Must-Read: Simon Wren-Lewis: A General Theory of Austerity, Cynicism and Opportunism

Must-Read: Simon Wren-Lewis: A General Theory of Austerity, Cynicism and Opportunism:

Was austerity an unfortunate accident?…

…For the major economies including the Eurozone as a whole, austerity could have been avoided completely by delaying fiscal consolidation by a few years…. There was no evidence that the financial markets had demanded the switch to austerity in 2010. Instead, the Eurozone crisis went beyond a crisis for the Greek government because of the ECB’s unwillingness (until 2012) to act as a sovereign lender of last resort. In other words, austerity at the global level was a huge and avoidable mistake. This naturally leads to the question of why that mistake was made…. The accident story might run as follows. The first unfortunate accident was Greece…. The second accident was that Greece’s situation occurred inside a Eurozone that was dominated by Germany…. While there is undoubtedly an important element of truth in both the unfortunate timing of the Greek debt crisis and the role of Germany in interpreting and reacting to it, there are three reasons why it cannot explain the dominance of austerity since 2010…. Within the Eurozone… there has been… little resistance to German views…. In the US and UK… the turn to austerity [as well]…. The damage done by austerity, and the special nature of the debt funding crisis in the Eurozone, were quite clear to most economists by 2014 at the latest…. Yet while the IMF’s own economists were prepared to make this admission, politicians (including those running the IMF) were not….

The idea that deficit concern was being used as a pretext to reduce the size of the state, which I will call the deficit deceit hypothesis, is based on two propositions:
1) Political parties on the right want a smaller state, but popular support for such a programme is, at best, mixed. 2) From 2010 there was strong popular support for reducing government deficits…. One strong piece of evidence in favour of deficit deceit is the form of austerity imposed. Republicans in the US called for spending cuts to reduce the deficit, while at the same time arguing elsewhere that taxes should be cut…. At first France appeared to be an exception, proposing to focus on tax increases to reduce deficits. European Commissioner Olli Rehn was not pleased…. An indication of the strength of popular support for cutting budget deficits came from the lack of opposition to these policies from the centre left….

Perhaps the most interesting argument in Wren-Lewis (2015b) is that the creation of independent central banks, coupled with a growing consensus that monetary policy and not fiscal policy should deal with macroeconomic stabilisation (Kirsanova et al, 2009), has helped reduce the extent to which policy makers and the media hear about the costs of fiscal consolidation in a liquidity trap…. The expertise in finance ministries. If governments have in effect contracted out the business of macroeconomic stabilisation to central banks, there is less need to retain macroeconomic expertise in these ministries. The second concerns the attitudes of senior figures in central banks to budget deficits. Mervyn King once remarked (King, 1995): “Central banks are often accused of being obsessed with inflation. This is untrue. If they are obsessed with anything, it is with fiscal policy.” This follows from a historic concern that governments will force central banks to monetise debt, which outside of a recession could lead to large increases in inflation….

The deficit deceit hypothesis is therefore a general theory of why austerity happens when we are at the ZLB. It reflects opportunism on the political right… [that] will only work… [if] popular concern about government deficits must be strong… a generalised fear about the behaviour of financial markets… knowledge about the harmful effects of fiscal consolidation at the ZLB… weak within political parties, the apparatus of government and the public at large…. Popular concern about government deficits will be much greater if these deficits are at ‘record levels’, which they inevitably were following the deepest global recession since WWII….

There are also some trends that have helped create the conditions for deficit deceit to work. The most obvious is the growing power of a neoliberal ideology that puts such stress on the desirability of a small state…. The importance of deficit deceit in explaining recent (and in some countries, continuing) austerity means that it could easily happen again following another major recession….

There was no good macroeconomic reason for austerity at the global level over the last five years, and austerity seen in periphery Eurozone countries could most probably have been significantly milder. As austerity could have been so easily avoided by delaying global fiscal consolidation by only a few years, a critical question becomes why this knowledge was not applied. While the unfortunate timing of the Greek debt crisis undoubtedly played a small part, it alone cannot explain austerity in the US and UK, and the weakness of the European left in failing to oppose austerity…. Austerity was the result of right-wing opportunism, exploiting instinctive popular concern about rising government debt in order to reduce the size of the state. This opportunism, and the fact that it was successful (in its own terms), reflects a failure to follow both economic theory and evidence. This failure was made possible in part because the task of macroeconomic stabilisation has increasingly been delegated to independent central banks, but these institutions did not actively warn of the costs of premature fiscal consolidation, and in some cases encouraged it.