value measured in labour time between that time needed for the wages of the labour force and the price of the commodity or service produced realised in the market place for the capitalist.  But not the surplus value or profit achieved by each capitalist’s workforce does not go directly to the individual capitalist.  Each capitalist competes in the market to sell its commodities.  And that competition leads to profits being redistributed because profits tend to an average rate per unit of capital invested.

The transformation of values created by labour into prices in the market means that individual prices will differ from individual values.  As Baumol says, Marx knew that individual prices of production differed from individual values; unlike Ricardo who could not solve this transformation.

So total surplus value is converted (transformed) into total profit, interest and rent, with the market deciding how much for each capitalist.  Yes, ‘supply and demand’ decides profit or loss for an individual capitalist.  But that is just the appearance or result of the distribution of profit through market competition but created by the overall exploitation of labour in the production process.

Baumol’s explanation was a starting point for a more comprehensive answer and defence of Marx’s value theory developed by Marxist scholars like Carchedi, Yaffe, Kliman, Freeman, Moseley and others over the last 40 years since Samuelson’s attack.

Baumol’s interpretation of Marx’s theory provides a powerful answer not only to Samuelson but also to the ‘standard interpretation’ of the transformation problem, as Fred Moseley has named it in his book, Money and Totality (a book that explains in detail all the theoretical issues raised by mainstream and other heterodox economists and answers them).

Values in a commodity do not have to be ‘transformed’ into prices, as Robinson and Samuelson interpret Marx’s theory.  Prices are the appearance in the market of the exploitation of labour in production process.  As Fred Moseley says, if you accept Samuelson’s interpretation of Marx’s transformation of values into prices then “values do in fact cancel out and play no role in the determination of prices” (p229). However, this is not Marx’s theory.  Individual values are not converted into individual prices of production: “individual values play no role in Marx’s theory of prices.  What happens is that “total new value produced by current labour … is determined (in part) by the total surplus value produced, which in turn (in part) determines the general rate of profit and ultimately, prices of production… prices of production are not determined by multiplying transformation coefficients for each commodity by the individual values, but by adding the average profit to given money costs”.

There is no need to transform the values of constant capital (machinery etc) and variable capital (labour power/workforce) into prices.  They are already given as prices from the market in the previous process of production.  The only transformation that takes place is the transformation of the total new value from the production process in a re-distribution through market competition, with profits going to the various capitalists depending on the size of capital each advanced at the start of production.

As Baumol says, the distribution of surplus value from society’s central storehouse now takes place via the competitive process which assigns to each capital profits (or interest or rent) an amount strictly proportional to its capital investment.  “This is the heart of the transformation process – the conversion of surplus value into profit, interest and rent.  It takes from each according to its workforce and returns to each according to its total investment” p53

Marx’s transformation is temporal: you start (t1) with given money capital to invest in plant, machinery and labour and you get new value created by the exertion and exploitation of labour (t2).  The surplus value comes from after covering the cost of capital (constant and variable).  This is then redistributed through competition in the market, which drives all towards an average rate of profit.  Thus total value (dead labour and living labour plus surplus value) still equals total prices (based on the given cost of invested capital plus an average rate of profit), but total surplus value is transformed into profits, interest and rent and distributed according to the size of the capital invested.

Here is Marx’s actual schema for this transformation.

You can see that total values (TV) equal total prices (TP), but individual capitals have commodities with different values (V) to prices (P) because of the redistribution of surplus value (s) into profits (p) by the market.  There is no transformation of constant (c) and variable (v) capitals because they are already transformed (into money prices) in a previous production period.

Indeed, Baumol’s (and Marx’s) transformation has since been supported empirically.  Carchedi has shown that the money price average rate of profit is close to the value average rate of profit (i.e. across a whole economy). Other scholars have shown that when an individual sector’s production is measured in value terms (i.e. in labour time) and then aggregated, the total value is pretty close to total prices measured in money terms.  Thus Marx’s transformation of value into prices is not irrelevant even to relative price determination.

But, as Baumol said, it was not Marx’s purpose to show that.  He wanted to show that it is the exploitation of labour that creates value (through the private appropriation of the product of labour power) and that lies behind profit, interest and rent.

Profit is not the reward for ‘risking capital’ (money for equipment etc); or rent from ‘providing’ land; or interest for ‘lending’ money; thus rewards to various factors of production.  Baumol comments: “Such nonsense is precisely what Marx’ analysis anticipates and what it is intended to expose. Again, let Marx speak for himself. “In Capital-Profit, or better Capital-Interest, Land-Rent, Labor-Wages of Labor, in this economic trinity expressing professedly the connection of value and of wealth in general with their sources, we have the complete mystification of the capitalist mode of production.  …This formula corresponds at the same time to the interests of the ruling classes, by proclaiming the natural necessity and eternal justification of their sources of revenue and raising them to the position of a dogma.” (Volume III, Chapter 48, pp. 966-67).

It is no accident that it is the Keynesians and post-Keynesians like Joan Robinson that were (and are) the most vehement against Marxist economic theory – because Marxism is the main opponent of Keynesian influence in the labour movement.

William Baumol may have been as mainstream an economist that you could find – an exponent of the neoclassical equilibrium and marginalism.  But he was also a surprisingly acute observer of Marx’s exploitation theory of capitalism.  As a result, he could show the Keynesian (and neo-Ricardian) claim that Marx’s value theory was an ‘irrelevant and unnecessary detour’ was wrong.  For that, we can thank him.

North Korea: a story of isolation

Tensions in Asia have been rising sharply as North Korea continues its missile testing in defiance of US demands for them to cease. President Trump has been upping the ante with threats to by-pass China and the stalled so-called six party talks supposedly working out a ‘peace solution’ with North Korea, and ‘deal with’ North Korea on its own.  As US naval battalions enter Korean waters to impose Trump’s will on North Korea, I thought it might be worth looking at the state of the North Korean economy.

