so-called cliff

Like many others, I’m not worried about the so-called fiscal “cliff,” and the ravages to the economy that are likely to occur if Congress doesn’t do something about it before the end of the year. That’s because a lot of the impact can be cushioned in the short run by Executive Branch manipulations while negotiations continue to go on. But if measures aren’t taken to reverse the contractionary effect of the sequestration-induced changes, we’re looking at deficit cuts of $487 Billion over 9 months of the fiscal year.

By comparison, the American Recovery and Reinvestment (ARRA) of 2009 produced only $350 B in stimulus during its first year. And, if the full sequestration were allowed to proceed unmodified, then it would result in a “claw-back” of about 60% of the total ARRA stimulus.

Fortunately, if we do go over the “cliff” heavy pressure will then be on both parties to reintroduce the middle class tax cuts, and make them retroactive, and to restore some of the other cuts as well, so it may be possible to mitigate much, if not most, of the damage, if the Democrats are aggressive enough in pushing the negotiation advantages they appear to have now. So, the real danger of the manufactured “fiscal cliff” is more long-term.

That danger is the constant bleating from both deficit hawks and “progressives” that we have to do something long-term about the deficit/debt problem. So, they put up these long-term plans to delay deficit cutting for a year or two and then want to cut even more down the road to ‘stabilize’ the debt-to-GDP ratio. This is a non-existent problem, and any plan providing for deliberate polices to force deficit reduction by constraining Government spending to some arbitrary level is bound to damage the economy seriously when the prescribed spending cuts and increased taxes for lowering deficits take effect.

People have to come to accept reality, which is: if we want to import more than we export; and also want the private sector as a whole to save money (i.e. bank savings, pensions, other savings) then there is no alternative to having the Government deficit spend. Further, how much the deficit ought to be, without incurring the penalty of demand-pull inflation is dictated by how much we want the private sector to save, and how much of a trade deficit we want to continue to run. If we want to have a trade deficit at 4% of GDP, and we want to save 7% of GDP, then we must allow the Government to run a deficit of approximately 11% of GDP. And we must do that year after year after year, for as long as we want to save that much and import that much.

Do I need to point out that our deficits are not now anywhere near 11%? And that as a result we not only have high unemployment, an output gap of more than $3 Trillion annually in GDP, but also less in both savings (financial wealth being accumulated) and imports (real wealth being accumulated) then we otherwise would have? What will happen if even the “liberal” Center On Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) hits the economy with its proposed total of $3.7 Trillion (the $1.7 Trillion already agreed to last year and the additional $2 Trillion it is proposing) in deficit reduction? That is an average of $370 Billion per year in enforced deficit reduction which will come right out of savings and imports. That, in the absence of credit bubbles creating unsustainable demand, will condemn us to a stagnant economy as far as the eye can see.

We don’t have to run those 11% of GDP deficits, and also have them drive 11% of GDP further debt accumulation. Deficits and debt accumulation are not the same things, and can be decoupled. We can have the deficits and use Proof Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PPCS) to underwrite the deficit spending; or we can change the rules preventing the Fed from monetizing deficit spending by just creating the necessary credits for spending Congressional deficit appropriations and placing them in the Treasury General Account (TGA) when needed. So having the increased debt along with the continuing deficits isn’t necessary. And if we don’t like the debt, then we can get rid of it.

But, again, if we want the imports and if we want the savings, then we must have the deficits, and we must never have deficit reduction unless we also have savings reduction and/or trade deficit reduction. So the bottom line here is: We need to have the “loser liberal” message we’re hearing from Bernie Sanders, Robert Reich, The Center On Budget and Policy Priorities, and various “progressive” pundits and organizations, just stop!

Keynes’s idea that a fiscally responsible nation incurs deficit/debt in bad times, and pays it back in good times with surpluses, is wrong in the context of fiat currency nations. The gold standard’s been gone since 1971. Nations have much more fiscal space. Some nations want to run trade surpluses all the time, and accumulate nominal financial wealth, and others want to accommodate them and accumulate the real wealth of their imports instead.

So, this makes it impossible for those others to have both aggregate private sector savings and full employment, without Government deficits compensating for the demand leakages. The accommodating nations need to run permanent deficits to serve their own populations. And, if other nations, object to that, then they need simply to stop having export-led economies.

We have no national debt, or debt-to-GDP ratio problem, because we are a nation with a non-convertible fiat currency, a floating exchange rate, and debts in currencies not our own. This means we can always generate new currency to pay our obligations using the methods I just mentioned. And it also means that 1) our levels of debt and debt-to-GDP ratio have no impact on the fiscal sustainability of our fiscal policy; and 2) fiscal responsibility can’t mean targeting fiscal policy at particular levels of the national debt, or the debt-to-GDP ratio.

Nor can the bond markets create rising interest rates on US public debt because “we,” that is the Fed and the Treasury together, control those rates and can keep them as low as they want to even if every ratings agencies downgrades US paper to its lowest rating. Put simply, our creditors have zero power over our interest rates. Reich’s talk about persuading our creditors that we’re serious about getting our fiscal house in order is just errant nonsense. What we really need to do about them is to use PPCS to fill the public purse, repay our debt instruments as they come due, and take their bond market in USD away from them entirely. It’s only a source of “welfare” payments to rich people and foreign nations anyway. What do we need it for, anyway?

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives.)

Photo by tbennett under Creative Commons license.

Marshall Auerback recently posted in support of raising the minimum wage, joining Jamie Galbraith in advocating for it. This caused some disagreement among bloggers sympathetic to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

In particular, Rodger Malcolm Mitchell expressed his disagreement with Marshall in a straightforward critique, proposing an alternative and much more comprehensive initiative designed to move the economy toward the 5 goals Marshall set out in his post. The dispute received a very good discussion at Mike Norman’s site, with the main point being that everyone would favor Rodger’s alternative if it could be passed, but that Marshall’s proposal was much easier to get passed.

