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Articles from Syndicated Column "Against the Current" (for Project Syndicate)
The Wars of Austerity
Robert Skidelsky
Project Syndicate
| Monday, October 18, 2010
LONDON – I have become increasingly less hopeful about prospects for a rapid recovery from the global recession. Coordinated fiscal expansion ($5 trillion) by the world’s leading governments arrested the downward slide, but failed to produce a healthy rebound. The current frustration is summed up by The Economist’s recent cover headline: “Grow, dammit, grow.”
There are two reasons to be pessimistic. The first reason is the premature withdrawal of the “stimulus” measures agreed upon by the G-20 in London in April 2009. All the main countries are now committed to slashing their budget deficits.
The second reason is that nothing has been done to address the problem of current-account imbalances. Indeed, the talk nowadays of currency wars
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Russia Debates its Future
Robert Skidelsky
Project Syndicate
| Friday, September 17, 2010
YAROSLAVL – Russia is said by many to lack a “civil society.” But it partly makes up for this by having a rather interesting public sphere, in which serious topics do get debated, and where glimpses of the great are not entirely confined to televised snippets.
The first fortnight in September saw successive meetings of two major Russian political groups, the Valdai Discussion Club and the Global Political Forum. The first was on a boat and ended with dinner with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at Sochi on the Black Sea. The second, in Yaroslavl, culminated in a symposium with President Dmitri Medvedev. Scholars, think-tankers, and journalists (both Russian and foreign) joined political and business leaders to discuss Russia’s future.
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The Hole in Budget or the Hole in the Economy?
Robert Skidelsky
Project Syndicate
| Friday, August 13, 2010
LONDON - All economies recover in the end. The question is how fast and how far. When Keynes talked of persisting ‘under-employment’he did not mean that, following a big shock, economies stay frozen at one unchanging level of under-activity. But he did think that, without an external stimulus, recovery from the lowest point would be slow, uncertain, weak, and liable to relapse. In short, his ‘under-employment equilibrium’ is a gravitational pull rather than a fixed condition. This is a situation which Alan Greenspan has aptly described as a ‘quasi-recession’, a better phrase than ‘double-dip recession’.It is a situation of anaemic recovery, with bursts of excitement punctuated by collapses. It is the situation we are in today.
Contrary
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Keynes and Social Democracy Today
Robert Skidelsky
Project Syndicate
| Tuesday, June 22, 2010
LONDON – For decades, Keynesianism was associated with social democratic big-government policies. But John Maynard Keynes’s relationship with social democracy is complex. Although he was an architect of core components of social democratic policy – particularly its emphasis on maintaining full employment – he did not subscribe to other key social democratic objectives, such as public ownership or massive expansion of the welfare state.
In The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes ends by summarizing the strengths and weaknesses of the capitalist system. On one hand, capitalism offers the best safeguard of individual freedom, choice, and entrepreneurial initiative. On the other hand, unregulated markets fail to achieve
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The Price of Clarity
Robert Skidelsky
Project Syndicate
| Wednesday, May 19, 2010
LONDON -- “Through the contrivance and cunning of stock jobbers there hath been brought in such a complication of knavery and cozenage, such a mystery of iniquity, and such an unintelligible jargon of terms to involve it in, as were never known in any other age or country.” Jonathan Swift’s eighteenth-century barb resonates in today’s world of financial “intermediation”: now, as then, finance shrouds its “complication of knavery and cozenage” in “unintelligible jargon.” As US President Barack Obama explained in a speech in April: “Many practices were so opaque and complex that few within these companies – let alone those charged with oversight – were fully aware of the massive wagers being made.”
But was Swift right to see knavery as
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