The end of the Korean war in the early 1950s left Korea with over one million dead and still divided in two in the same way that the ‘cold war’ between the US and the Soviet Union left Germany split in two.  Both parts of Korea were poor, but interestingly it was the south that was poorer because most of the natural resources (coal etc) and industry were in the north, although the mines were mostly destroyed.

That changed in the ensuing decade or so.  Huge amounts of foreign investment were ploughed into the south where a military regime was imposed, keeping wages to the minimum and establishing large monopolistic corporations (chaebol) heavily integrated into the state machine.  Investment was state-directed and the profitability of capital rose sharply through massive exploitation of labour.

Meanwhile in the north, the one-party state machine, resting on a nationalised industry and farms and built in the image of its mentors, Russia and China, received no such investment support as in the south.  In 1961 an ambitious seven-year plan was launched to continue industrial expansion and increase living standards, but within three years it became clear this was failing. The failure was due to reduced support from the Soviet Union when North Korea aligned more with China, and military pressure from the US, leading to increased defence spending.

In 1965 South Korea’s rate of economic growth exceeded North Korea’s for the first time and in most industrial areas, though South Korea’s per capita GNP remained lower than North Korea’s. North Korea did recover somewhat under its national plan, but by the early 1970s, per capita income in the south exceeded that of the north for the first time and the gap then accelerated.

North Korea’s planned economy struggled with its isolation in trade and investment; the lack of support from Russia and China (which had their own problems); and the stifling totalitarianism of the Kim dynasty, now firmly ensconsed as the ‘great leader’ (one after the other).  The south had its own autocratic regime with no democratic rights, but at least it had trade and investment to exploit its people more effectively.

The collapse of the Soviet Union presaged an unprecedented disaster for the North Korean economy.  Weighed down by heavy military spending to defend the regime, the disappearance of its export markets for coal and other minerals led to a collapse in industrial output.  This was accompanied by terrible harvests, leading to a major famine that saw 500,000 to nearly a million deaths!  Living standards fell by half as the average real GDP growth rate in the 1990s was -4%!

In 1999 the economy showed some signs of recovery. And the Kim regime decided to mimic the ‘reforms’ introduced in China to allow some private sector production and some markets in agriculture and for small businesses.  There has been steady if low economic growth since the late 1990s, even if the country is still the poorest in East Asia. During the period 2000-2005, the North grew at an average growth rate of 2.2 percent. There was a downturn yet again in the global Great Recession and from 2006-2010, only 2008 registered positive growth. But since 2010, North Korea resumed some growth again.

North Korea continues to depend on getting foreign currency to import goods by selling coal to China (one-third of all exports). In addition, the regime sends thousands of North Korean workers in forced labour conditions to China, Russia and the Middle East to work in mining, logging and construction to remit foreign currency.

Estimating GDP in North Korea is a difficult task because of a dearth of economic data and the problem of choosing an appropriate rate of exchange.  In 2014, the South Korea-based Bank of Korea estimated that the real GDP of North Korea in 2014 was KRW 4.2 billion  or just 1/44 of the size of the South Korean economy.  However, it is probably an underestimate of the North Korean economy. GDP per person was KRW1.388 million, or just one-20^th of the average in South Korea.  This is a mighty huge gap.

A significant part of the population is still malnourished and the average North Korean family considers itself reasonably affluent if they can afford a new bicycle.  However, this year, North Korea enjoyed an exceptionally good harvest, which for the first time in more than two decades will be sufficient to feed the country’s entire population.  Ironically, in this year of possible attack by the US and the sabre-rattling of the Kim regime, the economy is growing around 3-4% a year, a record level since the 1970s.

The government appears to have allowed the private sector to grow.  Some ‘state companies’ are in effect owned by rich individuals, usually well-placed or related to senior state officials.  According to the most recent estimates, about 75 percent of North Korean household income now comes not from the state but from assorted private economic activities – activities that are now tacitly tolerated by the government. North Koreans today tend to their very own private plots, run their own food stalls, make clothes, footwear (and even counterfeited Chinese cigarettes) in unofficial workshops, and of course, they trade.  Since 2010, the number of government-approved markets in North Korea has doubled to 440, and satellite images show them growing in size in most cities. In a country with a population of 25 million, about 1.1 million people are now employed as retailers or managers in these markets, according to a study by the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul.

So the law of value is inevitably beginning to operate and strengthen in an economy that is unable to expand through state planning run by a dynastic autocracy.  But with the law of value and markets come rising inequality, fostered by the corruption of the bureaucracy.

But even if the political tensions were to subside, there is no way that the North Korean economy can really deliver sustained economic growth and living standards for its 25m people.  The key is foreign investment and a democratic plan.  North Korea will have neither under the current regime.  First, there are US-inspired sanctions against investing in the north, while the north pursues its aim of having effective nuclear weaponry – and that aim is seen as essential by the Kim regime for its survival.

And the regime sees foreign investors as institutions to be milked not as partners in expansion.  They have not learnt from the Chinese here.  For example, the Egyptian telecommunications firm Orascom created a North Korean mobile phone network virtually from scratch, but the North Koreans not only refused to pay the Egyptians from the proceeds of the network but confiscated all the assets.  Foreign capital is not likely to come on that basis.

The obvious immediate solution is the unification of north and south.  Koreans should be united as the Germans were.  But the only option offered is, of course, unification on the basis of capitalism, not democratic socialism.  Capital would dominate in the north as well as the south – something that has proved a failure even in Germany, where the gap between east and west in living standards remains wide, despite billions being ‘transferred’ to the east and slowing expansion in unified Germany for nearly a decade.  Those living in the east have real incomes at just two-thirds of those in the west and one-third of easterners have moved to the west.

And here is the rub.  The cost of unifying north and south Korea is way more than it was to bring west and east together.  Whereas, east Germany had 17m people against 60m in the west, a ratio of one to four; north Korea has 25m against 50m in the south, a ratio of one to two.  A report from the south still reckons it would be possible to unite Korea on a capitalist basis and raise the income per head in the north to $10,000 (compared to $1800 now and $25,000 in the south) and North Korea’s economy to 70% of the south’s by 2050, making a unified Korea the seventh-largest economy in the world.

