The GRI country-by-country reporting standard is launched today and other accounting standards setters should be taking note — Richard Murphy

As the FT reported a couple of days ago when discussing corporation tax and corporate accountability:

Now the Global Reporting Initiative, a not-for-profit setter of sustainability standards, is seeking to enhance transparency in this area. In a new standard it is calling for improved disclosure of corporate tax strategy, explanation of the reasons why the tax charge in financial accounts falls short of statutory headline tax rates, and country-by-country reporting of business activities, revenues, profits and tax.

Tax Research UK
The GRI country-by-country reporting standard is launched today and other accounting standards setters should be taking note
Richard Murphy | Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London; Director of Tax Research UK; non-executive director of Cambridge Econometrics, and a member of the Progressive Economy Forum

Who are accounts really for? – my first column now I am back with AccountingWEB — Richard Murphy

Important. Richard Murphy reports that the era of responsibility to shareholders rather than stakeholders is over. TPTB recognize that capitalism has to be "reset." It's not working as it is and the result is social unrest.

Tax Research UK
Who are accounts really for? – my first column now I am back with AccountingWEB
Richard Murphy | Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London; Director of Tax Research UK; non-executive director of Cambridge Econometrics, and a member of the Progressive Economy Forum

Richard Murphy — It’s time for accountancy to put climate change at the core of financial reporting

Socializing negative externality doesn't eliminate the actual cost. That needs to be accounted for.

Tax Research UK

It’s time for accountancy to put climate change at the core of financial reporting

Richard Murphy

Awara — Simple Tips That Will Help You Choose the Best Accounting Company in Russia

While doing business in Russia, you might have already learned the easy or the hard way that local accounting principles significantly differ from Western practices due to requirements of Russian law.

Accounting is institutional and its rules are determined by institutional arrangements that are generally part of the legal structure in modern societies.

This can make comparison of data difficult in different jurisdictions.

Awara
Simple Tips That Will Help You Choose the Best Accounting Company in Russia

Steve Roth — Why Tyler Cowen Doesn’t Understand the Economy: It’s the Debt, Stupid

It’s the debt, stupid = doing economics without balance sheets and awareness of finance.

It’s as if Irving Fisher and Hyman Minsky had never written.

Conventional economists seem to do their thinking without tethering it to the real world though finance as a source of funds and accounting as the record of what actually happens in market exchange. If economists are looking for microfoundations, this is where it is, rather than in "preferences," "expectations" and "confidence."

Asymptosis
Why Tyler Cowen Doesn’t Understand the Economy: It’s the Debt, Stupid

Steve Roth

Ellis Winningham — A Brief Note on Loan Payments, Accounting and Bank IOUs

Whenever I discuss banking operations, I usually receive at least one question asking me about how a loan is paid off and where the payments go, in addition to further clarification of bank IOUs. So, I’m going to answer them all at once. First, though, I want to point out that when you ask about how a bank processes your loan payments or terminates a loan, that is not exactly a macroeconomics question. It is an accounting question.

Ellis Winningham — MMT and Modern Macroeconomics
A Brief Note on Loan Payments, Accounting and Bank IOUs

Ellis Winningham

Diane Coyle — Civilising money

I am going to have to read this book. Fortunately, it is modestly priced. You can "Look inside" at Amazon.

Publisher's blurb:

In the aftermath of recent financial crises, it's easy to see finance as a wrecking ball: something that destroys fortunes and jobs, and undermines governments and banks. In Money Changes Everything, leading financial historian William Goetzmann argues the exact opposite--that the development of finance has made the growth of civilizations possible. Goetzmann explains that finance is a time machine, a technology that allows us to move value forward and backward through time; and that this innovation has changed the very way we think about and plan for the future. He shows how finance was present at key moments in history: driving the invention of writing in ancient Mesopotamia, spurring the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome to become great empires, determining the rise and fall of dynasties in imperial China, and underwriting the trade expeditions that led Europeans to the New World. He also demonstrates how the apparatus we associate with a modern economy--stock markets, lines of credit, complex financial products, and international trade--were repeatedly developed, forgotten, and reinvented over the course of human history.

