Tag Archives: MMT

By J.D. ALT Note: This essay was first posted on realprogressivesusa.com Now that progressive leaders (Bernie Sanders, Kirsten Gillibrand and Corey Booker) have placed a proposed “Job Guarantee” program onto the mainstream political stage, it is essential they begin explaining the proposal’s underpinning macro-economic logic. Otherwise they lay themselves, and the proposal itself, wide open to scathing public ridicule—as exemplified by a recent Megan McArdle op-ed in the Washington Post...

How it worked, why it failed and how MMT Job Guarantee proposals avoid those problems Modern Money MattersThe UK’s Unofficial Job GuaranteeNeil Wilson

John Carney makes interesting points pro and con. Most of the cons are about politicization of the program since the JG as it is being presented and supported is clearly a Democratic program and "leftist" idea. He points out that this needn't be so. A value-neutral JG program can also be designed to appeal cross the political spectrum. JG supporters should listen to this. A JG is really a populist program that favors people, and firms will oppose it. For, as Carney points out, employers...

Nice précis of MMT.Mount Desert Islander — Letters to the EditorGovernment debt and spending John Buell

Most mainstream economists seem to think the idea behind Modern Monetary Theory is something new that some wild heterodox economic cranks have come up with. New? Cranks? How about reading one of the great founders of neoclassical economics — Knut Wicksell. This is what Wicksell wrote in 1898 on ‘pure credit systems’ in Interest and Prices (Geldzins und Güterpreise): Lars P. Syll’s BlogMMT — the Wicksell connectionLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

In a recent Financial Times article, Martin Sandbu identifies three major economic failures of competitive capitalism in the West: growing inequality; the disproportionate effects of The Great Recession on young people; and the threat of displacement in labor markets brought by improving technology and the presumed ubiquity of artificial intelligence. Sandbu connects these failures to recent victories of populist “extremist” parties in the EU, UK, and US, and asserts that if liberalism and...

The 27th Minsky Conference — “Financial Stability in a World of Rising Rates and the Repeal of Dodd-Frank” — just wrapped up yesterday. Anyone interested in the slide presentations can find them below…. Multiplier Effect27th Annual Minsky Conference PresentationsMichael Stevens

Here is a quote from John Maynard Keynes, writing in 1933: If I had the power today I should surely set out to endow our capital cities with all the appurtenances of art and civilisation on the highest standards of which the citizens of each were individually capable, convinced that what I could create, I could afford – and believing that money thus spent would not only be better than any dole, but would make unnecessary any dole. For with what we have spent on the dole in England since the...

Despite reports of a healthy US labor market, millions of Americans remain unemployed and underemployed, or have simply given up looking for work. It is a problem that plagues our economy in good times and in bad—there are never enough jobs available for all who want to work. L. Randall Wray, Flavia Dantas, Scott Fullwiler, Pavlina R. Tcherneva, and Stephanie A. Kelton examine the impact of a new “job guarantee” proposal that would seek to eliminate involuntary unemployment by directly...

Imagine an end to Washington spending wars that leave filibustering senators blue in the face. Economist Stephanie Kelton does. She sees a world where the federal government can build a big, beautiful social safety net, strengthen the military and, for good measure, cut taxes on the rich. The government, in her eyes, can spend as much as it wants on anything without the bill coming due. Welcome to Modern Monetary Theory — a bizarro world that might not be as far-fetched as it sounds. The...