But this is really a pipe-dream.  Even this optimistic report reckons that the south would have to commit 7% of GDP every year to the north to achieve this target (compared to 4% of West German GDP to the east).  That is clearly impossible on a capitalist basis, given the increasing economic problems facing the south since the Great Recession.  As I posted only last March, South Korea goes into a general election tomorrow with its political elite mired yet again in corruption and its economy increasingly sclerotic with its monopoly chaebols and facing increasingly difficult conditions in global trade, vital to the south’s expansion. No wonder political support for unification in the south has waned in recent years.

There is strong evidence that a planned and predominantly state-owned economy could succeed and do even better in a unified Korea.  If you compare, for instance, the development of Mexico and the Soviet Union from 1913 until the year the Berlin Wall fell, “the Soviet Union’s growth over the period of communism put Mexico’s to shame,” according to Charles Kenney, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. He points out that Soviet income per capita was 46% greater than Mexico’s in 1989, compared to just 1% larger in 1913.  And there is the story of China’s phenomenal and unprecedented economic expansion, taking hundreds of millions out of poverty.

Unification was tried back in the 1950s through a bloody war that decimated Korea.  Unification would only be successful peacefully if there were a unified, democratically elected, regime under the control of the working class of both south and north.  It would only be successful economically if the chaebol in the south were taken over and the resources of the north were integrated into a national investment plan.  The capitalist regime of the south and the cultist dictatorship of the north would have to go before that.

Memoirs of an erratic Marxist

Yanis Varoufakis once described himself as an ‘erratic Marxist’.  This heterodox economist became the finance minister in the Syriza-led Greek government during the most intense period of the Greek debt crisis when the Greeks were trying to avoid severe austerity measures being imposed by the Troika of the EU group, the IMF and the ECB back in 2015 and stay in the eurozone.

Varoufakis was sacked by PM Tsipras when Tsipras decided to capitulate to the Troika demands, despite the Greek people voting to oppose Troika austerity in an unprecedented referendum vote called by Tsipras himself.  Since then, the Syriza government has agreed to a succession of further fiscal austerity measures including cuts to wages and jobs in the public sector, pension reductions and privatisations in return for handouts by the EU in loans to repay previous debts – in a never-ending circle.

Now Varoufakis has published his memoirs of his time as finance minister and what happened in the discussions and negotiations with the EU leaders and others over managing Greek public debt.  According to Paul Mason, reviewing the book, “Varoufakis has written one of the greatest political memoirs of all time.”  Well, to me this stands as hyperbole compared Trotsky’s My Life or for that matter, Churchill’s political memoirs.  But no doubt the book is interesting, as Mason puts it, as “the inside story of high politics told by an outsider.”  According to Mason, Varoufakis shows graphically that “Elected politicians have little power; Wall Street and a network of hedge funds, billionaires and media owners have the real power, and the art of being in politics is to recognise this as a fact of life and achieve what you can without disrupting the system.”

Varoufakis makes the point that “not only was Greece bankrupt in 2010 when the EU bailed it out, and that the bailout was designed to save the French and German banks, but that Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy knew this; and they knew it would be a disaster.”  The aim of the Euro leaders back in 2010, when the Greek crisis mushroomed in the wake of the Great Recession and the global financial crash was to ensure that the German and French banks did not suffer severe losses from any default by the Greek.  These banks had bought huge amounts of Greek public debt to make profits and now in the crisis Greek bonds were worth nothing.  The EU leaders came up with a solution: the banks would take a small ‘haircut’ (no more than 10% on their bond holdings) and the rest of the debt would be shifted onto the books of the EU, ECB and the IMF to be paid off over the next decade or so.  The Troika would then squeeze and sweat the money they lent to pay off the banks out of the Greek people.

Eventually, the leftist Syriza won a famous victory in the Greek election on a programme of rejecting the debt burden and refusing austerity measures.  This is what I wrote at that time: “The alternative to grasp the nettle: demand the cancellation of the euro and IMF loans (the original demand of Syriza) or default; impose capital controls, take over the Greek banks and appeal to the Greek people for support and the European labour movement. Let the Euro leaders make the move on Eurozone membership, not Syriza. The problem is that now the Greek people have been led to believe that there is only one way out: a deal with the Eurogroup on increasingly bad terms. The alternative of a socialist plan for investment and a Europe-wide appeal is not before them.”

After months of negotiations with the Euro leaders, Tsipras called a referendum to refuse any austerity deal, expecting to lose the vote (as did Varoufakis apparently).  Losing the vote would have got Tsipras off the hook as he could have agreed to the Troika measures because the Greeks accepted them.  But he and Varoufakis got a shock.  Despite a massive media campaign by the Euro leaders and conservative forces within Greece; despite the Germans and ECB forcing a credit squeeze and a run on and closure of Greek banks for weeks, the Greek people said no.

Nevertheless, Tsipras decided to ignore that vote and opted to capitulate.  Mason says this was the right thing to do.  “I continue to believe Tsipras was right to climb down in the face of the EU’s ultimatum…. For Tsipras – and for the older generation of former detainees and torture victims who rebuilt the Greek left after 1974 – staying in power as a dented shield against austerity was preferable to handing power back to a bunch of political mafiosi backed by a mob of baying rich-kid fashionistas.”  Is Mason serious?  Was the right-wing Mafiosi the only alternative? Instead of building a movement of support for the government and proposing an emergency plan for the Greek people and its economy, the best solution was to give in?

Back in July 2015, I considered the options for Syriza.  There was the neoliberal solution being demanded by the Troika. This was to keep cutting back the public sector and its costs, to keep labour incomes down and to make pensioners and others pay more. This was aimed at raising the profitability of Greek capital and with extra foreign investment, restore the economy. Then maybe the Eurozone economy would eventually start to grow strongly and so help Greece, as a rising tide raises all boats.

