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"Total demand should be rising
fast enough to support a sustainable rate of real growth
but not so fast as to generate runaway inflation"
Samuel Brittan on nominal GDP target
People have been known to bet on when Samuel Brittan would write his next column on nominal GDP targeting
We feel the time may have arrived for this idea, especially as an alternative to austerity
Eurointelligence 11 May 2012
The idea is for policymakers to adopt a nominal GDP target of, say, 5%, which would allow for growth, while keeping an upper bound on inflationary expectations.
He acknowledges the main criticism – which is the quality and frequency of the data – but this problem would be easily fixed, once such targets are adopted.
A real alternative to austerity economics
A nominal GDP objective is far from a new idea. It was promulgated by the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Meade and by Sylvia Ostry, one-time economic director of the OECD.
Samuel Brittan, Financial Times 10 May 2012
The term austerity was introduced into political discourse by Sir Stafford Cripps, a postwar Labour chancellor known as “Austerity Cripps”.
Of course we need a functioning banking system.
But what matters at a world level and for countries is
that total nominal demand should be rising fast enough to support a sustainable rate of real growth
but not so fast as to generate runaway inflation
Samuel Brittan, Financial Times, July 31 2008
The safe limit for nominal demand growth for the industrialised countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is probably not far from 5 per cent per annum.
You would not think from the prevailing hysteria that this is almost exactly the rate at which nominal GDP has been growing in 2007-08 in this area
The world economy as a whole has clearly hit the buffers. Demand growth has been too high for world supply potential. This is the common factor behind the rise in oil, food and commodity prices
That is the long-awaited rebalancing of the major English-speaking economies towards less reliance on consumer demand growth and more on net exports.
There was, in my view, nothing immoral in borrowing excess developing-world savings to finance a consumer spending spree. It was fun while it lasted – and may even have saved us from a genuine international depression – but it could not be expected to go on for ever. The required rebalancing has been swollen by the need to
On the one hand, the BIS called for world interest rates to rise
in order to deal with a "clear and present threat" from global inflation while,
on the other hand, it warned that the global economy may be close to a "tipping point" into a "slowdown
severe enough to transform the current period of rising inflation into a period of falling prices."
John H. Makin, August 1, 2008