Lars P. Syll

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...

Do​es higher interest rates inevitably cause inflation? Most proponents of MMT argue that the aggregate demand impact of interest rate changes is​ unclear. Their effect depends​ on intricate and complex relations — especially distributional — and institutions which​ makes it realiter impossible to always be able to tell which way they work. Public budget deficits and higher interest rates may cause inflation to go up — or go down. And if so, the​ neoliberal...

Mainstream theories of income distribution Markets are never just given. Neither God nor nature hands us a worked-out set of rules determining the way property relations are defined, contracts are enforced, or macroeconomic policy is implemented. These matters are determined by policy choices. The elites have written these rules to redistribute income upward. Needless to say, they are not eager to have the rules rewritten — which means they also have no...

The myth of independent central banks  [embedded content]