The next solution was the Keynesian one, advocated by the left-wing within Syriza (but not by Varoufakis, who remained silent and left for America – apparently because of death threats to his family, according to his memoirs). This meant boosting public spending to increase demand, cancelling part of the government debt and for Greece to leave the euro and introduce a new currency (drachma) to be devalued by as much as was necessary to make Greek industry competitive in world markets.

The trouble with this solution was that it assumed Greek capital could revive with a lower currency rate and that more public spending would increase ‘demand’ without further lowering profitability.  But the profitability of capital is key to recovery under a capitalist economy. Greek exporters may have benefited from a devalued currency, but many Greek companies that earn money at home in drachma would be decimated. And rapidly rising inflation that would have followed devaluation would only raise profitability precisely because it will eat into the real incomes of the majority as wages failed to match inflation. Indeed, that is what is happening since the Brexit vote in the UK.

The third option was a socialist one – something not adopted then by either Tspiras, Varoufakis or the Syriza left (or it seems, could ever be viable, according to Mason). This recognised that Greek capitalism would not recover to restore living standards for the majority, whether inside the euro in a Troika programme or outside with its own currency and with no Eurozone support. The socialist solution would be to replace Greek capitalism with a planned economy where the Greek banks and major companies are publicly owned and controlled and the drive for profit is replaced with the drive for efficiency, investment and growth. The Greek economy is small but it is not without an educated people and many skills and some resources beyond tourism. Using its human capital in a planned and innovative way, it could grow. But being small, it would need, like all small economies, the help and cooperation of the rest of Europe.

This solution would have required Syriza mobilising the latent support of the people through workplace committees to discuss an emergency plan for change.  It would have entailed immediate nationalisation of the major banks to ensure payment of people’s deposits (despite the ECB) and the takeover of the major companies (reversing privatisations) in order to institute a plan for production and investment.  That would have meant approaching the labour movement and progressive forces within the major EU countries to force their governments to stop austerity on Greece or make it leave the euro and instead relieve them of this ‘odious debt’ just as the Germans were in the 1950s relieved of their reparation debt (still not paid to Greece for the destruction and death by the Nazis).

This socialist option was the only one that would have got Greece out of its hell.  But of course, it would be hugely difficult to implement.  Yes, the conservative forces within Greece would mobilise; yes, the Greek military may rear its head; and yes, the Euro leaders would try to strangle a tiny socialist Greece and kick it out of the euro and EU.  But the battle for a socialist transformation always poses these sorts of obstacles; and only the unity of the class across Europe and a determined Greek leadership could have overcome them.  But the Syriza leaders, including Varoufakis (the erratic Marxist), never considered this option as viable, and Marxist Paul Mason agrees with them.  For them, there was no alternative but to accept the Troika impositions – which have continued to this day.  And Mason admits that “Tsipras’s government has proved a not very effective shield for the Greek working class” even if (as he claims) it was “an effective protection for the million-plus Syrian migrants who landed on Greek shores in the weeks following the economic surrender.”

Mason reckons Tsipras’ achievement of building Syriza and getting it into government is greater than that of maverick ‘Marxist’ Varoufakis who kept ‘clean’ from the capitulation in July 2015.  But apparently if the ‘global left’ is recover than it “needs leaders like Tsipras and to find thinkers and doers like Varoufakis, and to nurture them.” Well, Varoufakis’ memoirs and Tsipras’ actions hardly seem to justify Mason’s admiration.  Only this week, the Syriza-led Greek government signed up to another round of severe austerity measures in order to get the next tranche of so-called bailout funds from the EU.  The government agreed to adopt another €3.6bn ($3.8bn) in cuts in 2019 and 2020 and have conceded fresh pension (9%) cuts and corporate tax breaks in return for permission to spend an equivalent sum on poverty relief measures.

The Syriza government has done everything it has been asked of by the Troika in making the Greek people pay for the failure of Greek capitalism. And yet the EU leaders have still not agreed to ‘debt relief’. Indeed, they are talking of only considering it once the austerity measures in the latest bailout have been implemented in full and the programme comes to an end in 2018. In the meantime, the Greek government is supposed to run a budget surplus (before interest payments on loans) of 3.5% of GDP a year for the foreseeable future. That is a level way higher than any other country in the EU and way higher for so long than any other government has achieved ever!

No wonder the IMF considers this approach as unsustainable.  “Even if Greece, through a heroic effort, could temporarily reach a surplus close to 3.5% of GDP, few countries have managed to reach and sustain such high levels of primary balances for a decade or more, and it is highly unlikely that Greece can do so considering its still weak policy making institutions and projections suggesting that unemployment will remain at double digits for several decades.” IMF.

For Greece, there is no escape from the penury of public debt owed to the IMF and Eurogroup.  There is a new and detailed study of the plans of the Troika (EU, ECB and IMF) to force the Greek government to run a primary (excluding interest payments) budget surplus of 3.5% of GDP from 2018 onwards.  It shows that it will be impossible for Greece to deliver this level of austerity and, even if it did, it would not stop the debt burden rising even more.  “Past experience suggests the fiscal policy expected – a budget surplus before interest payments worth 3.5 per cent of GDP, sustained for 16 years — has literally no chance of happening even if Greece were able to start generating a 3.5 per cent primary surplus by 2018, as per the targeted schedule”.  It goes on: “Greece’s debts to the EFSF would more than double to about €278 billion in 2050, when interest deferral is assumed to end, and then begin a slow decline, but the outstanding amount in 2080 would still be higher than it is today.”  That’s 70 years since the crisis began!  The paper says that the EU should offer more bailout money from next year to “tide Greece over”. But the debt would remain and keep on rising, even if yet more austerity measures (already unprecedented in fiscal history) were applied. The only solution is to write the debt off.

