Lars P. Syll

Sweden as a case of MMT According to the Swedish government official website, “Historically, the Swedish economy suffered from low growth and high inflation,” which the nation overcame with “inventive and courageous reforms” that “succeeded in maintaining control over public spending. “First, in 1996, a ceiling for public spending was introduced. This was accompanied by the addition of the ‘surplus goal’ … for the government budget.” ​Swedish government...

Noah Smith’s MMT ‘critique’ — nonsense on stilts What is MMT, the heterodox economic theory … What does it say? How can we tell if it’s a good theory or a bad one? These are incredibly important questions … These days, most economic theories are collections of mathematical models. If you want to know what the theory says, you can parse out the models and see for yourself … You can go read a New Keynesian model or a Real Business Cycle model and figure it...

MMT perspectives on the euro  [embedded content] When the euro was created twenty years ago, it was celebrated with fireworks at the European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt. Today we know better. There are no reasons to celebrate the 20-year anniversary. On the contrary. Already since its start, the euro has been in crisis. And the crisis is far from over. The tough austerity measures imposed in the eurozone has made economy after economy contract....

Steve Keen on MMT  [embedded content] A bank’s ability to grant loans and create money has nothing to do with whether it already has excess reserves or deposits at its disposal … From the perspective of banks, the creation of money is limited by the need for individual banks to lend profitably and also by micro and macroprudential regulations … The central bank influences the money and credit creation process in normal times through its interest rate...

Basic income — lessons learned from Finland’s experiment  [embedded content] [embedded content]

Robert Reich on the benefits of a Jobs Guarantee  [embedded content]

Social ontology and the irrelevance of economics  [embedded content] Modern economics has become increasingly irrelevant to the understanding of the real world. In his seminal book Economics and Reality (1997), Tony Lawson traced this irrelevance to the failure of economists to match their deductive-axiomatic methods with their subject It is — sad to say — as relevant today as it was twenty years ago. It is still a fact that within mainstream economics...

 [embedded content] I highly recommend also watching the other interesting interviews (especially the ones with Geoff Harcourt and Charles Goodhart) that Goldsmiths Economics has put on youtube.

The real debt problem The ad nauseam repeated claim that our public debt is excessive and that we have to balance the public budget is nothing but absolute nonsense. The harder politicians — usually on the advice of mainstream establishment economists — try to achieve balanced budgets for the public sector, the less likely they are to succeed in their endeavour. And the more the citizens have to pay for the concomitant austerity policies these wrong-headed...

Robert Shiller’s straw man critique of MMT M.M.T. is sometimes invoked to justify reckless government borrowing for marginally good causes, without raising taxes. Well, here’s a spoiler alert: Though increased spending on infrastructure, education, social welfare and the environment may be wise, and rising deficits may make sense some of the time, we really cannot borrow ceaselessly without risking real harm … It seems that modern monetary theory is not so...