Archive for MMT

Murphy, Former Disciple of Abba Lerner

I think I’ve got this debt stuff resolved, after spending about a week on an intellectual odyssey. This is truly one of the biggest shifts in my thinking on something that I thought I had down pat, in my life. First, let’s go to Nick Rowe’s taxonomy of the various positions one could hold on […]

Read more

Potpourri

I’m still buried with “day job” work, but at this point I have so many tabs on my Firefox browser that it’s slowing me down. So this post is an investment in my future productivity, see. * Glenn Greenwald once again delivers a very fair assessment of the political culture. It’s really impressive that GG […]

Read more

Wolf vs. Krugman: Separating the Economist From the (Bad) Accountant

Not surprisingly, both my allies and critics seem to be missing the point of my previous post on Krugman and (alleged) accounting identities. So some clarification is in order. First, here’s a simple one I made in the comments on the definition of income: If I do a consulting project for a guy and he […]

Read more

Krugman Promises to Reconcile Himself at a Date TBD

Ah, I’m glad to see some people are apparently busting Krugman in the comments of his blog about an apparent inconsistent (dare I say Kontradiction?). For a while Krugman has been ripping on the people worrying about deficits, by pointing to other countries that have higher debt-to-GDP ratios than the US does. Here’s a good […]

Read more

Potpourri

Lots of links have been piling up here… * You know how Keynesians liked that one journal article showing that businesses were more worried about bad sales than regulations? Well, when a survey shows the exact opposite, they still take it as further evidence that the demand-side story is right. (Note that I’m not saying […]

Read more

Quick Question for the MMTers

For those of you intrepid (foolish?) enough to wade through the comments on this blog, you will note that–contrary to perhaps your initial perception–the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) proponents do not actually say that the issuer of a fiat currency can’t become insolvent. Rather, they qualify it in the following way: To qualify for the […]

Read more

MMT Reporter

This is making the rounds on Facebook.

Read more

More MMT Wisdom on How Debt Works

Somebody in the comments a while back sent me this Mike Norman piece, in which he argues that the federal government paid off the national debt 4 times already…this year! The phony debt crisis facing the United States is kept alive by this one, stupid, soundbite: “How are we gonna pay it back?” The subtext, […]

Read more