Tag Archives: MMT

MMT and Pakistan.Business RecorderBeating the odds: growth in global recession Shahid Sattar and Eman Ahmed

Wednesday blog post – so only a few snippets including some discussion about Germany’s latest extreme outcome – a record fiscal surplus, which the Ministry of Finance is claiming is responsible. Judged by the fact that the economy has ground to a halt and there is a massive infrastructure deficit in the country as a result of a systematic starving of capital expenditure by the government, one has to ask: are they joking! The surplus was, in part, the result of the German government not...

What I refer to as the Monetary Monopoly Model is the simplest possible mathematical model that captures basic concepts from Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Despite its simplicity, it gives a good feeling of how a sovereign could pin down the value of a brand new currency (relative to existing currencies, or the value of real goods or services). However, the model makes almost no assumptions about private sector behaviour, and such assumptions would be needed to simulate an existing...

Minsky’s journey from socialism to stability for capitalist profitability comes about because he and the post-Keynesians deny and/or ignore Marx’s law of value, just as the ‘market socialists’, Lange and Lerner, did. The post-Keynesians and MMTers deny/ignore that profit comes from surplus value extracted by exploitation in the capitalist production process and it is this that is the driving force for investment and employment. They ignore the origin and role of profit, except as a residual...

As seen in some comments on my recent articles, critics of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) often complain about MMT's treatment of banks. I am largely mystified by these criticisms, as they obviously miss the point. Very simply, the existence of banking system, and the fact that bank deposits to be considered to be part of monetary aggregates, is well understood within the MMT literature. The only real debate is about the implications of private banking. To what extent the banking system...

Positive article on MMT and Stephanie Kelton, who is in Australia now. The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)'All deficits are good for someone': Visiting economist shrugs off debt concerns Andrew Taylor, Senior Reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald

I decided that I would run the CFA Franc series in three consecutive parts to maintain continuity and allow me to edit the final manuscript which Pluto Press will use to finalise the book by Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla. That meant that my usual Wednesday snippets sort of blog post didn’t happen this week. So, given that I have to travel for several hours today, Thursday becomes Wednesday and I just want to write a few comments about the current crisis in Australia (from the...

What determines the price level is a theoretical topic that pops up in Mosler's White Paper on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT - link to my discussion). Mosler's argument is that only MMT provides a proper understanding of price level determination. That is a strong claim, and difficult to assess. However, the discussion of price level determination is a distinctive part of MMT, and should receive greater prominence in discussion.... Bond Economics MMT And Price Level DeterminationBrian...

I have been commissioned to write the Introduction (Preface) to the upcoming book – The Last Colonial Currency: A History of the CFA Franc – by Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla, which is an English version of the original 2018 book, L’arme invisible de la Françafrique. It will soon be published by Pluto Press (UK) – as soon as I finish this introduction. The book is incredibly important because it shows the role that currency arrangements play in perpetuating colonial oppression and...

We at CleanTechnica have been looking at the various 2020 US Democratic candidates for president (here, here, and here) and their funding plans for a clean energy future. We (and they) have learned a lot about what it will take to not only usher in an energy future devoid of fossil fuels but also to pay for such a transition. Maybe it’s time, though, to put at least some of the politics aside and see what economists and researchers out there are saying about investing in clean energy,...