Tag Archives: public debt

Roger Farmer is out with an argument for the optimal level of public debt being 70% of GDP. Ralph provides the MMT answer. It is nicely succinct. MMTers have solved this one. Others are still floundering, in particular Roger Farmer in this NIESR article on the subject, is all over the place far as I can see (1). So I’ll run thru this vexed question for the umpteenth time.... Farmer bills himself as a Keynesian. Ralph reminds us of the answer Keynes himself gave to the question of public...

Yesterday I spoke to a group of important economists about my book The Production of Money - but omitted to make one important point. So am making it here. Savings are not needed for investment. Ever. There is absolutely no need for example, for the Chancellor to rattle the tax collection box, or cut government spending - to...

Image with acknowledgement to Google Search Anyone familiar with the austerity obsession of EU leaders will know that the boundary between fiscal virtue and profligate sin lies at minus 3%.  A budget balance below the ominous minus 3 sends the offending government to the fiscal headmasters of the European...

There was likely a collective gasp at OppenheimerFunds Inc. yesterday when President Donald Trump made another of those market-moving pronouncements, telling Fox News that Puerto Rico’s debt would have to be wiped out. The President’s remarks suggested he thought the losers would be Wall Street banks. The President stated: “You know they owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street. We’re gonna have to wipe that out. That’s gonna have to be — you know, you can say goodbye to that. I...

Link to web application written in R using Godley ratios.The Case for Concerted ActionUnsustainable Processes Of The EUV. Ramanan

Superb Bill Vickrey quote.Lars P. Syll’s BlogPublic debt — an economic necessity Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo UniversityAlsoNeoliberal ‘ethics’

Government spending in a recession can boost a country’s economy without permanently bloating its public debt, even if the debt is already quite large, researchers told an influential group of central bankers in Jackson, Wyoming, on Saturday. “Expansionary fiscal policies adopted when the economy is weak may not only stimulate output but also reduce debt-to-GDP ratios,” University of California, Berkeley, professors Alan Auerbach and Yuriy Gorodnichenko said in a paper presented at the...

Acknowledgements to wikimedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Historia_del_partido_socialista.jpg Dear readers. The article below was written in April, 2017, and submitted to Spain's socialist party (PSOE) for publication. It remains relevant to wider debates about the collapse of social...

Britain's public debt has risen inexorably since the Great Financial Crisis. It has done so despite (or because of) austerity, spending cuts that butchered the public sector and local government services, and led amongst other tragedies, to the Grenfell Tower inferno. And because of the very determined efforts of both Labour,...

I was looking at my Tweetdeck this morning when I came across this tweet from the Brookings Institution: Now it is clearly a Good Thing in principle for the US Federal government’s budget to be explained in clear and simple ways, but why – I asked myself – do Brookings choose to concentrate today on interest payments (which form just 6% of outlays)...