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Ralph Musgrave — What’s the optimum amount of national debt?

Summary:
Roger Farmer is out with an argument for the optimal level of public debt being 70% of GDP. Ralph provides the MMT answer. It is nicely succinct. MMTers have solved this one. Others are still floundering, in particular Roger Farmer in this NIESR article on the subject, is all over the place far as I can see (1). So I’ll run thru this vexed question for the umpteenth time.... Farmer bills himself as a Keynesian. Ralph reminds us of the answer Keynes himself gave to the question of public debt optimality and how to determine it. So, to return to the original question, i.e. what’s the optimum amount of national debt or more properly, PSNFA? The answer is “whatever brings full employment”. And that very much ties up with Keynes’s dictum: “look after unemployment, and the budget looks

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Roger Farmer is out with an argument for the optimal level of public debt being 70% of GDP. Ralph provides the MMT answer. It is nicely succinct.

MMTers have solved this one. Others are still floundering, in particular Roger Farmer in this NIESR article on the subject, is all over the place far as I can see (1). So I’ll run thru this vexed question for the umpteenth time....
Farmer bills himself as a Keynesian. Ralph reminds us of the answer Keynes himself gave to the question of public debt optimality and how to determine it.
So, to return to the original question, i.e. what’s the optimum amount of national debt or more properly, PSNFA? The answer is “whatever brings full employment”. And that very much ties up with Keynes’s dictum: “look after unemployment, and the budget looks after itself”. 
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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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