This is a VERY rough draft of a dialogue/narrated animation aimed at regular folks highlighting important misconceptions about the economy. I have to travel for a bit and rather than going back and researching every term and point made, I am throwing it on the web for help.Clint Ballinger
Help on MMT related dialogue
4 comments:
So far so good - the first comment on this post, by "Greg"
"WOW!
Outstanding Clint. I really like the way you worked in our willingness to accept Norway’s or Switzerland’s money not because of the interest it pays but because of the political stability of the country. Huge point I think."
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Happy to get any more feedback, positive, negative, technical, or just editing. Cheers, Clint
The other point is that the reason that the USD is the world's preferred reserve currency is that while it may not be as "sound" as the CHF, it is available in quantity in highly liquid markets.
Ralph Musgrave made some good points on my site on this post:
"Hi Clint,
Herewith a couple of suggested alterations.
You say “but for the moment, just think of Treasury Bonds as money.” You could put that more strongly and say that bonds and money merge into each other, or put another way, in the case of short term bonds paying a miserable rate of interest, there is little effective difference between bonds and money (monetary base to be exact). I.e. there is no difference between $1,000 and a promise by government to pay you $1,000 in two week’s time.
On the subject of China you say “If they want to go on a trillion dollar international shopping spree, good for them. It would be harmless…”. I suggest our opponents (the few of them that have brains) will trip you up on that one. I.e. you need to come clean on the downside of China cashing in it’s bonds and spending the proceeds: which is that if China buys stuff from the US, that means US citizens working away in factories etc and shipping stuff of REAL VALUE to China. That means a standard of living hit for US citizens. That’s simply the reverse of the process that enabled China to build up its stock of dollars in the first place: shipping stuff of real value to the US and getting silly bits of paper in return.
Alternatively if China spends it’s money elsewhere in the world, say Japan, then US dollars get exchanged for Yen, which hits the value of the dollar, which again means a standard of living hit for US citizens."
Part II of this, “MMT & Private Debt Dialogue”, is here
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