Samizdata

It is becoming increasingly clear that Europe’s economic problems are a year or so away from becoming nightmarish.  The international economic establishment is getting worried, G7 finance ministers, the OECD and the IMF are making increasingly gloomy noises.  Deflation approaches like a glacier, slowly but almost impossible to stop without radical measures.  The ECB’s constitution is inadequate to deal with the problem. It is charged with holding down inflation and maintaining price stability, not with encouraging economic growth.

Inflation is not a threat, deflation is a real threat.  Japan has had 41 consecutive months with no inflation, Germany is going the same way pulling Europe with it. The US has abandoned the strong dollar policy in order to reflate, devalue its debt and cheapen exports. Consequently the Euro has now strengthed over 40% from its lows, adding to the woes of exporters.  Germany is mired in high taxes, social costs and rigid structural problems – Eurozone unemployment rates are nearly double that of the Anglosphere countries. Real interest rates (base rate – inflation) in the Eurozone are punishing compared to the US. Don’t even think about the unfunded pension problems.

So what does the ECB do? Nothing. Last year many people laughed when 90 year-old Milton Friedman joked that he would outlive the Euro. If the ECB does not re-invent itself as a growth orientated central bank, Milton may yet have the last laugh.

Paul Staines

There is no shortage of entrepreneurs who will assure you that the secret to business success lies in marketing. Who am I to argue? You may have a quality product but you won’t make any money from it unless you sell it. Lots of it.

That is why I have a lot of respect for the people who devise marketing strategies. Producers can and do work hard to refine their product but the money doesn’t go round nearly so well without the salesmen who tickle the fancy of potential buyers.

It is those strategies that I always find so intruiging. How do they identify the pople who might be interested in any given product and what things do they say to induce these people to actually part with their hard-earned? Oftentimes these strategies are subtle beyond subtle. Other times, though, they are screamingly obvious.

Whilst on a London Underground train coming home this evening, I noticed a poster campaign for a book by a man called Joseph Stiglitz which is called ‘Globalization and its discontents’.

Now we all know that globalization does indeed have its discontents and they are mostly be found running around places like Genoa and Seattle waving ‘Hammer & Sickle’ flags. So I was unsurprised to note the sales strapline on the poster which read something like: “Will make you angry enough to want to march”. How dreary, thought I. Here again we have yet another frothing-at-the-mouth marxoid rant designed to incite walnut-brained followers to throw incendiary devices through the window of the nearest Starbucks.

However, and interestingly enough, the book itself does not appear to live up to its firebrand sales pitch. If the Amazon editorial linked to above is anything to go by, the author actually appears to take a more (dare I say it?) nuanced approach to the entire global trade thing and he is even prepared to say good things about it:

“Those who vilify globalization too often overlook its benefits,” Stiglitz writes, explaining how globalization, along with foreign aid, has improved the living standards of millions around the world.

Okay, I shall overlook the patent admiration for ‘foreign aid’ (transnational welfare) here. I said he was nuanced, I didn’t say he was necessarily right.

But, the point is, that none of that comes across from the advertising which clearly seeks to pitch this as some sort of ‘Nihilists Handbook’ aimed at the smelly combat trousers/woolly cap brigade. Regardless of the fact that they might want their money back when they’ve read it, it is still a bit of a depressing insight for the rest of us.

After all, publishers want to make money (I assume) and advertising campaigns on the London Underground are quite expensive. The publishers (or the advertising executives) clearly take the view that there are enough of these people floating about to be considered a ‘target audience’ and hence provide them with a sufficient return on the investment.

Still, there is also a valuable lesson for anyone looking to earn some cash for themselves: get your marketing right, and there’s a healthy profit to be made in the anti-capitalism business.

I attended a conference on business ethics today. Interesting experience. The world’s big investment houses, like the U.S. giant pension fund Calpers, are increasingly using their muscle to force firms to stop certain activities which they deem wrong – such as using child labour or wrecking the environment – and do more in other areas, such as cleaning up their accounting standards.

This is a big and growing area of business reporting and activity. I have mixed views about all this. On the one hand, I question some of the arguments used by folk to decry certain businesses as unethical, such as those which use child labour, for instance. If a shoe manufacturer hires 13-year-olds in Malaysia, for example, we rise up in horror. But the question that should be asked is, what else would these youngsters be doing if no such jobs existed? Would they be in school? In fact, when investors boycott firms which employ such youngsters, they may unwittingly be making life worse, not better.

Yet clearly, if people feel strongly about certain issues, such as preserving wetlands, avoiding pollution or boycotting the arms trade, for instance, there is nothing wrong at all in them using their economic power to do so. So long as they do not at the same time demand government coercion, one can have no complaints.

In fact, using the forces of the market to bring about outcomes which we favour is surely a good way for us gung-ho capitalists to show those often traditionally hostile to capitalism about how the market can be a force for good. A useful meme to spread, I’d have thought.

A lot of focus on corporate behaviour, of course, centres on how to avoid repeats of the collapse of firms like Enron and WorldCom. Avoiding fraud is, as several speakers at today’s conference suggested, incredibly difficult. What is clear, however, is that in today’s increasingly service-orientated economy, one of the most valuable things a firm has is its reputation. Reputations take a long time to build but can be destroyed in days. Take the collapse of accountancy giant Arthur Anderson, which fell soon after its involvement with Enron’s accounting scams was disclosed.

And this surely rams home another good meme from the libertarian side – if you want to pursue self interest and achieve wealth, then being ethical about it is not a luxury which only the rich can afford – it is a brute necessity.

Maybe we all need the occasional Enron event to remind us of that fact.

This is not a blog about whether the war was a good idea or not (for better or worse the choice has been made, and it is too soon for any historical analysis). Nor is it a blog about how the war should be fought – I do not have access to all the military information and I am not a soldier anyway.

My concern in this. Will the war get the blame for the coming economic downturn, thus diverting attention from the real cause?

For 30 years most newspapers, television and radio shows, economics textbooks and other such have blamed the failure of the Keynesian system in the 1970’s on the “Oil Shock”.

The fact that wage and price controls were introduced in the United States in 1971 and in Britain in 1972, whereas the ‘Oil Shock’ was in 1973 is overlooked. The idea that one can just pump up the money supply to hold down unemployment was clearly coming under strain (hence the effort to deal with the price rises, caused by the monetary growth, by direct controls), but then the “Oil Shock” came along to give the establishment an excuse for the failure of their system.

A similar thing could happen again. There is a vast credit bubble out there (in most Western nations) – the great majority of credit-money is not backed even by paper notes (let alone by anything else) and we are due for a big bust that will hit asset prices hard.

We have seen some of this already (with the decline in stock markets) – but there are a lot more problems to show up yet.

However, now the war has come – thus giving the establishment an excuse. “There is nothing basically wrong with the system, it was the war that messed things up”.

I know that it is cold to write about such things when people are dying – but it still has to be thought about.

On March 6, 1950 the first egg of Silly Putty was sold.