M. Blyth: The era of neoliberalism is over. The era of neonationalism has just begun.

I first heard about Mark Blyth from reading one of underguy1's threads.
I then started two threads in the GB with my caption from the link that he provided (pls. make allowances for my english and my obvious kack of knowledge re economics) hoping that they might incite a debate.

Unfortunately, the only responses that I got were from trolls who littered my threads with all sorts of bizarre pictures.
Fingers crossed that my thread won't have a similar reception here, thanks.



Here are the links to underguy's thread and to Mark Blyth's critique, as well as my captions of that:

http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=1373132

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-K8bf6dbYt4

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkm2Vfj42FY

N.B.
All my excerpts are less than 20% of the article or interview in question, so they're not in breach of forum rules.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-K8bf6dbYt4

"MARK BLYTH:

I kept talking about Global Trumpism, and I predicted Trump's election, Brexit and Trump. This is not a local event. There's the shrinkage of Center party votes, the collapse of Left party votes in particular in western Europe.
- Greece happened. Coming next, Renzi is going to fail in the next Italian elections coming up, which is going to cause a constitutional crisis in Italy .
- Shortly after that, we have the French election coming up. I would like to remind you of the following statistics:the lowest that George Bush Jr. ever got as president in his approval rating was 29%. The president of France currently has an approval rating of 4% . And the National Front have nearly 40%. So the most popular party in France is the National Front. We have the German elections coming up: Mattel is vulnerable.

How is all of this going to play out, and how is it all connected? There's a Simple way to think about it:
From 1945 until 1975, we targeted a particular economic variable called global employment. And there's a thing called The Luka's critique , which basically says: if you keep targetting something, people will game it.
And they did. Unions gained it, employees gained it and the result was inflation. And after a while, that inflation became painful enough that the people who were the hard buyers , the creditor class in these countries, to band together and form a market-friendly revolution. And they liberated finance, and they deregulated banks, and they integrated the economies of the world. And they globalised labour, such as that labour could no longer demand that it gets it's share of productivity, cause if you don't, we'll just move your jobs somewhere else. And all those trade agreements that were signed, the globalization which is inevitable we can't roll back.
-- And there's a moment when people started to figure out that for the past 30 year's from 1985 till n ow, huge amounts of money have been generated in the global economy, and most of it has gone to a tiny fraction of the population. So there's been a huge amount of growth, but hardly anyone has benefitted. So they're a bit fed up with this , and they've decided that at any possible opportunity, whether it Is Brexit, or the Italian constitutional referendum or anything, to basically notice, that we've had enoughof this. And that's what this is.


Now there's a macroeconomic underpinning all this too, because after we decided to target full employment for 30 years, we decided to target full inflation for 30 years. The Lukas critique might actually apply for that one as well.
And we've monitored credit award in which you can dump 13 trillions Euros under global money supply through quantity of using other programs, and there's no inflation anywhere.
And here's you problem; when you've levered up your banking system and you've bailed it out, dumped it on the public system saying that you all need to cut back all that terrible debt, when people's personal balance sheets are still bloated from the credit they took out in the 2000's, and they don't have wage growth, and there's no inflation to ease the burden of the debt, then the creditors fight harder to get their money back.. whether it's the form of the creditor class or the debtor class, what we have everywhere is creditor debts standoffs. And these take different forms:For the left it takes the form of Demos, for the right it takes the form of the National Front and for Trump, which has a weird coalition, which is of course sexist and racist, and all the rest of it. But one part of it is, if you look at the States that really fell hard, it's economic.

Now if you recognize that simple fact, you can put Trump in there with Brexit, with Jeremy Corbin and so on.
To end it all: in 2015, Wall Street bonuses(not regular compensations )seven years after they were bailed out with the public purse, totalled 28.4 billion dollars. Total compensation paid to every Single person from this country who earns minimum wage:40 billion dollars."

Global Trumpism
by Mark Blyth
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/artic...lobal-trumpism


"At the end of World War II, the United States and its allies decided that sustained mass unemployment was an existential threat to capitalism and had to be avoided at all costs. In response, governments everywhere targeted full employment as the master policy variable—trying to get to, and sustain, an unemployment rate of roughly 4%. The problem with doing so, over time, is that targeting any variable long enough undermines the value of the variable itself—a phenomenon known as Goodhart’s law. In short, the system undermined itself. The 1970s became a kind of “debtor’s paradise.” As irose, debts fell, and labor’s share of national income rose to an all-time high, while corporate profits remained low and were pummeled by inflation. Unions were powerful and inequality plummeted.

