Pitchfork Economics has the podcast What is Modern Monetary Theory? (with Stephanie Kelton).

Is government debt real? Is anything real? Professor Stephanie Kelton gives Nick and Goldy a master class on the hottest idea in economics right now: Modern Monetary Theory.

Stephanie Kelton is a professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University and a senior economic adviser to Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. She was the chief economist on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee in 2015 and in 2016, POLITICO named her one of the 50 people most influencing the public debate in America. Her forthcoming book, ‘The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of a New Economy’ will be published by Public Affairs in 2020.

It is always interesting to hear podcasts involving experts in MMT being interviewed by non-experts. After the experts sign off the non-experts talk about all that they don’t understand about MMT. That is exactly the time you need the expert to explain to you the parts you didn’t get. There are answers to all the questions they raise after Stephanie Kelton signs off. She is exactly the person who could have straightened them out, but they let her go.

With only a few years of study of MMT on my part, I think I could have answered all their questions and doubts.

If I had the time and the energy, I would go back through the podcast, collect all the issues they raised before and after they were speaking to Stephanie Kelton, and try to answer them all here.

To concentrate my energy in clarifying what Stephanie Kelton said, People could pose their questions on my Facebook post, and I will try to answer them there.

One thing that I think may have gotten lost in the conversation is that debt of currency users can be a concern, where “debt” of the currency issuer is a totally different matter.

Wired has the article All the Ways Facebook Tracks You—and How to Limit It.

If you have a Facebook account—and even if you don’t—the company is going to collect data about you. But you can at least control how it gets used.

I still use Facebook to advertise posts that are on this blog, but for those who don’t have a real need for Facebook, they might rethink what they are doing. Be aware that

Facebook owns WhatsApp and Instagram, too,

kontrast.at has the article Portugal has found an antidote to right wing populism.

Considering the booming economy, dropping unemployment numbers and the return of many once-emigrated young Portuguese citizens, it seems Portugal is on the rise. Facing the policies of socialist Prime Minister António Costa, which include properly supporting the welfare state and investing in the public sector instead of austerity measures, right wing populists don’t stand a chance.

This is from February 2019. This appears to be an example that shows that getting away from the austerity of neoliberalism can make significant improvements in the lifestyles of the people in countries that can use some socialism where appropriate.

The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies has published an article on the interview Modern Monetary Theory: meet the economists fighting the economy.

From the USA presidential campaign perspective, I choose to highlight the following excerpt:

The jobs guarantee has the crucial advantage over universal basic income that it encourages the employment of people to do work that needs doing, and there’s no shortage of that.

“There are a whole set of activities that address unmet community need that the market will never address because they can’t be reconstructed into profit-making activities,” Mitchell argues.

YouTube has the video The Good Dream is Factual MMT Warren Mosler.

First International Conference on Modern Monetary Theory 2017

An excellent address by Warren Mosler

This is one fabulous video. Warren Mosler always can simplify concepts so that they are hard to argue against. The only problem is that most people will have a little voice in their heads telling them that what Mosler says can’t possibly be true. Every reason people can come up with about why it can’t be true is easily shot down. Yes, but what about this, or what about that? Mosler has an answer for all of these things.

I like to use the Mark Twain quote – “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” People just know for sure that what Mosler says just cannot be true.

Here is a transcript of one quote in particular that is worth my remembering.

The government needs you to need their money. 33:45 “I don’t like to say taxes don’t fund spending because the word fund is ambiguous and even though you are right you can be dead right. It’s better to say the government doesn’t need your money to be able to spend. Not that it doesn’t fund it, it’s they don’t need it to be able to spend, but they need you not to have it. … You have to create a shortage to be able to spend. Taxes are more powerful than spending. A tax of $1 allows the government to spend maybe $1.25.”

YouTube has the video Shoshana Zuboff: Surveillance capitalism and democracy.

