Tuesday, February 9, 2021

All MMTers Now? — Brian Romanchuk

An observation that I have seen various people on Twitter make is the convergence towards the Modern Modern Theory (MMT) view with regards to the recent fiscal policy debate. The debate is about overheating, and not whether bond market or currency market vigilantes will block expansionary fiscal policy. The inter-temporal governmental budget constraint -- and even its ugly stepchild, the r versus g debate -- is nowhere to be seen.

There is more to MMT than just the Functional Finance parts, but that was the part of MMT that always generated the most heat in online debates. Should MMTers declare victory?
Partial victory. Winning some early battles is not winning the war. There's still a long way to go in educating the voting public on MMT and its policy implications.

Bond Economics
All MMTers Now?
Brian Romanchuk

2 comments:

Andrew Anderson said...

on MMT and its policy implications. Tom Hickey

MMT's policy implications are increased welfare for the banks and, by extension, for the rich, the most so-called "credit worthy" and wage-slavery to government for the victims dis-employed by what is, in essence, their own legally stolen purchasing power/investment opportunity.

The problem ISN'T that MMT policy recommendations are radical or even brave but that they are merely the finishing touches on an inherently unjust (and obsolete given inexpensive fiat) Gold Standard relic banking model.

Ralph Musgrave said...

Re "welfare for banks" mentioned by Andrew above, there's been three papers published recently on that subject:

https://voxeu.org/article/money-creation-bank-profits-and-central-bank-digital-currency?fbclid=IwAR1wwiJwWgktIVd4gFFFWdfrZlxvyegWF304m7cEgeB_CdvZPGxzdlgD7pw

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3776739

https://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/newsletterarticles/private-seigniorage/