Exploring the critical role of finance over the millennia, and around the world, Goetzmann details how wondrous financial technologies and institutions--money, bonds, banks, corporations, and more--have helped urban centers to expand and cultures to flourish. And it's not done reshaping our lives, as Goetzmann considers the challenges we face in the future, such as how to use the power of finance to care for an aging and expanding population.

Money Changes Everything presents a fascinating look into the way that finance has steered the course of history.

Finance and economics are two side of the same coin, one coin among the many, albeit a very important coin, that figured in the development of civilization and life as we know it today. But even today, finance and economics remain separate disciplines, and very few understand their intimate connection through price ("money") as the basis of markets, and accounting as the common language of finance, business and economics. 

The Enlightened Economist
Civilising money
Diane Coyle | freelance economist and a former advisor to the UK Treasury. She is a member of the UK Competition Commission and is acting Chairman of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation

Joanna Masel — How Your Savings Plan Fuels an Arms Race on Wall Street

Policy makers are keen to encourage people to save more money for retirement, e.g. via tax incentives. This is great advice for individuals; the more money an individual saves, the more comfortable their retirement. But is it also a good idea for society as a whole? What happens when everybody tries to save money at the same time?

To answer this, we need to understand the distinction between relative and absolute competitions. Think about a running race. An absolute competition pits each runner against the clock. In an evolutionary contest, where anyone who finishes the race in less than a certain time is allowed to have children, those with stumpy legs and flat feet will be replaced by the children of the fast runners. In future generations, the average person runs faster.

In contrast, in a relative competition, where competitors race in pairs against one another instead of against the clock, rules of fair play do not apply. One competitor is super fast. Unfortunately, he gets tackled from behind. In the ensuing brawl, he receives a solid blow to the head and passes out. The slower guy then wins. In each generation, the competition gets tougher, but not necessarily because the new generation runs faster. Strictly speaking, this relative competition does not favor being fast. What it favors is crossing the finish line before your competitor. Running fast is one way of crossing the finish line first. But evolution is a creative process, and there are many different ways of achieving the same goal. It is hard to predict which of the many solutions will triumph, and not all of the solutions are ones that we like.

If saving for retirement is an absolute contest, then policy makers are doing the right thing when they encourage people to save for retirement. But if saving for retirement is a relative contest, the incentives we give for retirement plans may achieve nothing, or even worse, do economic harm.

In the real world, it’s sometimes hard to figure out which competitions are relative and which are absolute. But the mathematics behind the two are different, and so are their outcomes. During my training in evolutionary biology, I learned to use a standard mathematical model in which competition was relative. In contrast, economists learn standard mathematical models that are based on absolute competitions. These default assumptions, built into the curriculum, can shape the way someone approaches a problem for the rest of their career.

As a result, economists are biased towards assuming that competitions increase prosperity. Evolutionary biologists like me are trained to have the opposite bias, instead assuming that competitions are zero-sum. In both cases, the truth is probably somewhere in between, but how we are trained affects which situations we see as “normal” and which as “special”, and which sort of mistakes we are most likely to make.
My recent book argues that saving for retirement has become a relative contest, but that economists dangerously mistake it for an absolute one.

Saving does not cause investment.

Evonomics
How Your Savings Plan Fuels an Arms Race on Wall Street
Joanna Masel

Ramanan — National Accounting As Atheism

On his blog, Sample Of One, Eric Lonergan has a post tiled Accounting as religion: Buffett, Derrida, and MMT. The post ends with the following line:

"… but money is not a liability of the state."

Eric’s post is arguing with the Neochartalists but my post here has nothing to do with Neochartalism. I always find it amusing when people go “money is not the liability of the state, even though it’s technically a liability” and so on. I am going to take a different track here and make an argument like James Tobin’s brilliant 1963 paper Commercial Banks As Creators Of “Money” .… 

The Case For Concerted Action
National Accounting As Atheism
V. Ramanan

Eric Tymoigne — Money and Banking – Part 2

The previous post reviewed basic balance-sheet mechanics. This post begins to apply them to the Federal Reserve System (Fed).

