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Raúl Carrillo — Hy Minsky, Low Finance: Modern Money, Civil Rights, and Consumer Debt

Summary:
Lawyer and Monder Money Network director Raúl Carrillo's presentation at the MMT conference. Must-read for all interested in MMT. (1) First, I’d like to impress upon folks a theme that I’ll be stressing throughout the conference: when it comes to the economy, law is not merely a governing force (as many on the right would have economists believe) nor a reflective force (as many on the left are inclined to think). It is also a constitutive force. What I mean by that is that the law doesn’t just intervene into the economy on the back end, and it doesn’t merely reflect deeper forces in the economy either. Rather, a lot of the economic concepts we talk about not only have a particular meaning in the context of specific legal parameters, but they only exist given the deeper architecture of

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Lawyer and Monder Money Network director Raúl Carrillo's presentation at the MMT conference. Must-read for all interested in MMT.
(1) First, I’d like to impress upon folks a theme that I’ll be stressing throughout the conference: when it comes to the economy, law is not merely a governing force (as many on the right would have economists believe) nor a reflective force (as many on the left are inclined to think). It is also a constitutive force. What I mean by that is that the law doesn’t just intervene into the economy on the back end, and it doesn’t merely reflect deeper forces in the economy either. Rather, a lot of the economic concepts we talk about not only have a particular meaning in the context of specific legal parameters, but they only exist given the deeper architecture of legal regimes, in the sense of systems design. I’m going to do my best to articulate what that means and what that looks like when it comes to consumer finance.

(2) Second, I’m going to talk about how people actually experience the government’s failure to sufficiently spend money for public purpose. People don’t experience the absence of MMT-insights as policy failures in a grand sense. They experience it as personal pain. Over time, that pain can become chronic, but at first, it’s acute. For some of us, it’s devalued assets, houses, cars, etc., but most people in this country live paycheck-to-paycheck — or no-paycheck-to-no-paycheck — and thus experience the survival constraint pain on the liability side, where their debt is expounded, compounded, and sometimes straight-up fabricated. And within this group…there is what we call “disparate impact” in the legal world. As Sandy Darity, Darrick Hamilton, and other fellow travelers consistently point out, for many folks on the periphery, especially people of color who lack intergenerational wealth, the lack of MMT informed-policy means permanent austerity and perpetual depression.

With that in mind, we must cultivate a way to talk about Modern Money from the bottom-up and from the outside-in. We have to draw maps from people’s suffering to the macro failures. I personally think we can do this best by talking about (1) consumer debt, (2) criminal justice debt (which Prof. Harris is going to cover), and (3) taxes (which Prof. McCluskey will discuss).…
Modern money is a legal institution first and foremost, as chartalism, or the theory of state money, makes clear. There is no "natural money." Money-use, initially as credit, grew out of informal custom and was later was institutionalized formally in law. and The constitution and operation of this now highly formalized legal institution has vast social, political, and economic implications, especially considering that it can be captured by special interests through a political process involving asymmetric power.

New Economic Perspectives
Hy Minsky, Low Finance: Modern Money, Civil Rights, and Consumer Debt
Raúl Carrillo, staff attorney at New Economy Project, an economic justice non-profit in New York City

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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