So, while Varoufakis publishes his memoirs of his time as finance minister during the debt crisis, exposes the rotten and cruel policies of the Troika, and goes around Europe in seminars to demand a better Europe, the Tsipras-led Syriza government continues trying to meet the demands and targets of the Troika in the vain hope that European capitalism will recover and grow and so allow Greeks to get some crumbs off the table. There may eventually some deal on ‘debt relief’. But it will still mean that Greece has an unsustainable burden of debt on its books for generations to come, while living standards for the average Greek household fall back below where they were before Greece joined the Eurozone. A whole generation of Greeks will be worse off than the last and another global recession is still to come.

Labour’s share

The leading Keynesian bloggers have been discussing the causes of inequality again.  In particular, they have highlighted the apparent decline in labour’s share of national income in most advanced capitalist economies since the early 1980s.

According to an ILO report, in 16 developed economies, labour took a 75% share of national income in the mid-1970s, but this dropped to 65% in the years just before the economic crisis. It rose in 2008 and 2009 – but only because national income itself shrank in those years – before resuming its downward course. Even in China, where wages have tripled over the past decade, workers’ share of the national income has gone down.

And the very latest IMF World Economic Report finds that “After being largely stable in many countries for decades, the share of national income paid to workers has been falling since the 1980s.” 

The IMF goes on “Labor’s share of income declines when wages grow more slowly than productivity, or the amount of output per hour of work. The result is that a growing fraction of productivity gains has been going to capital. And since capital tends to be concentrated in the upper ends of the income distribution, falling labor income shares are likely to raise income inequality.”

As Keynesian blogger Noah Smith put in an article, “For decades, macroeconomic models assumed that labor and capital took home roughly constant portions of output — labor got just a bit less than two-thirds of the pie, capital slightly more than one-third. Nowadays it’s more like 60-40.”  What has happened?  Smith reckons that there are four possible explanations: 1) China, 2) robots, 3) monopolies and 4) landlords.

By China, he means that globalisation and the shift of manufacturing by multi-nationals to so-called emerging economies has led to labour in advanced economies losing jobs and seeing their wages stagnate while productivity has risen.  Yet, as Smith points out, labour’s share has fallen in China too and (until recently) inequality of income rose sharply.

Then there is the accelerating substitution of machines for workers, particularly with robots and artificial intelligence.  What appears to be happening is that more efficient, hi-tech firms are growing fast, leaving behind inefficient firms that use more labour.  These less efficient firms lose market share and so start to employ less workers as well.

Well, that is pretty much a trend in capitalist accumulation from a Marxist perspective – so it should be no surprise.  Indeed, the IMF report backs up this view.  “In advanced economies, about half of the decline in labor shares can be traced to the impact of technology. The decline was driven by a combination of rapid progress in information and telecommunication technology, and a high share of occupations that could be easily be automated.”

It used to be argued in mainstream economics that inequalities were the result of different skills in the workforce and the share going to labour was dependent on the race between workers improving their skills and education and introduction of machines to replace past skills.

Indeed, another leading Keynesian Brad Delong still supports this answer.  In a recent post, he suggests that Smith and Krugman have it wrong. “let me suggest that there is no mystery to explain.”  If we look at labour’s share of net GDP, i.e. after deducting depreciation (the amount of output needed to replace worn-out plant and equipment), then labour’s ratio has not really fallen, except during the Great Recession.

So Delong concludes that any redistribution of income was indeed within labour’s share from low earners to high earners (CEOs, top executives, doctors and dentists etc) and not between labour and capital.

Delong’s argument is not convincing.  First, depreciation may not be defined as profit but it is clearly a deduction from gross profits. Second, even the graph above does show a trend decline in labour share after its sharp rise in the late 1960s, which led to an intensification in the fall in profitability in most advanced capitalist economies from the mid-1960s and in an accompanying class struggle.  The decline was also significant from 2000 during the credit-boom in the US (unlike Europe, where labour’s share was steady and even rose in the Great Recession – the opposite of the US experience).

And third, the gains in income for CEOs and small business doctors, dentists, lawyers and other ‘professionals’ are really profits not wages.  See Simon Mohun’s excellent work in this regard.

Paul Krugman has returned to the theme of falling labour share in a recent post on his blog, where he argues that it is monopoly power among such capital-intensive companies like Google, Microsoft, etc and the energy companies that drives up profits the overall economy. This is an argument he has raised before. As he said back in 2012, “Are we really back to talking about capital versus labor? Isn’t that an old-fashioned, almost Marxist sort of discussion, out of date in our modern information economy?”  

Krugman recognises that inequalities of income and wealth across US society and the declining share of income going to labour in the capitalist sector are not due to the level of education and skill in the US workforce, but to deeper factors.   In 2012, he cited two possible explanations: “One is that technology has taken a turn that places labor at a disadvantage; the other is that we’re looking at the effects of a sharp increase in monopoly power. Think of these two stories as emphasizing robots on one side, robber barons on the other.”

The first argument is that modern technology is ‘capital-biased’, namely it aims to replace labour by machines over time.  As Krugman put it: “The effect of technological progress on wages depends on the bias of the progress; if it’s capital-biased, workers won’t share fully in productivity gains, and if it’s strongly enough capital-biased, they can actually be made worse off.”

This is not new in Marxist economic theory.  Marx put it differently to the mainstream.  Investment under capitalism takes place for profit only, not to raise output or productivity as such.  If profit cannot be sufficiently raised through more labour hours (ie.e more workers and longer hours) or by intensifying efforts (speed and efficiency – time and motion), then the productivity of labour can only be increased by better technology.  So, in Marxist terms, the organic composition of capital (the amount of machinery and plant relative to the number of workers) will rise secularly.  Workers can fight to keep as much of the new value that they have created as part of their ‘compensation’ but capitalism will only invest for growth if that share does not rise so much that it causes profitability to decline.  So capitalist accumulation implies a falling share to labour over time or what Marx would call a rising rate of exploitation (or surplus value).

And yes, it does all depend on the class struggle between labour and capital over the appropriation of the value created by the productivity of labour.  And clearly labour has been losing that battle, particularly in recent decades, under the pressure of anti-trade union laws, ending of employment protection and tenure, the reduction of benefits, a growing reserve army of unemployed and underemployed and through the globalisation of manufacturing.