New Economic Perspectives
Money and Banking – Part 2
Eric Tymoigne

Bill Mitchell— Flow-of-funds and sectoral balances

I have noted some misperceptions about the derivation, meaning and application of the so-called sectoral balances framework that is used in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to help explicate the relationship between the government and the non-government sectors. Some of this confusion appears to be the product of a deeper misunderstanding of the difference between stocks and flows and relationships between flows in economics. Those who conclude that this framework is really just an accounting structure are incorrect. Equally, those who conclude that the accounting relationships that are part of the sectoral balances framework are matters of interpretation are also incorrect. It should be clear that the sectoral balances framework combines accounting structures, which are derived from the national accounts framework used by statisticians to measure economic activity, and theoretical propositions, which seek to explain relationships between variables within the accounting structures. In other words, we need to understand both the accounting aspects that are true by definition as well as the underlying theoretical structures which drive the balances.…

Must-read relative to understanding MMT.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Flow-of-funds and sectoral balances
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Ecoof the Centre of Full Employment and Equnomics and Director ity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Steve Roth — Thinking About “Assets” and Ownership

Purely “real” or nonfinancial assets have no such offsetting claims on other balance sheets. In theory, they represent direct claims on real goods.
That seemingly simple distinction, though, is far from simple when you start exploring it carefully.

To that end, consider the fundamental nature of “claims,” hence the nature and import of “ownership” and “property rights.” Full credit here to Matt Bruenig, who delivered the Aha! understandings for me on these topics — clear and (mutually) coherent definitions and explanations for concepts I’d been worrying at for years.

Mostly simply, ownership is an exclusionary legal claim. Ownership says you may have a picnic on your front lawn — which seems inclusionary, but that’s only meaningful because you may exclude anyone else from doing so. And you may invoke violence (farmed out to the police) to enforce that right of exclusion. As Matt has said so well, a modern ownership claim is best viewed as a violence voucher issued by government.

This imparts a decidedly sinister aspect to the lefthand side of balance sheets — a tally sheet of violence vouchers?…

So now to return, with that understanding, to the notion of real vs financial assets. In large, in aggregate, in the big national or global picture, both types of assets ultimately constitute claims on real goods. Someone holding zero real/nonfinancial assets but significant financial assets can make an immediate and successful claim on a new Maserati — a very “real” good. Everyone else is excluded from claiming that Maserati.
If this exclusionary notion is safe, in a very real sense your “real,” “nonfinancial” asset claim is actually offset by a liability — on the (EverybodyElseIn)TheWorld balance sheet. Call the entry “Stuff that we’re excluded from touching.” If all those exclusionary claims wall off AllTheGoodStuff with violence, we’re talking a very real liability indeed — even though this imaginary World Balance Sheet doesn’t, and practically probably can’t, exist.

This notional balance sheet may seem crazy and outlandish to us. But our ownership, property-rights, and “asset” structures do and have seemed equally outlandish to other cultures:

…fee-simple ownership is not the only basis for ownership and possession of land. Many eastern cultures and tribal cultures throughout the world follow the “communal property system” in which ownership of land belongs to the entire social/political unit, like the tribe, families, bands, and nations.

From the inside, ideologies always look like common sense.

Asymptosis
Thinking About “Assets” and Ownership
Steve Roth

JP Hochbaum — T Accounts of monetary operations

Put together by Nathan Cedric Tankus

FYI.

Heretical Druthers
T Accounts of monetary operations
JP Hochbaum

Cameron K. Murray — A tribal ceremony: Reconciling the economics of debt

To begin, a theory of resource allocation is right to treat debt as an internal allocation mechanism of real resources in the economy.

In a my household, for example, I can lend my wife money to treat herself a new dress today. If we were accurately keeping internal household accounts that would be a transfer from myself to her. In real terms, my consumption of resources decreases and hers increases.

