Grim news from the shop keepers
Retail sales statistics were updated yesterday 13 May. The state of the retail sector in March 2009 provides no comfort at all about the state of the SA economy. The statistics indicate that sales adjusted for inflation are still falling at an accelerating rate. Interpreting retail activity is always complicated by the Easter holidays that may come in March or April, as they did this year. We will need to wait for the April numbers to fully adjust for Easter.
Back from Davos
Maria Ramos, once Director General of the Finance Department, then CEO of Transnet and now of Absa and also incidentally newly married to long serving Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel, returned from Davos to tell us “We are all Keynesians now”
This is what Time magazine thought prematurely in 1965
This was in fact the heading of an iconic Time Magazine story written on 31 December 1965. Economists were then very confident that by fine tuning government spending and taxes, the Keynesian prescription, they could maintain full employment without inflation. Ramos might have been surprised that Time magazine in its “We are all Keynesians now” title was quoting none other than Milton Friedman. It was he more than any other economist who helped suppress the Keynesian revolution in economics.