Stephanie Kelton’s book The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy finally clarifies something I always wondered about.

In studying Modern Money Theory over the years, I have always felt that selling Treasury Bonds to “offset” federal budget deficits was somewhat counter-productive. On the one hand, deficit spending injects money into the private sector of the economy. On the other hand, selling Treasury Bonds drains money out of the private sector. Every time I have heard Stephanie Kelton talk, she says that Treasury Bonds are just another form of money. I kept saying to myself, but although Treasury Bonds can be bought and sold (traded) in the bond market, they are not like ordinary money. You cannot go to the grocery store and buy a loaf of bread with a Treasury Bond.

It took until page 98 in her book for Stephanie Kelton to finally say the words I have been longing to hear for years.

When the Fed wanted to raise interest rates, it sold some of its Treasuries. Buyers paid for those bonds using a portion of their bank reserves. By removing enough reserves, the Fed could move the interest rate up. To cut rates, the Fed would do the opposite, buying Treasuries and paying for them with newly created reserves.

When I first started reading this excerpt, my mind played its usual trick of thinking you don’t raise interest rates by selling bonds. Selling a large quantity of something lowers its price. Then my other brain kicked in to remind myself that the bond price changes inversely to the bond interest rate. A cheaper bond has a higher interest rate. When interest rates go down, existing bonds that pay the old, higher rate get more expensive to buy.

Naked Capitalism has posted the article Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Masks Masquerade.

Incompetence and Errors in Reasoning Around Face Covering

SIX ERRORS: 1) missing the compounding effects of masks, 2) missing the nonlinearity of the probability of infection to viral exposures, 3) missing absence of evidence (of benefits of mask wearing) for evidence of absence (of benefits of mask wearing), 4) missing the point that people do not need governments to produce facial covering: they can make their own, 5) missing the compounding effects of statistical signals, 6) ignoring the Non-Aggression Principle by pseudolibertarians (masks are also to protect others from you; it’s a multiplicative process: every person you infect will infect others).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a better understanding of the implications of probability in determining sensible reactions than many mathematicians. He touches on some of the problems I have always had with practical application of probability. Of course, his understanding is way beyond mine.

Okay, here is the real OMG post for this decade. Of course Michael Hudson has been saying this for years, but Paul Jay gave him an interview where Hudson could explain this all in terms that financially astute people can understand. The future does not look bright if either Trump or Biden gets elected.,

FED’s $10 Trillion Defends Assets of the Rich – Michael Hudson. This is the kind of interview that has been missing from the public discourse since The Real News Network staged a coup to get rid of its founder, Paul Jay.

This is a wonderful explanation of so much, and it is only 27 minutes long. Sacrificing Workers Lives is Back to Work Plan – Paul Jay.

Here is a half hour interview that adds a lot of context to what the Movement for a People’s Party should be fighting for. There is a lot to be learned from some of the details – where Paul Jay is living now, community control of police, the place of worker co-ops, etc.

theAnalysis.news has the article Bill Black: Cities Face Catastrophe; Finance a Cancer on Real Economy.

As part of its management of the current economic crisis, the Federal Reserve will spend approximately 750 billion dollars to prop up the corporate bond market. It’s also buying junk bonds, exchange traded funds and even directly buying into the stock market.

Who’s managing all this for the Fed? BlackRock, of course, the massive asset manager to know more about the extent of BlackRock power and the tremendous concentration of ownership that’s taken place, read my article on the Analysis.news site titled, Three Investment Banks Control More Wealth than the GDP of China, and Threaten our Existence.

None of this is in the center of popular discussion. This is going to be the biggest disaster we have seen in hundreds of years. Long after this people will wonder why we couldn’t have seen this coming. The answer is that we don’t want to hear about this or see it. It is too horrible to contemplate. There are things we can do to prevent this disaster, but it is easier to pretend it isn’t going to happen.

By the way, I am glad to see that Paul Jay is back at it after the coup at The Real News Network. Paul Jay took with him the Real out of the Real News Network when they threw him out.

Along with the above article there is a podcast Paul Jay on Law and Disorder. This concerns the deeper issues behind out current problems.