Next week the debt is ‘repaid’ according to our internal accounts when my wife lends me money to take the kids to the football.

When we look at our household as an aggregate entity, our total resource consumption is unchanged by the debt, which merely represents an internal reallocation.

There were no future resources brought forward for my wife to consume. The debt did not leave a cost to our children. Even if it was never repaid, I already paid for my household’s debt with the resources I didn’t consume when I transferred purchasing power to my wife.
It surprises me that on this crucial point the core mainstream concepts are consistent with the functional finance or modern monetary theory perspective, yet there remains animosity between these groups. I have come to believe that this is mostly a result of inadequate understanding of their own conceptual apparatus by the mainstream (here’s an example of how the noisiest mainstream commentators remain confused about their own theories). [emphasis added]

Much of the mainstream has equated 'looking through' debt to the real resources of the economic with ignoring the money creation aspect of debt altogether. This has lead to further confusion in the analysis of banking and economics generally, with the Bank of England recently having to explain the process to the economics community.
These core economic concepts are easily confused when one fails to properly understand the complete accounting of the system at all points in time. Specifically the use of overlapping generations (OLG) models can confuse more than inform, and many students come away from learning these models believing in the possibility of inter-temporal reallocations of resources.… 

Fresh Economic Thinking
A tribal ceremony: Reconciling the economics of debt
Cameron K. Murray

The Whole World Runs A Capitalism & Macro-Economic "Barro" Experiment, And The Results Come Out Opposite To Theory

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



This is just astounding. Was there ever another peep from Barro?

Bill Mitchell Unearths Yet More Options [not taken] for Europe

If this occurred in the field of physics - or any other science/engineering field - they'd IMMEDIATELY change the theory ... to fit experimental facts.

But not us!!! We just pretend it never happened, and try twice as hard to make the failed experiment-on-ourselves work "right" - right?

There are a number of astounding findings Bill Mitchell is dredging up about the Monetarist backlash against reality. I'll only mention one, for the sheer lack of imagination it shows.

“[Imaginary] multipliers and marginal propensities to consume ordinary goods and services would be relatively larger under [imaginary settings] than under quantitative easing/new bond financing of budget deficits.”

Wow! We’re trying to let ad hoc accounting rules dictate to unpredictable reality? What would Maxwell, Boltzmann, Einstein & Planck say? Or Alfred Nobel? Is there an Ignoble Prize in Economics?

What to do about the "banking reserves" which our fiat currency accounting methods throws off as a nominal side effect of any economic growth? How about some imagination? If we can run Carbon Credit Markets which trade Carbon Credits for reducing greenhouse gases, why not a Public Purpose Market that trades PublicPurpose Credits for draining nominal banking “reserves” as well?

If you listen carefully, you can actually hear the sound of reality re-entering the faint minds of double-entry accounting gnomes. Despite all odds, they haven't made an entry for net national growth on their ledgers, opposite the entry for net banking reserves.

Stay tuned for the next episode of the hit tragecomedy:

Accounting Rules Reality

or One Class Flown Upside Down Over The Cuckoo's Fully Amortized Nest

Starring: Du Bell 'entry, as Big Purse

The moral? When capitalists come to a fork in the road .... they stick it to themselves? (With apologies to Robert Frost.)

Perhaps we need to consider some paths less taken?

Capitalism Is Merely Personal Accounting Excessively Applied, Leading To Social-Dissociation, Not Social-Aggregation

(Commentary Posted by Roger Erickson)





So why not just replace minimum wage with a minimum cultural profit sharing program? Another Automatic Stabilizer? Same effect. Just simpler & more agile accounting. That would be FAR less of a burden than all our existing prison and welfare agencies - which effectively tie people up keeping others tied up.

Why not?

"The fundamental issue in capitalism is capital share versus labor share. The reason that capitalism doesn't work is that capitalists are always trying to increase that ratio in favor of themselves, and [in recent times] they have generally had the power to do so.  

