Tag Archives: Finance

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...

Are blockchain and cryptocurrencies as over-hyped? Michael Roberts thinks so and explains why.Michael Roberts BlogBlockchains and the crypto crazeMichael Roberts

Every once in a while, I get contacted to answer questions and/or provide quotes for articles, news programs, etc. (Nothing will ever be as neat as the feature in Grazia though.) The latest was an inquiry from a very nice fellow named Chris Taylor, who is the money guy for Reuters. The article is linked above, and here is the larger context: Okay, what actually happened was basically this: Chris: Can I ask you some questions about leveraged ETFs?Me: Oh hell no.Chris: Oh sorry to disturb...

The dominant view of banks and other financial institutions is that they function primarily as intermediaries, managing flows of scarce funds from those who have accumulated them to those who have need of them and can pay for their use. This understanding pervades textbooks, scholarly writings, and policy discussions – yet it is fundamentally false as a description of how a modern financial system works. Finance today is no more primarily “intermediated” than it is pre-accumulated or...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. In a clever online nudging experiment, 627,000 online taxpayers in Guatemala were given one of five different kinds of honesty messages, reminders about public goods, or legal warnings in a captcha. But none of the messages had any effect on taxes paid. Some unexpected side effects of antimalarial insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs): We show that ITNs reduced all-cause child mortality, but surprisingly increased total fertility...

Interest rates are the price of credit. They are the price of access to capital. Now, it is obvious that pricing credit is not tyrannical in and of itself. Interest compensates a lender for default risk and the risk of inflation eroding the purchasing power of the money that they lend. The tyranny I am getting at is subtle. It is the tyranny that Keynes pointed to when he proposed a euthanasia of the rentier. Keynes proposed that low interest rates would: mean the euthanasia of the rentier,...