Tag Archives: MMT criticism

Poorly argued. Economics professor Jonathan Portes admits that the fundamentals of MMT about operations are correct, and that MMT economists recognize that the financial constraint on fiscal deficits is inflation. Then he concludes that it is obvious that MMT cannot work since the real constraint is available resources and government spending uses resources instead of creating them. So, over time, inflation cannot be avoided other than by increasing taxes, that is, limiting the deficit by...

Confuses QE (monetary policy) with fiscal injection (fiscal policy). Can't get much more wrong than that. Moreover, confuses the monetary in a monetary production economy with production of goods. The author is ill-informed and not qualified to speak on this topic. Fail.GoldSeekModern Monetary Theory: A Cargo Cult Keith Weiner, Monetary MetalsSee also Another straw man argument that makes stuff up. Well, not so much. Furman and Summers: “Although politicians shouldn’t make the debt their...

Not bad for a critical article. Looks like the days of just mocking MMT are about over. Now critics have to be careful of looking foolish.National Review‘Modern Monetary Theory’: Helpful but Prone to Misuse Alan Cole

I attempted to link directly to the source of the post, which ZH crossposted, but got the message that the site''s bandwidth limit had been exceeded. Apparently MMT is going viral. AOC is a big deal. She has changed the national conversation.The "criticism" is pretty standard, from the gut rather than the head. Dealing with the truth is hard.Zero HedgeThe Disturbing Rise Of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)Mark Jeftovic via Guerilla-Capitalism.com

Strain and Veuger never try to meet the burden they set for themselves with their frenzied rhetoric. The key test of a theory’s validity is its predictive ability. A theory that is so weak that it is a “joke” made by “luna[tics]” should collapse as soon as its predictive ability is tested. What predictive failures do Strain and Veuger demonstrate MMT scholars have made? None. What predictive failures do they attempt to show MMT scholars have made? None. That failure even to attempt...

Things seem to come in cycles. We have been at this for some years now – trying to articulate the principles of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) in various ways in various fora. There is now a solid academic literature – peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters in collections, and monographs (books) published by the core MMT group and, more recently, by the next generation MMT academics. That literature spans around 25 years. For the last 15 odd years (give or take) there has been a growing...

Robert Vienneau links to the "popular" trolls, followed by a short summary of MMT as essentially correct as descriptive of the monetary system.Thoughts On EconomicsElsewhere: Popular Writing On Modern Monetary TheoryRobert Vienneau

"Be afraid, very afraid."This might be the nuttiest yet.Zero HedgeModern Monetary Theory (Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying & Love The National Debt)Ben Hunt via EpsilonTheory.com,

The simple fact is that imports are real benefits, meaning real goods, for the importer and exports are real costs for the exporter, who exchanges real goods for financial goods ("money").That is to say, one party to the exchange obtains real resources in exchange for monetary payment. This implies that the party accepting the payment desires to save, however, temporarily in the currency in which the real goods are priced.Nothing else is claimed in saying that imports are real benefits and...

The trolls are at it.Continental TelegraphZimbabwe’s Real Riots Problem – Modern Monetary Theory Strikes Again Tim Worstall AEIEp. 124: What is Modern Monetary Theory? — Political Economy with James Pethokoukis The WeekWhy Modern Monetary Theory is an unserious idea for an unserious time James Pethokoukis