Tag Archives: MMT

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...

The Job Guarantee proposal is a core part of the policy analysis of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). If implemented, it would be expected to cause a structural change in the economic structure, and so analysis techniques that extrapolate current conditions would be inapplicable. Although this analysis is aimed at the Job Guarantee, the basic principles would be applicable for other measures that cause a structural change in the labour market, such as the Universal Basic Income. (In fact, it's...

Some interesting history.MoneynessAn example of tax-driven money during the greenback eraJP Koning

One criticism of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) that I hear very often is that it applies only to the US or the countries with hard currencies that can issue bonds on international bond markets.... econoblog 101MMT, Tajikistan and foreign bond investorsDirk Ehnts | Lecturer at Bard College Berlin

Today, I have translated two interviews I did while I was in Europe recently. The original interviews were in Spanish. The first interview was with Andrés Villena Oliver for CTXT and was published in the Spanish newspaper Público. It was conducted at Ecooo in Madrid on September 28, 2017. The the second interview was with journalist Marta Luengo Garcés from the progressive newspaper El Salto Diaro. It was conducted at the Principe Pio Hotel in Madrid on September 29, 2017. You can get a...

Everything you wanted to know about cryptocurrencies from an MMT perspective.Modern Money MattersCrypto-Shilling Neil WilsonSee also Bitcoin transactions use so much energy that the electricity used for a single trade could power a home for almost a whole month, according to a paper from Dutch bank ING. Bitcoin trades use a lot of electricity as a means to make verifying trades expensive, therefore making fraudulent transactions costly and deterring those who would seek to misuse the...

I believe I have a better understanding of Eric Lonergan's arguments regarding whether fiat money is a liability of a state with currency sovereignty. (This discussion does not apply to commodity money, or a state using a money issued by an entity not under its direct control.) If I am correct, I would phrase his argument as: the existing accounting treatment of money is incorrect, since it does not account for seigneurage revenue. (Seigneurage has multiple English spellings; I was using...

In Post 20, a lot is said about the role that the rate of return on financial instruments—the interest rate—plays on the pricing on securities, but little was said about what determines that rate of return. Two competing theoretical frameworks explain what influences the interest rate, one of them emphasizes the role of real factors and the other emphasizes monetary factors. New Economic PerspectivesMoney and Banking Post 21: The Interest RateEric Tymoigne | Associate Professor of Economics...

This neoliberal era has a habit of getting ahead of itself and exposing its internal contradictions. In fact, the Capitalist system, as Marx, Keynes and others have demonstrated, it inherently inconsistent. The imposition of neoliberalism has only heightened those inconsistencies and made it more likely that we will move beyond this period in the foreseeable future (fingers crosssed). Last week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest Retail Sales data for August 2017. The...