Tag Archives: MMT

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) continues to make inroads into the mainstream discourse with the appearance of an article by Youssef El-Gingihy in The Independent Online. The article features MMT in connection with the new book by Bill Mitchell and Thomas Fazi, Reclaiming the State. At its recent rate of dissemination, MMT may transition from heterodox to mainstream ahead of expectations.Although the finer points of MMT can get quite involved, the most basic takeaway is very simple. For...

The title is snark, of course. The only difference between the money system we’ve imagined and the one we are actually using is the terminology we apply to it. We call the government’s particular fiat-money “U.S. dollars.” We call the “Citizen’s Net Gain” our federal budget “deficit.” We call the savings accounts the government makes available to citizens and businesses “Treasury bonds”—and we imagine the government is “borrowing” the dollars being deposited in them. Finally, we call the...

By J.D. ALT Think of how many of our seemingly intractable local and national problems could be solved if only America had its own sovereign fiat-money system! Unfortunately, most Americans can’t even think about that question because they’ve never heard a proper explanation of what “fiat-money” actually is. Here, then, is quick solution to that problem: How an American fiat-money system would work (in eight easy steps): The sovereign U.S. government declares that every citizen and...

Short review of Bill Mitchell and Thomas Fazi's Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World. IndependentActually the magic money tree does exist, according to modern monetary theory Youssef El-Gingihy

This article represents my initial comments on the question of the stability implications of locking interest rates at zero. Martin Watts, an Australian academic, had an interesting presentation at the first Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) conference (link to videos of presentations). Although MMT fits within a broad-tent definition of "post-Keynesian" economics, there are still sharp debates with other post-Keynesians. One topic of debate is the effect of permanently locking the policy...

This blog is short and only serves to provide a link to the video of the Q&A that followed my presentation at the British Labour Party Annual Conference Fringe Event on September 25, 2017. The presentation introduced the Reclaiming the State Project – and discusses my new book (with Thomas Fazi) – Reclaiming the State A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (Pluto, September 2017).The main presentation that preceded the Q&A is – HERE. Bill Mitchell – billy...

The crucial fact about the vertical side is that the fact that a nation is not like a household is evident regardless of the operational details. Positive Money is wrong in their belief the current system must be changed to achieve the type of government spending they want.However, this does not mean that Positive Money is flat out wrong. Key MMT people would be perfectly happy to spend vertically in the way Positive Money wants, which is just PQE/OMF by another name. This is especially so...

A recent twitter exchange with some Europhiles who believe that it is better to wait for some, as yet unspecified, incremental reform process for the Eurozone rather than precipitate exit and the restoration of currency sovereignty was summed up for me by one of the tweets from Andrew Watt. In trying to defend the abandonment of sovereignty and make a case for continuing with the so-called reform dialogue, he wrote (October 27, 2017): “Unemployment in “periphery” was v hi before €. Fell...

Last Friday (October 27, 2017), the US Bureau of Economic Analysis published their latest national accounts data – Gross Domestic Product: Third Quarter 2017 (Advance Estimate), which tells us that annual real GDP growth rate was 3 per cent in the September-quarter 2017, slightly down on the 3.1 per cent recorded in the June-quarter. As this is only the “Advance estimate” (based on incomplete data) there is every likelihood that the figure will be revised when the “second estimate” is...

This is a longish post but well worth the read since it goes into the objections of the progressive left to MMT's emphasis on national institutions that are relevant to policy, and especially economic policy, both fiscal and monetary. [Andrew Watt] thinks our position is “indistinguishable from the extreme right” and thus demands a response. Inasmuch as the ‘extreme right’ has grasped the reality that globalisation does not mean the nation state should surrender its legislative remit and...