The Rise of Neoliberal Public Finance

September 26, 2024 8:07 PM

What once looked like a slippery slope to the hyperinflation of wages is now openly embraced as a policy pathway to the hyperinflation of financial assets.

An essay by Melinda Cooper introducing her new book.
Previously, Previously.

posted by agentofselection (3 comments total)

This was interesting and well written…and sad. It's really weird to me that if you own stocks, you can easily "earn" more through asset appreciation in a month by sitting on your ass than you can by working super hard at a full time job for an entire year, and you pay less taxes on that money. Also, just out of curiosity, I looked to see if any countries are still on the gold standard, and apparently there are none.
posted by jabah at 9:27 PM on September 26 [1 favorite]

Money's collecting at the top, yes.

Global private equity and venture capital funds held a record $2.62 trillion of total uncommitted capital as of July 10 [1]

Romney: Obama waging 'war on job creators' [2]

So, combining spending increases, the 2018 tax cuts, we're paying $1.1T/yr in interest to these "job creators" [3]

naively, at $500K per job this $1.1T/yr flow should create 2.2 million jobs!

(this "supply side" stuff is not how the economy really works of course)

https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/wealth.html hasn't been updated in 10 years, but I remember being shocked by this research 20 years ago now.

Theoretically the current economy is doing OK on the grossest level . . . initial unemployment claims are still coming in pretty low but sky-high rents and corporate profits ...

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1up9O is real (2024 dollars) per-employee corporate profits, rising from ~$8000 last century to $24,000 now ...

are twin blood-funnels tapped directly into the working, non home-owner population.

Institutions to own 40% of houses [SFRs] by 2030 [4]

This is fine.
posted by torokunai at 10:19 PM on September 26 [4 favorites]

I read the first sentence

How did the American state come to be so extravagant in its recourse to fiat money creation and public debt issuance, yet so selectively austere in its public spending choices?

and my immediate thought was "whenever America does something inequitable but differently so from the way other nations do it, the reason usually ends up tying back to the mix of suppressed guilt and ongoing resentment we have over slavery, so I'm going to go with 'anti-Black racism' as my answer even if I don't know the underlying economics at all." A few paragraphs later,

Following the groundbreaking work of Nancy MacLean, I seek to contextualize Buchanan’s project within the longer history of the conservative Democratic South and its efforts to maintain white supremacy.

It's kind of depressing how predictable America can be.
posted by jackbishop at 3:59 AM on September 27