Since labor doesn't organize to exercise it's aggregate power, the only countervailing force is government at large. Whenever capital captures government, that avenue is closed." Tom Hickey

Sadly, Tom's statement seems to fit observable events pretty accurately.

If generally true, then the situation of the MiddleClass, and the description of all economics, can be succinctly summarized.

Capitalism as we practice it is merely personal accounting overly applied to social-dissociation, not social-aggregation!

The entire concept of capitalism is one big Fallacy of Scale? 

If one of us hoards, he may be better off. So if all of us hoard static assets, we'll all be better off as a team? What part of "does not compute" do we train capitalists to ignore, as a taboo?

We are once again experiencing a period when the old, local habit of distributed hoarding threatens to undermine and overwhelm the still-emerging, distributed habit of scalable collaboration. And we are worshiping that taboo as a national mantra! All the while claiming that we worship no false idols. It's a joke.

One could be excused for imagining that social parasites have co-opted our national religions and secular institutions alike, and use them to rule us, from within.

Haven't there been ANY capitalism models which unify aggregate PLUS personal accounting as components plus whole? Nothing since tribal pass-through economic structures themselves, & the Greek Nomisma? 

Is this ridiculously simple hurdle the crux of all micro/macro and currency conundrums?

We need only fuse biology, anthropology, sociology and capitalism - again?

Until then, we remain enslaved to the myth that state-currency has to be obtained from private parties. 

It should be self-evident to any thinking citizen that currency, like coordination, is an outcome of interactions and inter-dependencies themselves, and can ONLY exist as something abstract, generated on-demand by real actions.

Where did all our confusion come from, about such a simple topic? 

Is it primarily because capitalism began in a time when ultimate aggregate power was ceded to aristocracy rather than to tribes, aggregates or democracies? Why else would all accounting be addressed purely from the view of currency_users, and never include currency_issuers?

It seems that humans really do scale stupidity faster than their collective talents!

Let's make this real simple. The only way for any aggregate to be MORE than the sum of it's parts ... is if it formalizes an accounting method that tracks return-on-coordination itself, as a dynamic asset, and the reference asset for the aggregate.

Aggregate success tracks the quality & utility of our assessment method?

Limiting ourselves to summarizing all the static assets owned by different components of a system leads us away from, not towards that dynamic goal.

Sovereign currency denominates the various forms of return-on-coordination. Regardless of the arbitrary rules of a given regime, state currency is, in short, always functionally "backed" by Public Initiative.

Teamwork - return-on-coordination - is so obviously what IS done, that we have to go to great efforts to systemically lie enough to convince ourselves that it's NOT what we are doing? Mass stupidity requires massive distribution of taboos? It appears so.

Hence, our diverse, Innocent Frauds really ARE our worst enemies? The legions of related innocent frauds multiply everywhere. See comments here, urging citizens to adhere to form, not function - and worse, to give up any attempts to correctly re-state incorrectly stated form.

You couldn't make this up. 

Variations on the Deficit Doves, as Warren Mosler calls them? By hiding behind a twisted facade of morality, they help keep us enslaved to what some fraction manage to formally STATE in key places, rather than what all of us, in aggregate, formally DO?

Why didn't that entire conundrum go away 500 years ago, with spread of the Scientific Method?* Is it actually a taboo, to apply operational logic to national policy, and public discourse?

#####

* Seriously, we could write a social comedy about democracy in America.

If we simply WRITE the form of Idiocracy into our institutions, we can TRY to guarantee that we remain idiots forever - regardless of whatever taboo functions we have to practice in secret ... just to functionally exist.

Should we take the "literalist's" advice to heart, and quit trying to correct ANY bad habit that any of us has ever formed - simply because an excuse for it has been WRITTEN somewhere? That'll fix it! Things will be SO much easier now that that's cleared up. We'll never need to edit or amend ANYTHING, ever again, not a disproved equation or statement, not even the Constitution. We won't even have to use spellcheckers! :)

Isn't that the definition of literalism, i.e., belief in form to the exclusion of function? That's a good way to lead aggregates off a cliff, just because a printed policy clearly says that that's where to go.

