Mike Beggs

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posted by Mike Beggs @ 2:03 PM

I presented this paper at the 2007 Asia-Pacific Economic and Business History Conference.

Before the Storm: the making of Australian anti-inflation policy, 1945-65

It is clear from many obituaries for Milton Friedman last year that of all his work and ideas on money and inflation, it is the concept of the ‘natural rate of unemployment’ that has had the biggest impact on orthodox economics. Monetary policymakers today have little time for stable monetary functions or rules for targeting the money supply, but closely watch the unemployment rate, mainly for its connection to ‘wage pressure’. The award of the 2006 ‘Nobel’ Prize in Economics to Edmund Phelps, for his own work on the ‘equilibrium rate of unemployment’ and inflationary expectations, confirms the continuing prestige of such ideas.2 Though it is rarely put so bluntly, a certain amount of unemployment is considered functional for macroeconomic stability. Indeed, perhaps the most striking difference between the post-war long boom and the present is in the level of and attitudes towards unemployment. In Australia today we are often reminded that our current rate (now 4.8 per cent) is at its “lowest in a generation” (e.g., Australian Financial Review [2006]); in the early 1960s, the Menzies government nearly lost an election when unemployment hit the crisis level of 2 per cent.

Read the rest at the conference website...

posted by Mike Beggs @ 5:02 PM 0 comments

The Wizard of Oz

John Howard set himself up as a sitting duck when he, er, implied that interest rates would stay down if the Coalition was re-elected in 2004. It’s hard to see that manoeuvre as anything other than short-termism, since he can’t have been so stupid as to believe it, and must have known it would backfire sooner or later. But he’s right now that the government is not really to blame or credit for what happens to interest rates, and he was wrong then.

Read full post at Australia Watch

posted by Mike Beggs @ 4:58 PM 0 comments

Ken Buckley 1922-2006

Ken Buckley died last Sunday. I never knew him personally but ever since I arrived in Australia his name kept coming up for one reason or another. He was a writer, a teacher and a doer of the Sydney left, present at the creation of a number of its institutions. Most famously, the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, which was established after police raided a Kings Cross party he was at in 1963. He was its first secretary, and later president of the national body.

Read full post at Australia Watch

posted by Mike Beggs @ 12:41 PM 0 comments

A Labored connection

After my post on the housing bust a few weeks back, someone forwarded me a link to The New City. It claims to be a "web journal of urban and political affairs", but is fairly obviously linked to the right wing of New South Wales Labor. The mission statement says it aims to focus on "the future of the Australian labour movement and the disproportionate exercise of political, economic and cultural power by inner-city interests on urban planning and national, state and local politics."

Read full post at Australia Watch

posted by Mike Beggs @ 9:01 AM 0 comments

Windschuttle vs. Windschuttle

Keith Windschuttle’s appointment to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation board is obviously meant to provoke, and I’ll refer those seeking outrage (or right-wing taunts) to Larvatus Prodeo. Or back to Windschuttle himself in his younger, leftier days, in his book The Media:

Read full post at Australia Watch

posted by Mike Beggs @ 1:49 PM 0 comments

Houses in motion

These last few years, in many cities of the world, rather a lot of dinner party conversations have revolved around the property market, or so I’m told. At first the talk was about how fast prices were rising, and how far it would go; later, when it would all come to an end. In the last few weeks the business press has been worrying itself sick about the impact of sustained, simultaneous interest rate rises in the US and Europe, and Japan finally looks set to join the trend. The cheap money of the last five years is flowing out with the tide.

Read full post at Australia Watch

posted by Mike Beggs @ 1:06 PM 0 comments