This embedded recording stops at a little over 18 minutes.

This link goes out to about 22 minutes, but neither of them are the whole interview.

The whole 27 minute interview is in the article Sacrificing Workers Lives is Back to Work Plan – Paul Jay

YouTube has a video clip The Mondragon Cooperatives.

This is a socialist idea I am learning about, but a 2 minute 40 second clip does not answer all my questions about how to make this work. When I see the movie, I will learn more, but it is going to take more than one movie to answer many of my questions.

The movie has a web page Shift Change: Putting Democracy to Work

I have no idea whether or not anything in this video is true or not. If there is a concerted effort to suppress this video, it would seem awfully suspicious. If this video is wrong, then people should challenge it with evidence.

Some notes I took as I watched the video.

Vitamin C, D, and zinc.  

Hydroxychloroquine and AZT.   

This is hard to convey in words as I have tried to do recently. Maybe this picture will help. It stretches the credulity of most ordinary people. Maybe this is why they think they cannot understand Modern Money Theory. It is not MMT’s fault. This is the way it really works.

Here is the way money creation happens in the USA. 0ne of the purposes of Modern Money Theory is to explain this process that current USA laws require for the USA federal government to spend deficit money. MMT does not create this situation. MMT just explains it. If the USA federal legislature chose to do so, it could change the rules to reduce this to only require the first transaction, and eliminate the other four.

The Intercept has the article Screen New Deal: Under Cover of Mass Death, Andrew Cuomo Calls in the Billionaires to Build a High-Tech Dystopia.

Democracy Now has the interview Screen New Deal: Naomi Klein on How Companies Like Google Plan to Profit in High-Tech COVID Dystopia.

In her new report for The Intercept on the “Screen New Deal,” Naomi Klein looks at how the coronavirus pandemic is more high-tech than previous disasters — and how the future we’re being rushed into could transform our lives into a “living laboratory for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future.” She joins us to discuss what she found, and says, “I think we’re going to see very incomplete so-called solutions … that massively benefit private tech interests.”

About the hysteria that China is getting ahead of us in AI, let me remind you that in 1982 Japan embarked on what it called Fifth Generation computing. It turned into a blind alley. AI did not evolve in the direction that Japan bet the farm on.

At Digital Equipment Corporation, my group was dabbling in massively parallel computing. I even have a patent with Gabriel Bischoff in parallel computing that was not massive. Method and apparatus for circuit simulation using parallel processors including memory arrangements and matrix decomposition synchronization.

MasPar was a spinoff of the hardware development of a massively parallel computer at Digital Equipment Corporation. Gabriel Bischoff, in my group, worked on software development of an application on this computer while the hardware development was still at Digital. Gabriel and I worked several levels down the hierarchy from Jeff Kalb.

Do the people of Sturbridge understand that they have the power to remove from the House Ways and Means Committee the biggest roadblock in the country for Medicare for all? It frustrates me that there are Progressive voters who are scouring the country to find a candidate to promote, and they don’t even know about Alex Morse in our own CD1 here in Massachusetts. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Richard Neal has been taking funding from the private health insurance industry to block any efforts to get Medicare For All.

Alex Morse has broader goals than just Medicare For All, but if he accomplished nothing more than to retire Richard Neal, he would have done the country a huge service. Do people in Sturbridge have any idea what a golden opportunity has been placed within their reach?

It would be a shame for us to lose this opportunity because we didn’t know. Knowing is so simple if you just follow this link to the web page for Alex Morse for Congress.

I hear talk about how we need to scare the powers that be who are blocking Medicare For All in Congress. I can think of no better scare tactic than voting them out of office. In Massachusetts, we have a golden opportunity to knock one of those very powerful miscreants out of office. That miscreant is Richard Neal, the Chairman of the House Ways And Means Committee. Some of you in the Worcester area are actually in CD 1, but even if you aren’t, what’s holding you back? People in Worcester were willing to drive to New Hampshire to help Bernie Sanders. Western Massachusetts is not that far away. In the days of Covid-19, you don’t even have to leave your house to volunteer for Alex Morse.

Hello, somebody.