Tag Archives: MMT

By Thornton Parker        The way a problem is seen can determine how or even if it gets solved.  When the French engineer, Ferdinand de Lesseps, was picked to build the Panama Canal, he saw it as another excavation problem as his Suez Canal had been.  But Egypt was flat and Panama had a mountain.  When the United States took over the job, John Stevens, who was put in charge, saw it as a railroad problem.  The biggest task was to move ninety-six million cubic yards of rock and earth, as...

By Thornton Parker        The way a problem is seen can determine how or even if it gets solved.  When the French engineer, Ferdinand de Lesseps, was picked to build the Panama Canal, he saw it as another excavation problem as his Suez Canal had been.  But Egypt was flat and Panama had a mountain.  When the United States took over the job, John Stevens, who was put in charge, saw it as a railroad problem.  The biggest task was to move ninety-six million cubic yards of rock and earth, as...

I have a new peer-reviewed journal paper out this morning on a theme many on this blog might be interested in. Tax Research UK Modern Monetary Theory and the Changing Role of Tax in SocietyRichard Murphy | Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London; Director of Tax Research UK; non-executive director of Cambridge Econometrics, and a member of the Progressive Economy Forum

Not specifically about MMT but this: Now, Covid-19 could be a great opportunity for the United States and, also, for the world economy. With interest rates nearing zero, this could be a good opportunity to use fiscal policy to revive the economy. This is something that the defenders of the so-called Modern Monetary Theory, such as the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Olivier Blanchard, and also many banks, have been calling for for years, seeing how their margins...

I will write a detailed account of my view on how to deal with the coronavirus from an Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) perspective next week. But today I want to highlight something that just ‘goes through to the keeper’ (cricket reference meaning no-one pays attention to it) but is significant in understanding what is wrong with the Eurozone. I refer to information that is contained in the latest – Annual Report 2019 – released last week by the Deutsche Bundesbank. If you juxtapose that with...

Scott Fullwiler's article "The debt ratio and sustainable macroeconomic policy"* offers a very good introduction to Modern Monetary Theory's (MMT) stance on fiscal policy. It covers a lot of ground, making it hard to summarise. This article has some general remarks on why I recommend reading the paper as an introduction to MMT thinking. The key argument is that interest service is what matters for sustainability (and not the debt-to-GDP ratio) -- and that the rate of interest is under the...

One of the themes I exercised when speaking in Europe recently, particularly when presenting at the French Senate Commission and the Ministry of Finance, was that by pushing European integration into an unworkable currency union and refusing to budge, the European political class was undermining the valid aspects of the ‘European Project’, which the likes of Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman saw as a way of bringing peace to the Continent after several attempts by Germany to usurp the rights...

Not to bad an article overall, but Dion Rabouin goes off the rails at the conclusion: The takeaway: There's no telling whether Kelton and Sanders are right, because no government has ever attempted to implement the MMT approach.  The reality is that all governments are accounted for in MMT and all governments fall under a special case of the general case set forth in the MMT conceptual institutionalist model that is grounded in law and accounting rather than mathematical models based on...

One of the enduring myths that mainstream macroeconomists and the politicians that rely on their lies to depoliticise their own unpopular actions continue to propagate is that of ‘central bank independence’. This is the claim that macroeconomic policy making improved in the ‘neoliberal’ era following the emergence of Monetarism because monetary policy was firmly in the hands of technocratic bankers who were not part of the political cycle. As such, they could make decisions based on...

MMT and Stephanie Kelton.CRE — Commercial Property ExecutiveShould the Rising Deficit Worry CRE Executives? Paul Fiorilla