Saturday, February 9, 2019

Peter C. Earle — Why MMT (Ultimately) Doesn’t Matter


More bloviating.
Every one of the scores of known cases of hyperinflation dating back over 700 years bears witness to a reckless, breakneck campaign of money creation preceding it.
Post hoc, propter hoc fallacy.

All hyperinflations can be traced to scarcity of real resources for different reasons preceding money creation. Weimar was the result of war reparations. Zimbabwe was the result of fall in production. Venezuela was the result of pegging its currency to the dollar, thereby abandoning currency sovereignty.

See, for example, Cullen Roche, Hyperinflation - It's More than Just a Monetary Phenomenon (2011).

What's Earle's "solution"? No, not gold. Bitcoin.

American Institute for Economic Research
Why MMT (Ultimately) Doesn’t Matter
Peter C. Earle

3 comments:

Ralph Musgrave said...

The second link above doesn't work.

Calgacus said...

Should be Peter C. Earle — Why MMT (Ultimately) Doesn’t Matter

Thanks, Tom.

Was at this site a few months ago, but couldn't remember it. The AIER guru / founder Edward Harwood was an interesting guy. Superficially, sort of garden variety Austrian hard money type. But he corresponded with Keynes back in the day, and some of his ideas of how to think about economics are very, very good. I mean the Austrians have something interesting to say occasionally & can reason in the right way. It's just where they come from that is the problem: the theory of money is wrong - and their theory of property is usually very naive, unreflective & ahistorical.

But there's something to podasip there.

Detroit Dan said...

Here's the link: Peter C. Earle — Why MMT (Ultimately) Doesn’t Matter. Excerpts:

Last year, internet searches for Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) numbered approximately 100 per month; in the years and decades before that, the weekly total searches numbered mostly in single digits. Yet in the first few weeks of this year, searches have topped 100 per day and seem to be on an uptrend...