Apart from capital-bias technology, Krugman considers that the fall in labour’s share may be caused by ‘monopoly power’, or the rule of ‘robber barons’.  Krugman puts it this way.  Maybe labour’s share of income is falling because “we don’t actually have perfect competition” under capitalism, “increasing business concentration could be an important factor in stagnating demand for labor, as corporations use their growing monopoly power to raise prices without passing the gains on to their employees.”  

What Krugman seems to be suggesting is that it is an imperfection in the market economy that creates this inequality and if we root out this imperfection (monopoly) all will correct itself.  So Krugman presents the issue in the terms of neoclassical economics.

But it is not monopoly rule as such, but the rule of capital.  Sure, capital accumulates through increased centralisation and concentration of the means of production in the hands of a few.  This ensures that the value created by labour is appropriated by capital and that the share going to the 99% is minimised. This is not monopoly as an imperfection of perfect competition, as Krugman explains it; it is the monopoly of ownership of the means of production by a few.  This is the straight forward functioning of capitalism, warts and all.

The falling share going to labour in national income began at just the point when US corporate profitability was at an all-time low in the deep recession of the early 1980s.  Capitalism had to restore profitability.  It did so partly by raising the rate of surplus value through sacking workers, stopping wage increases and phasing out benefits and pensions.  Indeed, it is significant that the collapse in labour’s share intensified after 1997 when US profitability again peaked and began to slide again.  The IMF graph above shows that this applied to most economies.

Labour’s share in the capitalist sector in the US and other major capitalist economies is down because of increased technology and ‘capital bias’, from globalisation and cheap labour abroad; from the destruction of trade unions; from the creation of a larger reserve army of labour (unemployed and underemployed); and from ending of work benefits and secured tenure contracts etc.  Indeed, this seems to be the conclusion reached by the IMF in its latest report, Chapter 3 of the April 2017 World Economic Outlook finds that this trend is driven by rapid progress in technology and global integration.

“Global integration—as captured by trends in final goods trade, participation in global value chains, and foreign direct investment—also played a role. Its contribution is estimated at about half that of technology. Because participation in global value chains typically implies offshoring of labor-intensive tasks, the effect of integration is to lower labor shares in tradable sectors.  Admittedly, it is difficult to cleanly separate the impact of technology from global integration, or from policies and reforms. Yet the results for advanced economies are compelling. Taken together, technology and global integration explain close to 75 percent of the decline in labor shares in Germany and Italy, and close to 50 percent in the United States.”

Maybe ‘capital bias’ and ‘globalisation’ had less of an effect on labour share in the US because of the greater growth in financial profits and rents there than in the rest of the advanced economies.

Indeed, as Noah Smith puts it, “monopoly power, robots and globalization might all be part of one unified phenomenon — new technologies that disproportionately help big, capital-intensive multinational companies.”  I call that modern capital, which, quoting Smith again, “provides a possible way to unify at least some of the competing explanations for this disturbing economic trend.”

HMNY – the profit-investment nexus: Keynes or Marx?

The main themes of this year’s Historical Materialism conference in New York last week were the Russian Revolution and the prospects for revolutionary change one hundred years later.

But my main interest, as always, was on the relevance of Marxist economic theory in explaining the current state of global capitalism – if you like, understanding the objective conditions for the struggle to replace capitalism with a socialist society.

On that theme, in a plenary session, Professor Anwar Shaikh at the New School for Social Research (one of the most eminent heterodox economists around) and I looked at the state of the current economic situation for modern capitalism.  Anwar concentrated on the main points from his massive book, Capitalism, published last year – the culmination of 15 years of research by him.  This is a major work of political economy in which Anwar uses what he calls the classical approach of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx (and sometimes Keynes) under one umbrella (not specifically Marxist apparently).  His book is essential reading (and I have reviewed it here) and also see the series of lectures that he has done to accompany it.

His main points at the plenary were to emphasise that capitalism is not a system that started off as competitive and then developed into monopoly capitalism, but it is one of turbulent ’real competition’.  There has never been perfect competition as mainstream economics implies from which we can look at ‘imperfections’ like monopoly.

Anwar went on to say that crises under capitalism are the result of falling profitability over time in a long downwave (see graph comparing my measures with Shaikh).  The neoliberal period from the early 1980s was a result of the rejection of Keynesian economics and the return of neoclassical theory and the replacement of fiscal management of the economy, which was not working, with monetarism from the likes of Milton Friedman.  But even neo-liberal policies could not avoid the Great Recession. And since then, there has not been a full recovery for capitalism.  Massive monetary injections have avoided the destruction of capital values, but at the expense of stagnation.

In my contribution, I emphasised the points of my book, The Long Depression, which also saw the current crisis as a result of Marx’s law of profitability in operation.  I argued that mainstream economics failed to see the slump coming, could not explain it, and do not have policies to get out of the long depression that has ensued since 2009 because they have no real theory of crises.  Some deny crises at all; some claim they are due to reckless greedy bankers; or to ‘changing the rules of game’ by the deregulation of the finance sector causing instability; or due to rising inequality squeezing demand.

In my view, none of these explanations are compelling.  But neither are the alternatives that are offered within the labour movement. Anwar was right that neoclassical economics dominates again in mainstream economics, but I was keen to point out that Keynesian economics is dominant as the alternative theory, analysis and policy prescription in the labour movement.  And, in my view, Keynesianism was just as useless in predicting or explaining crises and thus so are its policy prescriptions.

Indeed, that was the main point made in the paper that I presented at another session at HM at which Anwar Shaikh was the discussant.  In my paper, entitled, The profit-investment nexus: Marx or Keynes?, (The profit investment nexus Michael Roberts HMNY April 2017), I argued that it is business investment not household consumption that drives the booms and slumps in output under capitalism.  For crude Keynesians, it is what happens with consumer demand that matters, but empirical analysis shows that before any major slump, it is investment that falls not consumption and, indeed, often there is no fall in consumption at all -the graph below shows that investment fell much more from peak of the boom to the trough of the slump in US post-war recessions.