The collection and analysis of data is changing the way economies operate. Are these changes so fundamental that they can be said to have led to the emergence of a new form of capitalism – surveillance capitalism? If people’s behaviour is made increasingly transparent, do we become a society in which trust is no longer necessary? Are individuals a mere appendage to the digital machine, objects of new mechanisms which reward and punish according to the determinations of private capital? How is social cohesion affected when people become dispensable as a labour force, while their data continues to provide function as a source of value in lucrative new markets that trade in predictions of human behaviour? How should we understand the new quality of power that arises from these unprecedented conditions? What kind of society does it aim to create? And what ramifications will these developments have for the principles of liberal democracy? Will privacy law and anti-trust law be enough? How can we tame what we do not yet understand?

I had no idea how eyeopening this talk would be. It was worth every minute of the 2 hours I spent watching this. Some of her most profound statements came in the Q & A session after the formal talk. I’ll have to go back and listen to the introductions. I initially skipped over them because I was impatient to hear about this topic that was new to me.

Deficit Owls put the link to the video How Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) Actually Works (w/ Warren Mosler) on their Facebook page. The video is on YouTube.

Modern Monetary Theory has become a hot topic of discussion. But is it well understood? In this interview with Real Vision’s Ed Harrison, Warren Mosler, the founder of MMT, describes exactly what Modern Monetary Theory is, and how the framework can be utilized. Particularly interesting is Mosler’s ambivalence about the political furor enveloping MMT. He sees the economic framework as more descriptive of monetary operations than prescriptive of policy. Mosler also outlines why MMT’s operational bent made it attractive to finance professionals long before it became a politically-charged debate among academic economists and politicians. Filmed on May 29, 2019 in New York.

Here is a fabulous interview from the godfather of MMT. In the beginning you have to listen fast to some of what he says. He says things faster than you may be able to absorb them. Later he starts to talk about how he came to understand what he had earlier described. For me this is a tremendous payoff. I have been learning MMT for a few years now, and there is always a bit or a piece here and there that I am not sure I get. He clarified so much for me in this one hour. Whatever you can get from this interview will add to your understanding of how money works and why you need to understand it. Whatever you don’t get should just encourage you to listen to more explanations that build your knowledge. Slowly, but surely, your brain will start to light up as you come to understand more. At least that is the way it works for me in any field I decide to study.

In trying to understand how a piece of software works, we often do what is called reverse engineering. We look at the code to figure out what it is doing to accomplish the task it is designed for. If the designer provides you with a description of the design he created before he or she started writing the code, then you will be miles ahead in understanding how the code does its job. In this sense, the interview with Warren Mosler is the design document that tells you how we came up with the concepts in MMT. I have seen documents from others that he worked with to develop MMT, but this is the best piece I have ever seen from Warren Mosler himself.

I took some courses in software engineering that used a book by a revered teacher Donald Knuth called The Art of Computer Programming. He seemed to like to explain computer algorithms by giving you the code in an assembly language he invented for the purpose. When I took the course, I already had a couple of years working as a software engineer. The book drove me batty. I knew already knew some of the algorithms I studied from the book. I kept thinking that if he would just explain the idea behind the algorithm, I could figure out the code for myself. Giving me the code so that I could figure out the ideas only made it more difficult. I decided to stop taking this course before he confused me about all the topics that I had already come to understand and use.

I consider reverse engineering as something I will do if I have to understand the code and nobody has provided me with any other tools with which to learn it. I don’t take pride in doing tricky reverse engineering because it is such a waste of time compared to reading a well written design description.

Mosler’s design for a ferry as discussed in the video is pure genius. Previously I have learned sailing, and read some on naval architecture. I have never read about a design like Mosler’s that puts that knowledge into practice.You never know where you are going to find a brilliant idea on an unexpected topic.

I think I see a better way to explain one key point of Modern Money Theory (MMT) that the experts have failed to exploit. The money the Federal Reserve bank creates is called “high powered money” by MMT proponents. I always struggle to understand the difference between high powered money and the money that private banks create.

Here is what I have come to recognize. Private banks do not really create money. They create the promise of money. When you have a private bank account or a loan, the bank is promising you that if you ever want high powered money they will provide it to you by the terms of your loan or your bank account balance. As long as your transactions are wholly within one private bank, you are only dealing with promises of money.

It is only when you want to take high powered money out of that bank, that the bank is forced to turn its promise into actual money. If you write a check to someone who is also a customer of the same bank corporation, the bank only needs to transfer its promise to pay you to the account of the person depositing your check into the same bank corporation.

