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Episode 3 in the third season of our Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) manga – The Smith Family and their Adventures with Money – produced by MMTed is now available (August 29, 2025). The Smith Family is a middle-class family living in a city somewhere in the world. The second-generation parents are university educated and have…

Central banks around the world tightened interest rates starting late 2021 in some places and there was a systematic period of hikes over the next year or more despite the inflationary pressures mostly showing signs of abatement as a result of factors that were not sensitive to the rising interest rates. In Australia, the RBA…

I often get asked about cryptocurrency. And I immediately become bored. The sort of claims that people have made about this phenomenon, which is historically just another speculative asset, are over-the-top to say the least. There are two realities that seem to be ignored. First, we already have mainstream digital money and have had for…

We knew in the 1980s, when neoliberal-influenced governments started selling off public trading enterprise for not much that the strategy would not deliver on its promises. At least some of us knew and wrote about it then. I was part of a team that analysed the disasters that would follow the sell off of the…

One of the issues that emerges when one is studying undergraduate macroeconomics is that there is a curious disregard for the role that income and wealth distribution play in determining the aggregate outcomes, that are at the centre of the study. Most students in my cohort didn’t think about that and the curriculum certainly didn’t…

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released the latest labour force data today (August 14, 2025) – Labour Force, Australia – for July 2025, which reveals that last month’s gloom might not have been the start of a downward trend. The current data has blurred that outlook and the best we can say is that…

Yesterday, the Reserve Bank of Australia finally lowered interest rates some months after it became clear the economy is slowing and the labour market is getting weaker. The RBA remain fixated on their claims that wages growth is too high. In yesterday’s – Statement by the Monetary Policy Board: Monetary Policy Decision ((August 12, 2025)…

The reason I ask that question is because I read in the UK Guardian article yesterday (published August 11, 2025) – As dark financial clouds gather, Labour has to heed its past: when it chooses austerity, it loses elections – that “Britain is in danger of going bankrupt. It may happen slowly or quickly, but…

The Trump administration is blaming everyone and everything that brought us to this point except the people and things that actually brought us to this point.

The UK economy is heading into a malaise. The latest news – UK construction activity in July falls at steepest rate since Covid (August 6, 2025) – and – UK services sector has biggest fall in orders for nearly three years (August 5, 2025) – confirms that there is a slowdown underway. That was prefaced…