Moreover, what drives business investment is profit and profitability, not ‘effective demand’.  That’s because profits are not some ‘marginal product’ of the ‘factor of capital’, as mainstream marginalist economics (that Keynes also held to) reckons.  Profits are the result of unpaid labour in production, part of surplus value appropriated by capitalists.  Profits come first before investment, not as a marginal outcome of capital investment. In the paper, I show that the so-called Keynesian macro identities used in mainstream economic textbooks fail to reveal that the causal connection is not from investment to savings or profit but from profits to investment.  Investment does not cause profit, as Keynesian theory argues, but profits cause investment.

Shaikh commented in his contribution that Keynes was also well aware that profits were relevant to investment.  That sounds contradictory to what I am arguing.  But let Keynes himself resolve how he saw it, when he says that “Nothing obviously can restore employment which first does not restore business profits.  Yet nothing in my judgement can restore business profits that does not first restore the volume of investment”.  To answer Keynes, my paper shows that there is plenty of empirical evidence to show that profits lead investment into any slump and out into a boom – the Marxist view.  And there is little or no evidence that investment drives profits – the Keynesian view.

Shaikh at HM argued that it is the ‘profits of enterprise’ that matter not profits as such.  By this he means that the interest or rent taken by finance capital and landlords must be deducted before we can see the direct connection between business profits and business investment.  Maybe so, but the evidence is also strong that the overall surplus value in the hands of capital (including finance capital) is the driving force behind investment.  Interest and rent can never be higher than profit as they are deductions from total profits made by productive capital.

Also Shaikh reckons that it is expectations of future profit on new investment that is decisive in the movement of business investment, not the mass or the rate of profit on the existing stock of capital invested.  Yes, capitalists invest on the expectation of profit but that expectation is based on what their actual profitability was before.  So the profitability on existing capital is what matters.  Otherwise, the expectation of profit becomes some ephemeral subjective measure, like Keynes’ animal spirits’.  Indeed, as I quote Paul Mattick in my paper, “what are we to make of an economic theory …. which could declare; “In estimating the prospects for investment, we must have regard therefore, to the nerves and hysteria and the digestions and reactions to the weather of those upon whose spontaneous activity it largely depends” (Keynes).

My paper concludes that different economic policy conclusions flow from the Marxist or Keynesian view of what drives investment.  The Keynesian multiplier reckons that it is demand that drives investment and if consumer and investment demand is low or falling, a suitable boost of government investment and spending can compensate and so pump prime or boost the capitalist economy back on its feet.

But when we study the evidence of the efficacy of the Keynesian multiplier, as I do in this paper, it is not compelling.  On the other hand, the Marxist multiplier, namely the effect of changes in the profitability of business capital on investment and economic growth, is much more convincing.  Thus Keynesian fiscal and monetary stimulus policies do not work and do not deliver economic recovery when profitability of capital is low and/or falling. Indeed, they may make things worse.

At the plenary I pointed out that Donald Trump plans some limited form of Keynesian stimulus by government spending on infrastructure programmes worth about $250bn.  I have discussed these plans and their fake nature before.  But even if they were genuine increases in state investment, it will do little.  Business investment as a share of GDP in most advanced capitalist economies is around 12-18% of GDP.  Government investment is about 2-4%, or some four to six times less. That’s hardly surprising as these are capitalist economies!  But that means an increase of just 0.2% of GDP in government investment as Trump proposes will make little difference, even if the ‘multiplier effect’ of such investment on GDP growth were more than one (and evidence suggests it will be little more,LEEPER_LTW_FMM_Final).

What matters under capitalism is profit because the capitalist mode of production is not just a monetary economy as Keynesian theory emphasises; it is, above all, a money-making economy.  So without profitability rising, capitalist investment will not rise.  This key point was the starting point of another session on Fred Moseley’s excellent book, Money and Totality, which explains and defends Marx’s analysis of capital accumulation, his laws of value and profitability, from competing and distorting interpretations. I have reviewed Moseley’s book elsewhere.

But the key points relevant to this post are that Moseley shows there is no problem of reconciling Marx’s law of value (based on all value being created by labour power) with relative prices of production and profitability in a capitalist economy.  There is no need to ‘transform’ labour values into money prices of production as Marx starts the circuit of production with money inputs and finishes it with (more) money outputs.  The law of value and surplus value provided the explanation of how more money results – but no mathematical transformation is necessary.

But this also means that for Marx’s law of value to hold and for total value to explain total prices (and for total surplus value to explain total profits), only labour can be the source of all value created.  There cannot be profit without surplus value.  That is why I disagree with Anwar Shaikh’s view that Marx also recognised profit from ‘alienation’, or transfer.  I have explained where I disagree here.

The danger of accepting that profit can come from somewhere else than from the exploitation of labour power is that it opens the door to the fallacies of mainstream economics, particularly Keynesian economics, that creating money or credit can deliver more income (demand) and is not fictitious but real value.  If that were true, then monetarism and Keynesian policies become theoretically valid options for ending the current Long Depression and future slumps without replacing the capitalist mode of production.  Luckily, the view that profits can be created out of money and by not exploiting labour is demonstrably false.

Gaining momentum?

At its semi-annual meeting that started this week, IMF economists announced an upgrade in their forecast for global economic growth.  This is the first upgrade that the IMF has made for six years.  It was only a slight increase in its previous forecast of growth made in January. The IMF now expects world real GDP to rise 3.5% this year (compared to 3.4% before) and 3.6% next year (unchanged).

As the IMF chief, Christine Lagarde put it, “The good news is that, after six years of disappointing growth, the world economy is gaining momentum as a cyclical recovery holds out the promise of more jobs, higher incomes, and greater prosperity going forward.”

But the IMF also warns that: “the world economy may be gaining momentum, but we cannot be sure that we are out of the woods.”

