A little bit of a different blog post format today. I mentioned in this blog post – Apparently core MMT idea is now supported by the mainstream (October 16, 2019) – that the Japanese government had taken issued a statement, by way of a formal answer to a series of questions from Japanese CDR politician Kazuma Nakatani on the opening day of the new Parliament (October 4, 2019). The Japanese government reply was not available in full at the time I wrote that but it was reported in the Japanese Media that the Government response could be summarised as “As a government, we don’t implement policy based on the idea that Japan is a successful case of MMT because its inflation and interest rates are not rising despite massive debt … We are working to restore fiscal health”. Which I thought was an interesting way of trying to deny the undeniable but also missed the point somewhat – being that MMT is not a ‘case’ but rather just provides an alternative lens to understanding the way in which modern monetary systems operate, the capacities of the currency-issuing government within those monetary systems, and the consequences of particular policy choices. In that context, over the last 3 odd decades, the Japanese government has pushed policy into new domains – large-scale central bank government bond purchases with continuous, and, at times, relatively large fiscal deficits yet has seen interest rates fall to zero and below, inflation low to negative and negative long-term bond yields. The consequences of the policy choices have been anathema to those predicted by mainstream macroeconomists. Japan has essentially defied mainstream economics and demonstrated its falsities. The only body of macroeconomic thought that gets close to explaining the Japanese situation is Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). That is why our work is being discussed at the highest levels in Japan. Anyway, today, I can present full translations of the Questions and the Government response with my annotations of that response. My translation was considerably enhanced by Kobayashi Chie and I thank her heaps for her help.
Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Q & A Japanese government style – denial has no boundaries
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia
"For some reason, the Japanese government is highly resistant to admitting the obvious.
ReplyDeleteIt wants to hold out a view that its macroeconomic policy thinking is mainstream orthodox and the major prognostications of that orthodoxy are binding constraints on its fiscal space."
lol this is how the platonistic method works its non discriminatory...
switch to Science...
“ lol this is how the platonistic method works its non discriminatory...”
ReplyDeleteLol! Meaning that it includes Matt too. But Matt ain’t that good at it and therefore has a massive envy toward those who are good at it making him a giant crybaby.