Tag Archives: MMT critics

Another deficit hawk shocked, shocked, shocked by MMT. Summary Wake up America! It is only massive and unsustainable deficit spending that continues driving our economy forward. The budget deficit is set to widen significantly in the next few years and in 2020, is expected to top $1 trillion even with healthy economic growth, according to new projections from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The bottom line is that we are in the midst of a "false economy" and it is only by the...

Tom Holland is a geologist by training and journalist by profession. Although he has written on business for 25 years, he displays little knowledge of finance, economics or MMT in this article. Why do people that are not qualified to speak on an important subject get a platform to criticize for reasons that are patently wrong. In the first place, the author doesn't realize that China is not sovereign in its currency since it pegs the renminbi to the dollar. (The Chinese currency is the...

Confused.  Michael Roberts needs to read more of the MMT primary literature if he wants to critique MMT in any detail. Nevertheless, MMT starts with the conviction that it is the state (not capitalist commodity relations) that establishes the value of money. Not quite.MMT starts with the observation of Warren Mosler that under the current monetary system, a contemporary sovereign currency is a public monopoly, with the currency issuing government acting as the people's representative —...

Richard Murphy has always said that MMT supporters do not properly understand tax and Jonathan Portes seems to me, on the evidence of this article, to fall into the same category. What Jonathan Portes misses is that the ‘financial constraints’ are self-imposed. It’s bad enough – in reality – being short of teachers, nurses and doctors. But having bogus self imposed financial constraints is just – well – self imposed.Finance is man made. Jonathan Portes, as a former Treasury civil servant,...

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

"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,