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Steve Keen’s lightbulb moment on modern monetary theory — Richard Murphy

Summary:
But there has been an issue: Steve did not 'get' MMT and its argument that spending creates the money to pay tax and fund what is called government borrowing, but which is actually the redepositing of the excess of government spending over taxes raised back with the government for safekeeping. And that obstacle meant that we could never quite agree. And then he read The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton, which is also essential reading. And he did some double-entry book-keeping to build a Minsky inspired model of the economy, which is available to sponsors of his blog. And the result is that he now gets that what Stephanie says, and what I've been saying for some time, is right: i.e. that the deficit creates money. Money is not needed to fund the deficit. The deficit makes the money to

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But there has been an issue: Steve did not 'get' MMT and its argument that spending creates the money to pay tax and fund what is called government borrowing, but which is actually the redepositing of the excess of government spending over taxes raised back with the government for safekeeping. And that obstacle meant that we could never quite agree.
And then he read The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton, which is also essential reading. And he did some double-entry book-keeping to build a Minsky inspired model of the economy, which is available to sponsors of his blog. And the result is that he now gets that what Stephanie says, and what I've been saying for some time, is right: i.e. that the deficit creates money.
Money is not needed to fund the deficit. The deficit makes the money to pay for itself.The bonds just tidy up the private sector, and bank, balance sheets and let it be pretended that the government is not lending itself money when that is what it actually, and inevitably, is doing via its own central bank...
Amazing that it took reading The Deficit Myth for Steve to realize this elementary institutional fact.

Tax Research UK
Steve Keen’s lightbulb moment on modern monetary theory
Richard Murphy | Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London; Director of Tax Research UK; non-executive director of Cambridge Econometrics, and a member of the Progressive Economy Forum

Mike Norman
Mike Norman is an economist and veteran trader whose career has spanned over 30 years on Wall Street. He is a former member and trader on the CME, NYMEX, COMEX and NYFE and he managed money for one of the largest hedge funds and ran a prop trading desk for Credit Suisse.

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