But if it was a great time to be a debtor, it was a lousy time to be a creditor. Inflation acts as a tax on the returns on investment and lending. Unsurprisingly in response, employers and creditors mobilized and funded a market-friendly revolution where the goal of full employment was jettisoned for a new target—price stability, aka inflation—to restore the value of debt and discipline labor through unemployment. And it worked. The new order was called neoliberalism.
Over the next thirty years the world was transformed from a debtor’s paradise into a creditor’s paradise where capital’s share of national income rose to an all-time high as labor’s share fell as wages stagnated.

But Goodhart’s law never went away. Just as targeting full employment undermined itself, so did making inflation the policy target. Wage earners now have too much debt in an environment where wages cannot rise fast enough to reduce those debts. Meanwhile, in a deflation, the opposite of what happens in an inflation occurs. The value of debt increases while the ability to pay off those debts decreases. Seen this way, what we see is a reversal of power between creditors and debtors as the anti-inflationary regime of the past 30 years undermines itself—what we might call “Goodhart’s revenge.” In this world, yields compress and creditors fret about their earnings, demanding repayment of debt at all costs. Macro-economically, this makes the situation worse: the debtors can’t pay—but politically, and this is crucial—it empowers debtors since they can’t pay, won’t pay, and still have the right to vote.

The traditional parties of the center-left and center-right, the builders of this anti-inflationary order, get clobbered in such a world, since they are correctly identified by these debtors as the political backers of those demanding repayment in an already unequal system, and all from those with the least assets. This produces anti-creditor, pro-debtor coalitions-in-waiting that are ripe for the picking by insurgents of the left and the right, which is exactly what has happened.

In short, to understand the election of Trump we need to listen to the trumpets blowing everywhere in the highly indebted developed countries and the people who vote for them. The global revolt against elites is not just driven by revulsion and loss and racism. It’s also driven by the global economy itself. This is a global phenomenon that marks one thing above all.
The era of neoliberalism is over. The era of neonationalism has just begun. "

Looks like I'm not reaching an audience for the things that I'm interested in, so I'll just drop it.

The nutters can't attack Mark Blyth and have no real understanding of what he's talking about so they'll be silent.

hashtag4 said:

The era of neoliberalism is over. The era of neonationalism has just begun. "

Click to expand...

So, what does that mean? Will it become the new normal for all industrialized nations to maintain protectionist trade policies and high tariffs? Will international trade decline? And what will that mean for the Third World countries?

KingOrfeo said:

So, what does that mean? Will it become the new normal for all industrialized nations to maintain protectionist trade policies and high tariffs? Will international trade decline? And what will that mean for the Third World countries?

Click to expand...

Global corporate elites won't wither and die. Protectionist tariffs won't keep transnational megacorps from seeking the cheapest labor. When they can't offshore jobs, they'll impoverish the domestic workforce to keep costs down. Cue the hyperinflation. This occurred in early 1920s Germany. German exports boomed; products were very cheap because the Papiermark was worth shit. Industrialists paid workers almost nothing but sold products for hard currencies -- which they banked overseas, of course.

Expect Tromp's infrastructure and tax scams to trigger inflation in USA. That, and stiff tariffs, and deporting low-wage undocumenteds, will drive up prices and drive down real wages. Welcome to hell, folks. Crop-picking and chicken-plucking jobs await you.

What happens to Third World nations? Totally fucked. Combine protectionism with climate change causing crop failures, as provoked revolution in Indonesia and civil war in Syria, and we can expect increased refugee flows, starvation, repression, and generally bad shit -- which won't much bother the elites.

Nationalism broke up the old European empires that kept continental peace for a century after Napoleon. Neonationalism will shred the international structure that kept us from WWIII. Expect the future to be pretty fucking shaky.

Hypoxia said:

Global corporate elites won't wither and die. Protectionist tariffs won't keep transnational megacorps from seeking the cheapest labor. When they can't offshore jobs, they'll impoverish the domestic workforce to keep costs down. Cue the hyperinflation. This occurred in early 1920s Germany. German exports boomed; products were very cheap because the Papiermark was worth shit. Industrialists paid workers almost nothing but sold products for hard currencies -- which they banked overseas, of course.

Click to expand...

What utter tripe.

And the rest of your comment is worse.