Some ideas just will not die, no matter how much damage they do. Keynesian economics is one of those. So let me say it again: NO Keynesian stimulus has ever succeeded in bringing about a recovery. Not one, not ever. Go on, you Keynesians out there. Name one, anywhere, any time. Name a single occasion when an increase in public spending brought a recession to an end and returned an economy with high unemployment to full employment. The General Theory was published in 1936. Since then, there is not a single occasion when an increase in public spending led to an economic recovery. Every pre-Keynesian economist would have understood not just this fact, but also why it was so. But such is the dead hand of received ideas, that economists continue to push for an increase in public spending to bring recessions to an end.
So here is the latest set of economic instructions, this time from Canada. The headline reads Economy needs bigger deficit spending with the sub-head, “economist tells Ottawa now is the time to spend, not worry about balanced books”. And this is how it begins:
Ottawa should not be afraid to spend a lot of money it doesn’t have quickly in order to give the economy a shot in the arm, an influential economist says.
That was the gist of a note Thursday from David Rosenberg, the chief economist and strategist at Toronto-based money manager Gluskin Sheff Inc.
During the recent election campaign, the Liberals ran on a pledge to run “modest” deficits in the $10-billion range for the next few years, in an attempt to stimulate the economy.
Debt-to-GDP can come down even with deficits, economists say
But Rosenberg says more drastic measures are warranted, noting that Ottawa could run deficits of up to $24 billion a year all the way until 2020 and still be below the average 70 per cent debt-to-GDP ratio among OECD nations.Canada’s debt-to-GDP ratio currently stands at 31 per cent.
“What is Ottawa waiting for?” Rosenberg wrote.
“If the government wasn’t spending years strengthening our nation’s balance sheet to use it as a weapon against downside economic risks as is the case today, then what was the point of it all?”
Rosenberg says it is time for the federal government to get off the sidelines and start “fighting the economic forces” instead of leaving the heavy lifting to the Bank of Canada, in the form of monetary policy.
This is identical to the advice that Ken Henry gave Kevin Rudd, with the usual disastrous results. But it’s advice that has an older pedigree than that. Let me take you back to my 2009 classic, The Dangerous Return to Keynesian Economics, where you will find the identical advice offered to Japan in the 1990s.
Stanley Fischer, who in 1998 was the First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, was very clear on the need for the massive increases in spending. Addressing a symposium in Tokyo in April that year, he said:
Japan’s economic performance is of course a matter of grave domestic concern. But given the prominent role of Japan in the world economy, and especially in Asia, it is also a legitimate matter for concern by Japan’s neighbors and by the international community. There is little disagreement about what needs to be done. There is an immediate need for a substantial fiscal expansion …
On fiscal policy, the recent suggestion of a package of 16 trillion yen, about 3 per cent of GDP, would be a good starting point. But, unlike on previous occasions, the program that is implemented should be close to the starting point. The well-known reservations about increases in wasteful public spending are correct: that is why much of the package, at least half, should take the form of tax cuts. Anyone who doubts the effectiveness of tax measures need only consider the effectiveness of last year’s tax increases in curbing demand.
The IMF is not famous for supporting fiscal expansions. And it is true that Japan faces a long-term demographic problem that has major fiscal implications. But after so many years of near-stagnation, fiscal policy must help get the economy moving again. There will be time to deal with the longer-term fiscal problem later.
Another example of the same kind of advice is found in a February 28, 1998, editorial in The Economist under the heading, “Japan’s feeble economy needs a boost”:
The [Japanese] government says it cannot afford a big stimulus because its finances are perilous. It is true that Japan’s gross public debt has risen to 87% of GDP, but net debt amounts to only 18% of GDP, the smallest among the G7 economies. The general-government budget deficit, 2½% of GDP, is smaller than its European counterparts’. Rightly, the Japanese are worried about the future pension liabilities implied by their rapidly ageing population. But now is not the time to sort the problem out. Far better to cut the budget later, when the economy has recovered its strength.
I need hardly point out that Japan’s “lost decade” has continued for more than twenty years yet in all the investigations over what had gone wrong, the increase in public spending has never even been glanced at. Modern macroeconomics is a disaster continuously in wait for its next victim. If you would like to understand why, once again I cannot suggest anything written more recently than 1936, other than, of course, this.
[My thanks to SMc for alerting me to the advice being offered to the Canadian PM, who will, no doubt, now take it.]
Law of Markets 