Tag Archives: MMT

Good read!  Controversy over money is nothing new in US history, since it has been a lively political issue. The arguments are not chiefly about money, although couched in terms of money, economics, and finance, but rather, politics, which involves winners and losers in the policy game. Historically, sound money advocated have been the wealthy, and functional finance people have been ordinary citizens aka "the little people" (h/t Alan Simpson).History News NetworkMMT and Why Historians...

This is the second part of a three-part series discussing the political issues that give me confidence in the primacy of fiscal policy over monetary policy. The series is designed to help readers see that the recent criticisms of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as being politically naive and unworkable in a real politic sense have all been addressed in the past. In Part 1, I gave examples of how ‘agile’ or ‘nimble’ fiscal policy can be when an elected government has it in their mind to use...

Ha ha. Noah Smith criticizes an MMT formal model expressed in words rather than equations (which he thinks is OK as a formal method and as a logician, I agree) based on, wait for it, unrealistic assumptions, which is exactly the same thing that heterodox economists accuse conventional economists of doing, that is, if one considered John Maynard Keynes himself to be a heterodox economist.MMT economists should not fall into the trap of trying to mimics the mainstream in creating formal...

Good presentation about why getting progressives to admit that MMT is correct won't change them. It's about politics. Short read.In my view, the way to proceed is by calling attention to economic rent — financial rent, land rent, natural resources rent, and monopoly-monopsony rent — along with socializing negative externality instead of imposing true cost.A comprehensive analysis also necessitates going beyond economics and finance to include all other areas that are relevant ‚ individual...

Generally favorable article about MMT. The mention of AOC is just clickbait. The objections it brings up in the interest of being "fair and balanced" are easy to meet.Business InsiderAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a fan of a geeky economic theory called MMT: Here's a plain-English guide to what it is and why it's interestingJim Edwards and Theron Mohamed

[embedded content] Greenspan: "We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like"FEBRUARY 16, 2005 COMMITTEE ON BANKING, HOUSING, AND URBAN AFFAIRS, UNITED STATES SENATE  GREENSPAN: I think we should maintain the principles of Social Security, but I think the existing structure is not working, and that until we can construct a system which creates the savings that are required to build the real assets so that the retirees have real goods and services, we do not have a...

Two weeks ago Alphaville published a clarification on modern monetary theory by Scott Fullwiler, Rohan Grey and Nathan Tankus. They argued that, counter to what had been reported, MMT does not rely exclusively on raising taxes to counter inflation. Proper MMT, they wrote, uses a lot of tools to manage inflation -- taxes only one among them.... FT Alphaville (Free registration required if not a FT subscriber) When DoJ and the FCC slowed inflation Brendan Greeley

Brad DeLong apparently missed the part about role of the job guarantee in mopping up residual unemployment after the implementation of fiscal policy based on functional finance and using automatic stabilization to maintain output close to an optimal level with respect to growth, full employment and price stability. This would be done using Godley-inspired SFC macro modeling rather than the conventional approach to econometrics. I mention DeLong's criticism even though it is getting...

The received wisdom on government debt is that it saddles future generations with the burden of repayment. The received wisdom is wrong. As long as a government’s debt is denominated in its own currency, repayment is never a problem. Why? Because the government can always create the necessary funds.  A sovereign government’s debt is one source of a country’s currency. National governments literally spend money into existence. Deficits can cause problems, but to properly understand those...

In this two-part series I will: 1. Consider the question as to whether fiscal policy is sufficiently flexible enough to provide an effective counter-stabilisation against the non-government spending cycle.If a nation is heading into recession, can governments act quickly enough with discretionary spending changes? If a nation is ‘overheating’ and inflation is threatening to accelerate, can spending and tax changes be implemented quickly enough to counter these tendencies? 2. Should...