Tag Archives: MMT

Here is my latest podcast. Enjoy.

On Friday, we had the extraordinary admission from our Federal government that they had overestimated the injection required to fund their wage subsidy JobKeeper program by some $A60 billion. When the overall program was announced the Treasury allocated $A133 billion to it. So now they are admitting to a 45 per cent forecasting error, which sort of dwarfs the worst errors that the IMF makes, and they sure make some bad mistakes in their projections. Whatever the reason for the mistake, the...

Mitchell, Wray and Watts Macroeconomics p 323, give a the correct version of the #MMT position on budget aggregates .... John Quiggin's BlogMWW on MMT (from Twitter via Spooler)John Quiggin | Professor and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland, and a member of the Board of the Climate Change Authority of the Australian Government

Talking points.  The so-called MMT critics need to read more MMT in order to actually criticize MMT. They are criticizing MMT based on straw man arguments. I, too, am getting bored with plodding through it to see if anyone has come up with anything substantial.  Without doing the necessary prep, criticism appears not only unprofessional. In this case, it also leads to the question of whether the criticism is an ideological attempt to control the narrative by influence based on...

When Kevin Rudd was faced with the threat posed by the unfolding GFC in late 2008 his government became very pragmatic and immediately ditched the narrative they had been pushing out throughout that year about inflation being a threat and the need for tighter fiscal policy and surpluses. They introduced, in two rounds, a fairly significant fiscal stimulus (around 4.2 per cent of GDP) which effectively saved the Australian economy from entering a recession. A significant part of that...

At least some on the left are taking cognizance of MMT, but if this author is any indication, more study is required to understand what MMT is and what it is not. But at least it is a try.Green LeftCOVID-19 debt crisis: Is Modern Monetary Theory a solution? Neville Spencer

It is Wednesday so music and some snippets. I have updated the US unemployment claims data with a new map and state table. Shocking. We are working on updated estimates of what the Australian government would need to invest to run a Job Guarantee. We haven’t done that for a while because I didn’t want the press to get obsessed with dollar amounts. But as I am currently talking a lot about the Job Guarantee in the media, I thought some numbers would be useful as a comparative exercise...

Warren is amazing in his ability to cut to the quick in a sentence or two.Tax Research UKWhy MMT? A discussion with Warren MoslerRichard 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

Academic Agent – a YouTube libertarian and unusually ignorant advocate of Austrian economics – tries to refute Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) in this video:[embedded content]Let us run through this video and refute Academic Agent’s arguments point by point:(1) Academic Agent fails to Refute the Three Core Principles of MMT There are three fundamental principles in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), as follows:(1) Most sovereign governments today are the monopoly issuers of their own fiat currencies...

There was an interesting article posted on Alternet (April 12, 2020) – Leftist policy didn’t lose. Marxist electoral theory did – in response to the dismal showing by Bernie Sanders in the current Democratic Primaries. I think it summarises the confusion that is now abundant on the progressive side of the political struggle. The arguments presented highlight the dilemma facing the progressive side of politics. Should Leftists compromise with centrists to get more traction? Compromise with...