YouTube has the video What causes inflation? Economists Radhika Desai & Michael Hudson explain.

In this episode of Geopolitical Economy Hour, economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson discuss inflation: what it is, what causes it, and what are the problems in how the Federal Reserve and other central banks respond to it.

They start off with the point I have been making for years. The rise in asset prices like the stock market prices is a form of inflation that everybody likes. There is no complaint when stock prices rise.

In the comments I inserted this.

Let me see how people here take to my explanation. Private banks do not create money. They create promises of money. The promise is that if you ever need “real” money from the private bank, they will find enough “real” money to satisfy your needs in the form of Federal Reserve Bank money. One example shows what I mean. When you go to a bank’s ATM to withdraw money, you get Federal Reserve Notes. You don’t get anything that represents private bank money.

Another question to ask, is “If private banks create money, why don’t they just create more of it when there is a run on a bank?”

What is it that the Federal Reserve Bank creates that satisfies the demand that private bank money cannot satisfy?

Where is the debt that came from the trillions of dollars the fed created to stop the crash of 2008/2009? The only debt was the USA government’s promise that you could pay your taxes with Federal Reserve Bank money. Why did China need so much Federal Reserve money when they were not subject to USA taxation?

You can find the transcript on the Geopolitical Economy web site article What Causes Inflation?.

I have just discovered the Q & A sessions with Michael Hudson. The episode on YouTube is Systemic Sponsors of Self-Interest.

Prof Michael Hudson answers questions from his Patreon supporters during the quarterly Q&A session. Discussions cover geo-political affairs through China, Russia, USA in light of inflationary pressures.

Even though I am a regular follower of Michael Hudson, each time I view one of these sessions, I learn something new.

Stephanie Kelton has published the article on Substack These Are the Times that Try Men’s Souls.

[B]ecause there is no difference between bond- and money-financed government deficits, there is no reason for the government to sell bonds at all. We can stop today. No further increases in the debt and no unnecessary and counterproductive debt ceiling drama.

Here I go again disputing the words of my allies in the MMT universe. Here was my comment on Stephanie Kelton’s post.

===== comment =====
When the government sells bond in return for money, the government takes spendable money out of the system and replaces it with money that cannot be spent into the economy. So there is a difference between money and bonds. As long as MMT people like yourself try to sell the fiction that there is no difference between money and bonds, you will fail to gain credibility. You do know why the government sold bonds in WW II, don’t you?
===== /comment =====

Can my readers supply the answer to that last question I left for Stephanie Kelton? Surely, she knows the answer you are about to give.

When my friends tell fibs to make a point, I do not appreciate it.

Institute For New Economic Thinking has just posted this 2016 interview We Were Wrong about Keynes [James Crotty].

“I discovered that the Keynes that I had been taught was not the right Keynes historically. This is one of the two or three most famous economists in history. So how could we have gotten him so wrong?”

In 2016 James Crotty (Professor Emeritus, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst) sat down with INET for a wide ranging conversation about his life and experiences becoming a professional economist.

I have never heard this story told in this way before. For a long time I have accepted the idea that government is the only entity that can make some investments that society needs that just cannot be fulfilled by the private sector. I had no idea that this matched with Keynes’ thinking so well.

Institute for New Economic Thinking has highlighted a 5 part series Inequality 101.

In this five-part lecture series from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, economists Arjun Jayadev (Azim Premji Univeristy) and Branko Milanovic (CUNY Graduate Center) break down what inequality is, how we measure it, why it exists, and how to address it.

Here is the trailer for the series.

YouTube has The Grayzone video Matt Taibbi on the Twitter files.

Matt Taibbi joins The Grayzone live for a discussion with Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté about his reporting on internal Twitter files exposing shocking levels of US government pressure on the social media giant to censor accounts dissenting against official deceptions and revealing some of the most titanic frauds of the Trump-era Russiagate drama.

I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to the Twitter files story, so this was somewhat eye-opening for me. Some of the readers of my Facebook page or this blog may be way ahead of me on this story.

I hope I remember to point to this video if anybody should question my disdain for The Dreaded New York Times (TDNYT). This video validates my skepticism of TDNYT and my skepticism of the RussiaGate narrative. I think this also validates my skepticism of the coverage in the corporate new media of the war in the Ukraine.

YouTube has the video Economists Radhika Desai & Michael Hudson explain multipolarity, decline of US hegemony.

Introducing Geopolitical Economy Hour: This is the first episode of a show being hosted every two weeks by economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson. They present the program and discuss the rise of the multipolar world and decline of US hegemony.

Finally a return to what I think is the most important topic going forward. It has been an interesting diversion to get wrapped up in the Ukraine War, but these economic issues are the ones driving everything else.

This introduction is a great summary of what Michael Hudson and Radhika Desai have been trying to explain to us for decades.

Keep in mind that they are discussing a multipolar world not a unipolar one nor even a bipolar one.

Naked Capitalism has published the article The Great Inflation Debate: Supply Shocks and Wealth Effects in a Multipolar World Economy.

Setting the record straight and identifying less destructive pathways forward than round after round of interest rate increases.

Economic history is full of episodes in which inflation triggered both intense social conflicts and heated debates among economists and policymakers over its causes. The present worldwide upsurge in prices is no exception: from the moment governments and central banks first contemplated how to protect their citizens from COVID, inflation hawks and doves divided over whether the measures would touch off an inflationary price spiral.

This contradicts many of my assumptions about the cause of the current inflation. The inflation is about supply chain problems, but the people exercising the demand that drives inflation are not the ones I suspected.

The Analysis News has the interview Time Bomb in Global Finance – Rob Johnson.

A Bank for International Settlements study says 60+ trillion dollars of off-the-books currency swaps could be a profound, systematic risk. Robert Johnson joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news.

I knew how to protect myself from the crash of 2008/2009, but I am not sure I know how to protect myself from the next disaster. What is being described here is the greatest reason why I am so angry at Obama for bailing out the Wall Street crooks and refusing to prosecute them. Remember that Obama specifically chose to go to Harvard so he could learn where the levers of power were. He learned only too well, and he refused to use that knowledge to protect the people who voted him into power.

I have already taken some more extreme measures than I took in 2008. I hope these measures are enough.

This is probably the Bank for International Settlements report that was the subject of the above video Dollar debt in FX swaps and forwards: huge, missing and growing