New Economic Perspectives has an article that points to an article in Renewal titled Modern money and the escape from austerity by Joe Guinan.  The New Economic Perspectives author L. Randall Wray called the Renewal article:

Here’s one of the best and fairest summaries of MMT that I’ve seen:

Before realizing there was more to the Wray article, I immediately followed the link to the Guinan article.  The article is eye opening in a lot of respects even for me who has been reading about and blogging about MMT for quite some time now.

On 2 January 1879 the United States returned to the gold standard. Specie payments had been quietly suspended in 1861 to meet the costs of the Civil War, with Congress authorising the issuance of $450 million in ‘greenbacks’ – legal tender treasury notes – that greatly increased commercial liquidity and triggered an economic boom. But with wartime exigencies over, banking interests demanded a return to financial propriety and redeemable hard money. ‘Though the Civil War had been fought with fifty-cent dollars’, historian Lawrence Goodwyn explained, ‘the cost would be paid in one-hundred-cent dollars. The nation’s taxpayers would pay the difference to the banking community holding the bonds’ (Goodwyn, 1978, 11). What followed was one of the most extraordinary and creative episodes in the history of popular democratic understanding of money.

You need to read his description of the history of what happened at that time to get an appreciation of how wrong is your current understanding of how money works.  If you think that MMT goes against every notion you have about how money works, then this history tells you that what you think you know cannot possibly explain what happened in 1879 and the following years.  MMT explains it quite well.  So rather than thinking that MMT has no historical precedent, you will learn that historical precedent explains exactly what is wrong with today’s orthodox theory.

As further proof  of what is wrong with the orthodox theory that the public is told, is the following excerpt from the article:

That there was an alternative can be glimpsed in the operations of central bankers. Even as public budgets were being slashed, central banks were pumping staggering sums of new money – hundreds of billions in the UK alone – into the financial system to repair the balance sheets of commercial banks through bailouts and quantitative easing (QE). These central bank operations are not new, but their scale is unprecedented – central bank balance sheets are now three times their pre-crisis levels (Streeck, 2014, 39) – and not a penny had to be ‘paid for’ through taxes or borrowing. ‘It’s not tax money’, former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke explained in a TV interview: ‘The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed’ (Pettifor, 2014, 24). Free money, in other words, was made available to those who caused the crisis in the first place, but not to the vast majority who continue to suffer its consequences. The only reason governments have been able to get away with this is because of public ignorance, fostered by politicians of all stripes, of the basics of banking and money creation. ‘It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system’, Henry Ford once said, ‘for, if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning’ (Greider, 1987, 55).

The aforementioned New Economic Perspectives article is uselessly named Odds and Sods: Some Good Reads For a Cold Winter Friday.  It has lots of good stuff in it besides the link to the Renewal article, but it is badly enough named that I almost didn’t bother to read it.

Common Dreams has the article I Will Grieve. I Will Laugh. But I Am Not Charlie by Josh Healey. This article beautifully puts into words why I have felt some unease about the Euro/American support for Charlie Hebdo magazine.

This excerpt about Molly Ivins captures the way I think about satire.

As the late great Molly Ivins said, “Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel — it’s vulgar.”

This is a good description of the kind of satire I like and the kind that I can easily live without. For instance, this is why I preferred David Letterman instead of Jay Leno.

Josh Healey had a pithy summary point of his own.

 I love free speech as much as anyone, but I can separate the right of people to have free speech with my support for their actual speech. When the ACLU supported the right of neo-Nazis to march through the suburban shtetl of Skokie, IL, they didn’t go around saying #IAmHitler.

I don’t really know why Josh Healey’s explanation should come as a surprise to anyone.  There can’t be very many people who are unfamiliar with the following quote:

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

See two Wikipedia articles for the source of the quote, Evelyn Beatrice Hall and Voltaire.  Hint: If you believe Wikipedia on this subject, the phrase was not coined by Voltaire.

Thanks to Chris Spear for commenting on this article on a Facebook post. His comment is what brought this article to my attention.

Chicago Magazine has the article These Chicagoans Are Pushing Elizabeth Warren to Run for President.

Just how worried Hillary is about Warren was evident in the awkward pronouncement she made at a 2014 midterm campaign event that also featured Elizabeth Warren: “Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.” Hillary quickly had to walk that back, in the process appearing to lack Warren’s most prominent quality: the courage of her convictions.

I saw a video of Clinton’s awkward pronouncement. Awkward doesn’t nearly convey how bad Clinton would be if she tried to convey Elizabeth Warren’s message.  This is exactly why I doubt that Hillary Clinton would be an effective substitute for Elizabeth Warren.  If Clinton were to become the nominee, she would have to up her game considerably before I would work for her election or even vote for her.

Naked Capitalism has the article How the Shale Oil Revolution Has Affected US Oil and Gasoline Prices. This article provides some very useful information about the oil business that I didn’t know about.  You may be similarly enlightened if you were in the same state of ignorance that I was.  Below, I have attempted to choose an excerpt that will hint at some of the information you might not have known.

The US shale oil boom was preceded by a persistent and growing shortage of light sweet crude oil in world markets. US refiners responded to this trend by expanding their capacity to process heavy crudes that remained in abundant supply, becoming the world leader in this field. They were therefore taken by surprise when the US market was inundated with shale crude oil from the centre of the country after 2010.

I don’t know how to take advantage of the knowledge I have gained from the article, but having it has certainly got to be better than not having it.