Tag Archives: MMT

Taking down lazy back-of-the-hand critiques of MMT that don't actually address MMT but just belittle a caricature of it.Independent AustraliaA response to MMT criticism Stephen Williams

I’m helping to organize a conference on MMT with the topic “Why money matters”. It takes place in Berlin on February 1-2, 2019 at EBC Hochschule. The Call for Papers is open until December 31, 2018 and registration opens on December 1st. Find more information on http://mmtconference.eu econoblog 1011st International European Modern Monetary Theory conference, Berlin 2019Dirk Ehnts | Lecturer at Bard College Berlin

This passes for serious criticism now? In addition, Tim Worstall doesn't seem to realize that MMT is not a policy proposal but rather based on how the existing monetary system operates currently. Understanding this and using this knowledge opens up policy space by correctly describing existing fiscal space. Nothing needs to change with respect to the actual potential of the existing monetary system. This misunderstood by most economists, politicians and the public, with the result that...

So, both Mr Trump and Mr Sanders were proposing stimulatory economic policy at a time when the US economy was already at, or near, what economists consider full-employment, something that most economists warned might trigger runaway inflation.Most economists, but not Bernie Sanders' senior economic adviser, Stephanie Kelton.The economics professor from Stony Brook University in New York treads an unusual path between advising a number of left-leaning Democrats and holding the ear and...

President Trump banned a CNN reporter only to find his position overturned by the judicial system. Well CNN is guilty of at least one thing – publishing misleading and alarmist economic reports about Japan. In a CNN Business article last week (November 13, 2018) – Japan’s economy has a $5 trillion problem – readers were told that the Bank of Japan has no “dwindling options to juice growth if a new crisis hits” because “it’s now sitting on assets worth more than the country’s entire...

In some recent posts, a job guarantee has been considered within the income-expenditure framework. One post in particular suggested a possible conceptualization of the dynamics of the model. It was shown that these dynamics are consistent with the model’s steady state requirements. Demonstrating this took a fair bit of algebra, which may have obscured for some readers the simplicity of the actual model. Much of the algebra was only needed for the specific purpose of verifying that the...

The first section of the previous post outlined basic steady state relationships in a simplified economy with a job guarantee. There are various ways of expressing the same relationships that shed light on what is going on in the model. Here, a few ways of thinking about the levels of total income and job guarantee spending are noted.... heteconomistSome Aspects of a Steady State with a Job GuaranteePeter Cooper

It is Wednesday and I am doing the final corrections to our Macroeconomics textbook manuscript before it goes off to the ‘printers’ for publication in March 2019. It has been a long haul and I can say that writing a textbook is much harder than writing a monograph not only because the latter are more exciting in the drafting phase. The attention to detail in a textbook that runs over 600 pages is quite taxing. Anyway, that is taking my attention today. ? Yay! I also plan to write some...

US economist Stephanie Kelton, who served as Bernie Sanders' economic adviser during the 2016 presidential campaign, is currently touring Australia to promote the concept she says isn't too good to be true. "There is nothing to prevent the Australian government, if it chose to do so, from funding a large-scale government job program that would offer employment to anybody who wanted work and couldn't find it anywhere else in the Australian economy," she said.  "Let the private sector...

I have been toying with an idea of writing a book with the title "How Can a Floating Currency Sovereign Default?" As a follower of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), this is a bit of a joke, since the text of the book would just be: "They can't." The book can then be submitted to the World's Shortest Book Competition. Thinking about this has led to me to the realisation that the usual way of discussing sovereign default is inherently defective. (This criticism extends to my earlier book...