Tag Archives: Abba Lerner

In this post, Stephanie Kelton takes on Paul Krugman. She appears to agree with Paul Krugman's assumption that monetary policy that is built on raising interest rates to address inflation is not backwards. Actually, central bank interest rate setting is a form of price setting, the policy rate being a variable that sets the cost of borrowing (price of money). Higher interest rates are also inflationary to the degree that increase the income of holders of securities, as Warren Mosler has...

From a late 1990s catalogue; Lance Taylor (center), and also in no particular order and from what I can remember (Ellen Houston, Adalmir Marquetti, myself (with goaty on the left side), Margaret Duncan, Josh Bivens and Carlos Pinkusfeld (Orozco Room) The New School for Social Research was founded 100 years ago by a group of academics dissatisfied with the direction of American high education. Economics was central to the early history of the New School, and my brief, very incomplete,...

Abba Lerner quote.Lars P. Syll’s BlogFunctional​ finance — how to cope with inflationLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

"Modern money" is state money. Abba Lerner explains the "trick" by which a state creates its money.Imposing taxes and accepting its own liabilities in payment creates demand for the currency. In this sense, state money is "monopoly money" in the truest sense, since modern have a monopoly on the issuance of currency, regardless of whether or how they choose to exercise it. Monopolists are prices setters rather than price takers. Hence, the value of the currency is established based on what...

This is a good historical backgrounder and it should be read for that reason alone. But Michael Roberts also brings up other issues that follow upon this history that are relevant to the current debate, at least some of which that have been brought up previously in the comments here. Highly recommended. As Maria Ivanova has shown, there remains a blind belief that the crisis-prone nature of the latter can be managed by means of ‘money artistry’, that is, by the manipulation of money,...

This is the second and final part of this cameo set, which aims to clear up a few major blind spots in peoples’ embrace with Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). This is all repetition. I don’t apologise for that and it does not reflect a slack or bad editorial approach from yours truly as some critics have claimed. Repetition is how we learn. Reinforcing things in different ways (aka repetition) helps people come to terms with concepts and ideas that give them dissonance. MMT is certainly about...

In most ways, Modern Monetary Theory—Functional Finance—is just macroeconomic common sense: We do not like high unemployment. We do not like excessive inflation. Thus the government should make it its first priority to use its tools of economic management so that we do not experience either. And maybe the government needs to be a little bit clever in how it uses fiscal and when and how it uses monetary policy to keep the task of financing the national debt from becoming an undue or even...

Abba Lerner versus Robert Barro.Lars P. Syll’s BlogAbba Lerner and the nonsense called ‘Ricardian equivalence’Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

This is a good Twitter thread and I suggest reading it. I am sure MMT economists will jump in.Here's an excerpt. ...  Brad DeLong: MMT is Abba Lerner's Functional Finance with bells & whistles & some confusions. Manipulate G to stabilize Y & π, manipulate M to get an i to make debt finance sustainable, and rely on π to tell you if your policies are sustainable... If π↑ need G↓  Suresh Naidu: Clearest exposition of MMT in a tweet. Fight me deficit owls!  ... BDL has thought...

The balanced budget paradox is probably one of the most devastating phenomena haunting our economies. The harder politicians — usually on the advice of 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 politicians and economists recommend as “the sole solution.” There are three budget views.1. Balanced budget...