Long but interesting. Much on Michael Hudson's background.
Counterpunch
How Bankers Became the Top Exploiters of the Economy
Adam Simpson interviews Michael Hudson
How Bankers Became the Top Exploiters of the Economy
Adam Simpson interviews Michael Hudson
9 comments:
Off-topic, a recent speech by Chris Hedges for those interested.
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/chris_hedges_enemy_donald_trump_or_steve_bannon_corporate_power_20170315
The MH article was long but worth every minute of it. I know of no other economist that understands what is going on better than MH. By the way, I liked his reference to economics as science fiction.
"We see budget deficits as providing the economy with money to fuel growth. "
Wrong....
MH presents deficits as fueling as the MMT view. It is not. It is the old Keynesian view of pump priming.
The MMT view is that the fiscal deficits offset non-government surpluses.
The accounting identity is then used in support of running a full employment fiscal policy based on functional finance in order to address demand leakage and the build up or unsustainable domestic private debt.
MH doesn't fully understand the MMT macro view and how it applies to policy, which is based chiefly on sectoral balances and functional finance, and he misrepresents the MMT position in the post.
"We see budget deficits as providing the economy with money to fuel growth" is translatable into anybody's MMT terms and is true enough. So saying it is wrong is excessively critical. "Pump priming" wasn't exactly Keynesian either - it was a pre-Keynesian idea that once the pump was primed, it would work without further "intervention" - a more modern analog would be giving a car a jump-start. Better than neoclassical/mainstream, but ignores the fact that often enough - some - maybe not an enormous amount - of continual fiscal support / "good" deficits / "intervention" may be needed for a robust high employment economy.
The right way to look at MMT is as a body of regulative ideas that one can use to understand, can be a "foundation" of other schools of economic thought, which may have more to say about specific topics, may have valuable points of view. Hudson usually is someone who emphasizes things other MMTers don't. So he usually can be read as consistent with MMT, if not saying things exactly the same way as the others. Just may require a little more effort.
Michael Hudson pretty consistently puts things differently from MMT economists, while giving the impression that this is MMT. Not all MMT economists are pleased.
I should clarify that that when I said wrong, I did not mean that MH was wrong about what he said but wrong in his introductory remarks about MMT. I think it it's pretty safe to say that no MMT economist would present MMT that way.
I think that MH makes a huge contribution to the heterodox debate and at the same time, I think it would be a mistake to consider him to be either an MMT economist or a Post Keynesian economist. That is not the framework in which he is working.
I like much of what MH says. He emphasizes important matters that MMT economists don't feature like economic rent and the details of financialization.
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