When our perceptions of functional facts changes, shouldn't we be honest enough to update minds and theories to fit newly obwerved facts, ASAP? Isn't that the definition of survival, and morality?

The visible danger of literalism is the compulsion to slavishly adhere to stated form, regardless of actual function.

"A system behaves according to its underlying structure...it's behavior is a function of it's topology, period. We can only restrict it." Paul Meli

Paul's words imply the known statistics of development, selection and evolution. The only apparent purpose of all "restrictions" is to pare or tune the statistics of constantly emerging diversity into a lean foundation.

Why? So we can build even more on top of that foundation.

So what do we do with all the accumulating rules & regulations we write, in order to slowly produce better cultural foundations?

The list of legal constraints which we're always using to constrain and tune our emerging options can easily obfuscate the real function of our systems - to serve as additional launch platforms. Most old written policies are just conveniently forgotten. It takes additional effort to recursively review written politicies, if some literalist finds a way to mis-use them. 

Functionally, writing out a long list of places we usually shouldn't go leaves a short, UNSTATED list of places where we can go - but both lists have to change continuously, as we discover, by trial & error, where we as a people MUST go next. This reveals responsibility, no matter where we look, but there's no shirking it - if we want our kids to survive and prosper.

What slows us down?

Literalists struggle to see function from our long lists of regulations, while functionalists see only the function, and learn to ignore the regulatory details.

The easy, historically functional solution was to have democracies settle upon consensus goals, and then delegate achievement to explorers and leaders. As a 3rd step, have agile electorates and their leaders continuously TELL literalist accountants where we HAD to go next, so the literalists could then recursively adjust all the long cascades of forms - rules & regulations - to allow us to get there, with agility.

Putting the wrong personality types in the wrong occupations can obviously create maladaptive havoc - like the type of havoc generated when political leadership and policy development offices are staffed with capitalists and lawyers and economists, instead of people who can think about emerging function. 

Keep regulatory agencies staffed with literalists, and reserve leadership offices for functionalists? This ain't rocket science.

"Underlying systems are not at all complicated to anyone that can think and solve problems in a systematic manner.

Yet the overlying legal structure gets all of the focus. Thus is where literalists are focused, always missing the evolving forest for the trees.

If we don't understand how a particular system should be arranged, or why, we end up aimlessly puttering around with it's regulatory constraints, based on different stylized visions of how some people think it works...only to be disappointed or worse, injured in some way when it doesn't respond as expected." Paul Meli

Wow! Does Paul nail sociology and economics? Or what? And he's not the first to see this. Without consensus agreement on aggregate purpose, we fall back to squabbling over the narrow purposes of conflicting sub-groups, thereby generating an immense Output Gap as net teamwork is ignored. Some entire countries, no matter how intelligent, no longer let themselves learn!

More to the point, the 320-million people making up the analog network comprising our "Group Brain" never thinks just THIS alone or THAT alone.

Rather, the "Aggregate Perception" of any such large, analog network, is the sum of all the threads waxing and waning in nation-wide Public Discourse - just like what comes out our mouths, or unfolds in our actions, is the result of the trail of conflicting ideas (patterns) running through the billions of neurons in our individual brains at different times.

We only appear to have singular policy points, and even then ONLY when we delegate function to a given, transient form of policy or treaty or other regulation. The timeless reality is that if we do not update our transient forms rapidly enough to stay within striking distance of ever-changing reality, we are actively killing ourselves through neglect!!!

So everything, CONSTANTLY, comes down to RECRUITING proportions of an Aggregate Brain to emerging, adaptive function, rather than to just random (and always soon obsolete) form. No matter how many obsolete forms are simultaneously stated or recorded in other parts of the aggregate, we have to change each and every one of them, sooner or later.

What part of "dynamic, analog networks" were all of our overly anthropomorphic literalists NOT introduced to, early enough in life?

