And it’s a similar story in Britain, Europe, and Brazil.Give the populists their due. They intuitively knew that there was something crazy (in the non-fox-like sense) about raising interest rates and trying to balance budgets in the post-crisis world, just as they understood that voters had tired of ever freer trade and rising immigration rates. It was the eggheads (myself among them, I admit) who wanted sound money and austerity.Could anything break this trend, whereby falling interest rates and painless deficits help populists stay in power? One answer I can think of is a major war, which has tended to be the thing, historically, that drives inflation expectations and interest rates upwards. But that, too, is something the populists have pretty much ruled out. They saw what became of another set of eggheads — the neoconservatives — when they decided to revive war as an instrument of policy after 9/11.But another game-changer would be an election surprise. Markets seem to love a right-wing government unconstrained by monetary and fiscal rules. They may feel differently if a left-wing government inherits this lack of constraint. The difference between technocracy and democracy is that there’s always more than one game in town. And not all crazy foxes are on the right.We dunnit it in 71, we can do it again, it is simple and we can improve the process a bit.
Tuesday, August 6, 2019
Yes, an old fashioned Nixon shock
Niall Ferguson Got the secstags: (bold face mine)
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