Naked Capitalism has the post Scott Fullwiler: Paul Krugman—The Conscience of a Neo-Liberal? published on March 28, 2011.  This is one of the best counter-attacks on Paul Krugman’s attempts to discredit MMT that I have read. It is not just a  counterattack, but it is also an explanation of a lot of MMT. Your mileage may vary.  So this is another one of the posts that I make purely for my own benefit in recording the location of the article.

The article concluded with the following:

To conclude by way of reiterating the main point here, one need not agree with MMT that the three assumptions Krugman makes are incorrect. The overarching problem is that Krugman has simply assumed the Neo-Liberal macroeconomic model is correct and the MMT view is incorrect. This is far different from actually demonstrating that MMT is incorrect, which Krugman has yet to even attempt.

By the way, I stumbled across this article while wending my way through some of the links in the article of my previous post Is It Time for MMT To Become Mainstream to Save Us from the Second Global Financial Crisis of the Millennium?

Apropos of my previous post, New Economic Perspectives has the article Is It Time for MMT To Become Mainstream to Save Us from the Second Global Financial Crisis of the Millennium? by L. Randall Wray.

In the New Economic Perspectives article, Wray is commenting on a Vox article Bernie Sanders opens a new front in the battle for the future of the Democratic Party by Dylan Matthews.

As Dylan says: “For years, the main disagreement between Democratic and Republican budget negotiators was about how to balance the budget — what to cut, what to tax, how fast to implement it — but not whether to balance it. Even most liberal economists agree that, in the medium-run, it’s better to have less government debt rather than more. Kelton denies that premise. She thinks that, in many cases, government surpluses are actively destructive and balancing the budget is very dangerous. For example, Kelton thinks the Clinton surpluses are nothing to brag about and they actually inflicted economic damage lasting over a decade.”

Yeah, Bernie Sanders.  Now if Bernie and Stephanie can turn Elizabeth Warren into an MMTer, we’ll know we are really making progress.  As a constituent of Warren’s, I have tried to use what little influence I have to get Warren thinking about MMT.

Naked Capitalism has the article New Findings Point to Private Credit “Perfect Storm” Brewing in Your Financial Future.

Macroeconomic stability will be more elusive and that will affect all of our lives: from the risks many will face in childhood, to the security of employment at working age, to the challenge of accumulating for retirement. More financial instability will introduce more uncertainty all down the line, and that will be a very different world than the one we would have lived in only a couple of decades ago. But that period of calm also tells us that such instability isn’t necessarily a fact of life, and addressing that is likely to be the policy challenge going forward.

As several comments point out, this is not exactly a new finding, but the graph they show may be new to some people.  Also keep in mind that this article is talking about private credit.  This is what people in the private sector have borrowed and must pay back.  This bears no relation to the federal “debt”.  The federal “debt” is to the federal government like bank account deposits are to banks.  To make this clearer, isn’t it obvious that people tend to buy U.S. Treasury securities because it is absolutely the safest place they can put their money and earn a little interest.  This safety factor is exactly why Treasuries pay a lower interest rate than private banks, and yet the Treasury has plenty of customers who are more than happy to accept the deal.