Capitalism Redefined? .. Not Really

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Two capitalists list capitalism's flaws ... can't make any plausible suggestions

For Democracy's Sake! Can't these guys just use ANY previously existing chemical system as a precedent model?

How about the trillions of biochemical model systems already existing?

Or the billions of physiological models?

Or even mathematical models of closed-loop, ecological systems?

Only naive, hopelessly anthropomorphic capitalists would say that capitalism is the greatest problem-solving system in history.

Capitalism is simply a crude, and very partial, VIRTUAL ACCOUNTING SYSTEM used in some human cultures. It's an accounting system that we're currently using as a crutch until better system instrumentation methods evolve, to allow more agile, real-time sensing, discussion, exploring and assessment behaviors among human aggregates. Capitalist accounting is simply a hack we use, AFTER THE FACT, to divvy up - productively or not - the spoils of group endeavors. There's a reason no army uses capitalism to manage it's operations. It doesn't work as a guide for group operations. Only as a hack for maintaining some some arbitrary degree of honour among a mob of thieves.

If any amoeba had to depend only upon capitalistic behavior among it's trillions of molecules to survive .... it wouldn't! Not for a minute. 

The highly regulated, coordination METHODS which are deeply programmed into the characteristics of ANY functioning aggregate, are those which are painstakingly selected through trial and error. It is NEVER every man for himself, which is what most people assume capitalism means. 

Bottom line is that cultural attributes are how we survive. Capitalism is just an arbitrary accounting methods which cultures use to track SOME, but not all, of their transactions. For example, we don't (always) overtly buy/sell citizenship, spouses, or babies - or even friends, or countless similar examples.

These guys must have been raised in an MBA or Finance school. They don't seem to know anything else.  As usual, they completely leave out any mention of the return-on-coordination, which is a given in the very definition of a social species, but isn't even mentioned in "capitalism."

Randy Wray — What Do Banks Do? What Should They Do?

Minsky.

Economonitor — Great Leap Forward
What Do Banks Do? What Should They Do?
L. Randall Wray | Professor of Economics and Research Director of the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability, University of Missouri–Kansas City

Winterspeak— Intentionality and Accounting

Some weeks ago I had a good back-and-forth with the indomitable JKH in the forums about how useful Mosler's "paradigm shift" approach was vs JKHs "strictly the accounting" strategy. Mosler plays fast and loose with the language a little at time to better get his point across, and my position was (and remains) that if your goal is to knock people out of one way of thinking and into another, then sometimes you need to hit them over the head. But I don't think anyone has quite cracked that nut (no pun intended).

And yes, the term "paradigm shift" is grotesquely over and mis-used, but I think in term of MMT/PK vs standard academic economics, it is the correct term as we really are talking about taking an entire worldview, not just an isolated theory, and all of the implications that come with it; and jettisoning it for something else. This is a multiple-organ transplant procedure here, not a buttock lift, so roll up your sleeves.

Conceptualization counts when one is bucking the mainstream model.

Winterspeak
Intentionality and Accounting

Steve Keen —The self-destruction of academic economics

The self-destruction of academic economics
Steve Keen

Over the last 40 years, economics has gone from being 40% of any business degree to just 4%. When I did my undergraduate degree, 4 year-long Economics subjects were required in any Business degree; now 1 semester unit out of 24 is required.

This collapse in the Economics component of Business degrees is the reward for 40 years of bone-headed behavior by Neoclassical economist defending the purity of the discipline, which created many of the academic departments that then did Economics in. Non-orthodox economists have been collateral damage in this process.

I recommend that we should finish the process. The only factor preserving one Economics unit in Business degrees is that Accounting accreditation requires it. Post Keynesian economists should work with Accountants to replace Introductory Economics with an "Monetary Economics for Accounting" subject. That will cut off the cash cow 1st year Economics course that currently lets Neoclassical economics survive, and enable a more realistic monetary economics to develop in Accounting departments.

This is my keynote speech at the 2013 Australian Teaching Economics Conference.