Two short clips from Lawrence Summers talk at the ASSA meeting in San Diego. So he first says that secular stagnation is more plausible now than before. He sees that it can be explained as a shift of the IS curve backwards. His IS has a somewhat marginalist foundation, with a natural rate, and a fairly conventional story for investment. Of course, the negative shift has bee compensated by some sort of stimulus, that is now weaker. I would say a smaller multiplier that affects the slope of...
Read More »A spreadsheet version of the IS/MY model (alternative to IS/LM model) — Dirk Ehnts
I hope that this model will be taken up by more colleagues as it is very clear now that the IS/LM model “does not work”. If you make it more realistic by saying that investment does not depend on the rate of interest (vertical IS curve) and that the central bank determines the interest rate (horizontal LM curve), then you will have wasted 3-4 lectures to explain the goods market (IS curve) and the money market (LM curve) only to conclude that both do not matter in practice. It is only a...
Read More »Peter Bofinger — Modern monetary theory: the dose makes the poison
This article explains the ISLM view of MMT in some detail without being overly wonkish for general accessibility. While it is sympathetic to MMT, it is still wrong, but instructively so. Assumptions die hard.Notice the assumptions about the effect of changes in "money supply" based on money supply being settlement balances in the payments system ("bank reserves balances", abbreviated as "rb").The effect of such changes in conventional economics is based upon assuming that changes in the...
Read More »The theory of endogenous money and the LM schedule
By Tom Palley. From the abstract: Money is at the center of macroeconomics, which makes understanding the money supply central for macroeconomic theory. this paper presents the Post Keynesian theory of endogenous money supply and shows how it is fundamentally different from the conventional money supply theory. the conventional approach relies on the money multiplier and bank lending is invisible. Post Keynesian theory discards the money multiplier and focuses on bank lending which drives...
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