Nevertheless, there is a growing confidence among mainstream economists and official international agencies that the world capitalist economy is finally coming out of its slow and weak recovery since the Great Recession of 2008-9.  Below trend growth, weak investment and hardly any uptick in real incomes in most major economies since 2009 has been described variously as ‘secular stagnation’ or in my case as The Long Depression, similar to that of the 1930s and 1880s.

But maybe it is all over.  Only this week, the FT’s economic forecaster model was showing a sharp pickup.  The Brookings-FT Tiger index — tracking indices for the global economy — suggests growth has picked up sharply in both advanced economies and emerging markets in recent months. The index, which covers all major advanced and developing economies, compares many separate indicators of real activity, financial markets and investor confidence with their historical averages for the global economy and for each country separately. The Tiger index suggests growth in emerging markets has picked up sharply since the oil price fall hit output in 2015. Having languished well below historic average levels this time last year, the index for emerging market growth has climbed to a level not seen since early 2013. China and India appear to have weathered recent rocky periods and indicators for growth are back above historic averages for both countries.

And the main economic indicators in the US and global economy have been picking up.  The purchasing managers’ indexes (PMI) are surveys of companies in various countries on their likely spending, sales and investments.  And the PMIs everywhere are well above 50, meaning that more than 50% of the respondents are seeing improvement.  The global PMI now stands at its highest level (54) for three years and, according to JP Morgan economists, it suggests that global manufacturing output is now rising at a 4% pace compared to just 1% this time last year.

Things are also looking better in the so-called emerging economies.  China has not crashed as many expected this time last year.  On the contrary, the Chinese economy has picked up and, as a result, there has been increased demand for raw materials.  The Chinese economy expanded 6.9% year-on-year in the first quarter of this year that ended in March, slightly up from 6.8% growth in the fourth quarter of last year.  Investment and industrial production also had a slight uptick.

Gavyn Davies, former chief economist at Goldman Sachs and now a columnist for the Financial Times in London, pointed out that “Global activity growth has rebounded sharply, and recession risks have plummeted. Growth in real output is now running at higher levels than anything seen since the temporary rebound from the financial crash in 2009/10. Importantly, recent data suggest that the growth rate of fixed investment is beginning to recover, which is a body blow to one of the central tenets of the secular stagnation school.“

Behind this apparent recovery is a small recovery in corporate profits, which up to the middle of 2016 had been falling quarterly.  Since then, corporate profits have recovered somewhat around the world and, according to JP Morgan, business investment has reversed its decline of the last year.

All this sounds promising, even convincing.  But as the IMF warned, maybe these optimists are jumping the gun.  The US economy remains the key driver of global growth, not Europe or China and there seems little sign of any uptick from the sluggish growth of 2% a year that the US economy has achieved over the last six years on average.

The stock market has been booming (until recently) on the expectation that President Trump would boost profits and investment through corporate profits tax reductions and a programme of infrastructure spending by the federal and state governments.  But so far, nothing has happened.  And anyway, in a previous post I showed that the impact of such measures on overall investment and growth would be minimal.

Indeed, what has happened is a growing divergence between economic data based on surveys of opinions about the US economy (‘soft data’) and actual figures (‘hard data’).  According to Morgan Stanley economists, “the divergence is stunning.” In other words, everybody is very optimistic about the prospects for the US economy over the next 12 months but the current data don’t show it.

This divergence is revealed by the huge differences in forecast US economic growth by the main economic forecasting agencies. The New York Federal Reserve reckons US real GDP will be up 2.6% in the first quarter that ended in March, while the widely respected Atlanta Fed forecast has dropped to just 0.5% for the same quarter. The difference is caused by New York including more ‘soft’ data and Atlanta excluding it.

Also investment analysts are now forecasting huge rises in corporate profits or earnings. First-quarter earnings are expected to rise 15% yoy for European companies, 9% for those in the US and 16% for Japanese firms – a complete turnaround from previous forecasts that predicted a slowdown in 2017 to follow the slowdown of 2016.  Yet the very earliest profits results for the top US companies released this week were very disappointing.

Indeed, when we consider the hard data, the situation is not so rosy. The final reading of US national output for the fourth quarter of 2016 confirmed that the US economy grew only 1.6% in 2016, the weakest annual rate of growth for five years. The pace of growth did pick up in the second half of 2016 from a near stop in early 2016, but was still growing no more than 2% a year in the fourth quarter.

The bright spot was a significant pick-up in US corporate profits. Between the beginning of 2015 and the second half of 2016, corporate profits had fallen by 9%. However, in the second half of last year profits rose back 6% and in the last quarter were up 9.3% yoy and even more after tax.

Business investment had followed profits down three quarters later in 2015, confirming again my thesis that profits lead investment in the capitalist economic cycle. Business investment fell yoy in every quarter last year and equipment investment, the most important part of business spending, is down 5% from mid-2015. But with profits now rising, investment may pick up in 2017 – we’ll see.  But the latest measures of what will happen to investment and lending in the first quarter made by the St Louis Fed do not suggest any pick-up at all.

Consumer spending also does not seem to be responding to all this optimistic talk.  US personal consumption spending seems to have slowed to just a 1.1% annual rate in the first quarter of 2017 compared to 3.5% in the last quarter of 2016, the weakest rate of expansion in four years and the worst first quarter since the end of the Great Recession in 2009.

And, as I have argued in several previous posts, corporate profitability in the major advanced capitalist economies remains weak and there is a sizeable section of ‘zombie’ firms, those unable to make any more profit than necessary to cover the servicing of their debts, let alone invest in new productive technology to raise productivity and expand.

Confidence may be rising among mainstream economists and official agencies, based on improving surveys of opinion, but that must be balanced against the fact that the current recovery period since the end of the Great Recession is pretty long already.

The IMF report signals the risk of a new recession.  Its indicator suggests that it is still quite low for most economies at around 20-40% as the world economy moves through 2017.  But Lagarde warns that “there are clear downside risks: political uncertainty, including in Europe; the sword of protectionism hanging over global trade; and tighter global financial conditions that could trigger disruptive capital outflows from emerging and developing economies.”