Furthermore, the bank only has to worry about the difference between what people want to take out of the bank and what people want to put into this bank. Under normal circumstance this difference of money is a small fraction of the money obligations the private bank has on its books. This is what makes the idea of fractional reserve banking work so well, under normal circumstances.

I think I will stop here to let people digest what I have just said. I have posted this story on my Facebook page. We can discuss what I have said, and your questions about it on Facebook.

Modern Money Theory (MMT) says that money created by the Federal Reserve Bank and money created by private banks are not the same thing, MMT calls Federal Reserve created money “high powered money”. I sort of get the idea, but then I struggle with it. I finally realized that the financial crash of 2007-2009 was all the proof that I needed to see the difference between the two kinds of money.

What the private banks create is a promise to pay you “high powered money” whenever you want it. As long as you are happy to leave your money in the bank, you don’t care if that money in the bank is a promise or is the actual thing. It only matters to you and the bank, if you want to take some money out of the bank. From this realization of the bank arose the idea of fractional reserve banking. Over time, banks learn how much “high powered money” their customers will ever want at any one time. All the high powered money the bank needs to have (in reserve) is the maximum amount of high powered money their customers will ever want to withdraw from the bank at one time. Any money that they hold above the reserve requirement can be lent to someone else for a fee.

The only fly in the ointment is that sometimes too many people who have money in the bank want to take it out at the same time. If word gets out that the bank can’t deliver the money on demand, suddenly all bank depositors want to take all their money out of that bank. This is called a run on the bank. It used to happen often enough that people were on the look out for the possibility of happening.

In 1913, the Federal Reserve Bank was created to back-up banks in case a bank had a run. The Federal Reserve Bank, which held a large reserve, could rush high powered money to the bank that was having a run. If people realized that the bank could give them all of their money that they wanted, the run would stop, the banks could repay the Federal Reserve Bank, and business returned to normal.

During the 1930s depression there were so many runs on banks at the same time, that President Roosevelt had to declare a nationwide bank holiday. You could not withdraw your money from a bank while the holiday was in effect. From this experience, the idea of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. With this in place, your money in a private bank was insured by the government as to always be available to you no matter what happened to the bank where it was deposited. With that insurance, there was no need for there to be a run on a bank, and even if there were, the FDIC would come to the rescue. In fact , runs on banks became very rare.

I won’t go through all the details, but by and large this worked well for almost 80 years. In the interim, the USA went off the gold standard, and the Federal Reserve Bank was given the responsibility to create USA high powered money that was backed by nothing other than the full faith and credit of the USA government.

By the mid 2000s, with deregulation of the private economy, banks (and insurance companies, and the shadow banking system) were taking more and more risks. Not only were there bank deposits and loans, there were also CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), liar’s mortgage loans, credit default swaps, and an alphabet soup of money derivatives. Look this up on the internet if you want to know more. When the real-estate market started to decline, too many of these promises of money started to be redeemed. Lehman Brothers Bank collapsed, and the world’s financial system froze up.

What unfroze the situation, among other things, was the promise by the Federal Reserve Bank to create $20 trillion dollars of high powered money to satisfy all the demands. What better indication can we have that high powered money is different from private banks’ promises of money?

Could a similar problem arise with Federal Reserve Bank created high powered money? It is much less likely, but it could happen. Right now, the USA has a trade deficit with the rest of the world. Countries accept USA money for the goods they sell us, but they don’t spend all that money to buy stuff from us. The excess USA money that these countries accumulate sits in accounts at the Federal Reserve Bank (or it is invested in USA Treasury securities). MMT almost says, “no problem, the Federal Reserve Bank can always create enough high powered money to satisfy the demand for this money”. The USA government can always buy whatever is for sale in USA money. Countries holding all this money won’t try to convert all this money into something else like gold or the high powered money of another country. If they did, the USA money would become worthless, and they would lose the value of all the USA money they still held. However, this accumulated money is not being used for anything by these countries. What if they merely said “We have enough reserves of USA money. We don’t need any more, so you can’t buy anything from us with USA money.”?

I think I will leave you with this thought. Use your imagination, or ask experts what the result of this would be. Imagine what the USA could do (or already is doing) that would bring on this refusal to accept our money?