Trends

Robert Pollin is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He is the founding co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). This is via Real News:

I want to refer to an article that was in the global–the leading global financial newspaper The Financial Times last week by one of their columnists, Gavyn Davies. And Davies tried to explain why the U.S. stock market seems to be going up so quickly even though the economy is basically still limping along. Very, very small improvements in unemployment and GDP growth, but the stock market keeps going up. And Davies says, well, actually, there’s a fairly clear explanation for that, and that is that the share of the total output in the economy, the share of the total GDP or the pie, even if the pie isn’t growing that fast, the share going to the rich in terms of profits is growing very rapidly because the share going to everybody else in terms of wages is going down.

Now, I’m saying that this is coming not out of a leftist kind of publication; this what’s in The Financial Times. And Davies’s own column referred at length to a blog by a well-known financial market blogger, and the title of the blog itself was “Where Karl Marx is right”–not the kind of thing you usually read from financial market type analysts.

So we have–number one, we have this story about regulations of the financial markets not getting implemented, that the tough regulators are getting replaced. On the other hand, we have this notion of the recovery, such as it is, is taking place mainly in the financial markets. That’s what recovering quickly. And that’s due to a redistribution of income where profits are getting a bigger share, everybody else is getting a smaller share.

And then the third piece, very unlikely source, the past few days, the International Monetary Fund, which for basically a generation had been the center of advocacy of austerity-type policies, it has now published an article saying that the U.S. should ease off on austerity. The U.S. should ease off on austerity. The IMF is saying it.