How & How Not to do Economics is an 2019 INET series of 11 lectures that are about 15 to 20 minutes in length each. I have made it through 4 so far. It is not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing as it is a matter of being exposed to a broader range of ideas. I studied or read about many of the historical figures mentioned here, but at the time I didn’t have enough context to really understand what I was reading. The more I hear lectures like this, the more I realize what I missed when studying these things over 50 years ago,

Interestingly, the various people I listen to who talk about the history of economics don’t always agree on the significance or lessons of the various historical figures that they discuss.

I think it was Taleb who said that you are on the firmest grounds when you just describe what happened, and on much more unstable grounds when you try to explain why things happened the way they did.

I have learned that even discussing what happened is fraught with interpretation. So describing why something happened must be on less firm ground if you can’t even agree on what happened.

Here is the fist lecture. See the link to INET above to get to all the lectures.

Bill Mitchell’s blog has the article The role of bank deposits in Modern Monetary Theory.

You can read this article and still be confused by the word play. I think this sentence in the conclusion settles it for me.

Deposits do not fund loans. But they are one source of funds that the bank has available to ensure that its role in the settlement process is not compromised which would require borrowing from the central bank.

I get a lot of pushback from people who have read about MMT when I try to make the above point. Mitchell’s article discusses the myriad ways that a bank can raise the money it needs. He discusses the different costs that a bank might incur by employing any of these methods. That discussion leads to the above concluding sentence mentioning two of the alternative methods.