Tag Archives: MMT

Real Progressives announced today the creation of a new nonprofit corporation to help match activists and progressive causes with policymakers, media outlets and academic experts to help create an actionable policy from a sound financial framework.Real Progressives launches this unprecedented effort with a mission to facilitate dialog and workgroups to assist academics within the Modern Monetary Theory discipline to fundamentally address the ubiquitous question of how progressive policy can...

Only a short blog post today as it is Wednesday. My father, in fact, used to say that ‘leopards do not change their spots’, when referring to people who in one period behaved one way and then when sprung would pretend they were reformed. I was thinking about that when I noted that the queue to the magical reinvention door is getting longer by the day. This is the process, whereby a person, who previously advocated neoliberal macroeconomic policy interventions from the sidelines (as an...

Later this week I will be in Japan for a series of presentations and meetings with a broad spectrum of Japanese politics. The various hosts of the events which I will confirm in Wednesday’s blog post are all committed to advancing an MMT understanding in Japan and ending the hold that ‘sound finance’ has on the public policy debates and regularly lead to poorly contrived policy shifts (such as the recent sales tax hike) in pursuit of lower fiscal deficits. As part of my preparation for my...

A little bit of a different blog post format today. I mentioned in this blog post – Apparently core MMT idea is now supported by the mainstream (October 16, 2019) – that the Japanese government had taken issued a statement, by way of a formal answer to a series of questions from Japanese CDR politician Kazuma Nakatani on the opening day of the new Parliament (October 4, 2019). The Japanese government reply was not available in full at the time I wrote that but it was reported in the Japanese...

In the end, MMT looks like an extreme version of conventional economics in which there is no independent monetary policy and there are a lot of unused resources. But when resources get tight, the reflex is command and control central planning. This cuts to the quick of it. The question is how much market state (where free markets determine outcomes, in theory at least) and how much welfare state (where the economy is managed based on desired outcomes). This is an ongoing dialectic among...

It is Wednesday and I am travelling a lot today with limited opportunity to write. I am reading a lot though. Highly significant political debates with far reaching effects on the well-being of citizens once policies are implemented are conducted on a daily basis in our national Parliaments and in the media with little correspondence to reality. This is the norm for debates on macroeconomics, which dominate political news every day. There is this fictional world that has been created to...

In “Monopoly”, the bank can “print” money indefinitely, the players get into debt, and the state adds 200 Marks each round. But what if everyone had to pay 200 Marks each round and would suffer negative returns when owning railway stations?  Even if “Monopoly” comes from the US, it has long since become a classic German game. And it goes like this: In the ideal case four players buy and sell roads, build houses and hotels and pay each other rent, which depends on the price of the road and...

An Explanation of the Federal Reserve Money system and what it means for the potential accomplishments of American Democracy By J.D. ALT Let’s begin by restating what I think was the main insight of PART 1: The overarching purpose of the Federal Reserve Act was to enable “money” to be created, as necessary, to support the scale of commerce that American Enterprise decides to undertake and accomplish. If the labor, materials, energy, technology, and ingenuity exist to do something—and it...

One thing that is clear: the modern national debt does not function just like a household debt, which is how it was sold as a campaign issue by the deficit hawks who pretended to care about deficit spending before Trump was elected. More national debt is not “bad” under any and all conditions, and less is not “good” under any and all conditions. It really depends on what you’re doing with the money.... Not all economists agree on when the next recession will hit. They almost all do agree,...

In this part, I’ll resume with comments on the critical contributions to the special issue of rwer. We finished Part 2 with a discussion of the shocking lack of citations to MMT literature in the critiques—especially the dearth of citations to the more academic contributions (as opposed to the summaries of MMT written for undergrads and the general public). Let me return to the oversight of contributions made by scholars such as Fullwiler and Tymoigne—who have mostly written academic...