To this point, beowulf, a blogger and commenter much respected in MMT and Modern Monetary realism (MMR) circles, added a number of lively comments about the desirability of raising the minimum wage that I think are worth blogging here. He said:

“Minimum wage laws are like hummingbird wings. In theory they shouldn’t work at all, in the real world they work pretty well.

Australia’s minimum wage was just bumped to A$15.96 an hour, US$16.84.hr at today’s exchange rate. Unemployment rate is 5.2%.

Think about that, their U3 rate is three points lower AND their minimum wage is more than double ours. Either the Coriolis effect makes neoclassical economics work backwards in the Southern hemisphere, or mainstream economists are a bunch of astrologers who think they’re Carl Sagan.

$16.84/hr is high enough that a full time worker making that here would be means-tested out of food stamps, section 8 and other income security programs.

So what’s going on is Australia puts the cost of a living wage for the working poor on their employers instead of taxpayers, enabling govt spending to be focused on other needs– like universal Medicare and a Social Security system so broad it would impress even Rodger Mitchell.

Then later on he added:

“One other thing, this John Stossel post last month may be the most mendacious thing I’ve read all year.

“Statists say that Australia is proof that minimum wage laws help workers. They point to Australia’s 5.1% unemployment rate… But statists ignore the details.

“Most people who earn minimum wage are young, unskilled workers. How are they doing in Australia?

“In June, Australia’s unemployment rate for workers age 15 to 19 was 16.5%.”

“That’s digging pretty deep for an unemployment stat. Curious that Stossel neglected to mention the comparable US stat (for workers 16 to 19). In June, their unemployment rate was…26.6%.

That Coriolis effect is CRAZY.”

And then he added a bit more:

”OK, this is really the last one…

“According to the Heritage Foundation/WSJ “2011 Index of Economic Freedom”, Australia’s “government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP)” is less than that of the United States; 34.3% vs 38.9%.

“Stop and think about that… universal Medicare (with dental!), a jumbo size Social Security system, a defense policy of jumping into the same wars we do (including Vietnam and Iraq) and Australia still spends less on government than we do. At risk of sounding hyperbolic, I”d say that Coriolis effect is strong enough to move hurricanes (and cyclones). :o)”

These are great comments, and I’ll draw out their implications a little further.

– First, Australia is one of many nations with minimum wage rates way above our own. They’re no exception. Internationally, they’re closer to the rule; and among major nations, we are the shameful exception.

– Second, a recent Credit Suisse study shows the United States is 24th in the world in Median Wealth per adult. One of the reasons for this certainly can be the sad state of the minimum wage rate compared to other nations.

– Third, when a prediction is correct in theory, but not in the real world; then the most likely explanation is that the theory that says it won’t work is wrong. Capish? And

– Fourth, when will American legislators, politicians and political parties treat American citizens and their constituents at least as well as the legislators, politicians, and political parties of other democracies?

That is the question that has been blowin’ in the wind for at least 35 years now. Time to retire this group of bozos, crooks, and corporate ideologues.

And while we’re at it, let’s not forget the Justices of the Supreme Court. At least five of them need impeachment badly before they complete the turnover of this country to the corporations!

(Cross-posted from Correntewire.com.)

In my last post, I discussed the first part of Beowulf’s post entitled: “(MMT − JG) + Medicare for All = MMT,” and also some dialogues between Jamie Galbraith and both TomThumb and Beowulf related to the MMT Job Guarantee at one of FiredogLake’s Book Salon’s featuring Jamie’s new book Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis.

In Beowulf’s post, he highlights replies by Jamie to a question about the JG including this point:

“. . . the federal government handles *insurance* extremely well. Social Security and Medicare are functional, efficient programs. That is why they are so hated by some people – and prized by others.”

Beowulf then remarks:

“I rather agree with his last point. As I’ve suggested before, Congress should dump universal healthcare funding onto the Fed’s lap. This would have the side benefit of providing the Fed with a fiscal policy tool; they could periodically adjust the rebate’s ratio of seigniorage vs transaction fee revenue depending on economic conditions.”

Beowulf then follows with more details of one of his way out-of-box proposals illustrating an unequaled talent (and I mean this in the best possible way) for policy wonkery, that puts the likes of the unjustly celebrated Ezra Klein to shame. Before I get to these details however, I’ll note that the general idea would require Congressional legislation and also legislation that gives the undemocratic Fed more authority than it has now.

In my view it would reinforce the Fed’s position in the Government, and since I think that position both violates constitutional separation of powers and also provides the financial industry with undue influence over the operations and policies of the Central Bank, my first reaction to Beowulf’s proposal is that it incorporates a big negative to begin with.

Beo goes on with the details:

“To take a few minutes to unpack my last paragraph (you can punch out if you don’t want to go into the weeds)… While Obamacare was being debated in 2009, Anthony Weiner went on the Morning Joe show to make a ridiculously strong case for a single payer system (Part I, Part II). Congressman Weiner was promised a floor vote on a Medicare for All bill he drafted but Pelosi and/or the White House pressured him to drop it so people would pay less attention to how flawed Obamacare really was (but I digress). Unlike the HR 676 Medicare for All bill that you often see touted, Weiner’s bill was actually vetted by the CBO so its additional expenditures were matched by additional taxes… A LOT of new taxes (approx $1 trillion a year, that’s over and above current govt health spending that’d roll over into the new system). Raising taxes seems rather unnecessary since Congress could accrue this revenue without taxes or inflation simply by mandating the Fed deposit an equivalent amount in TGA every year.”

So, there’s the Congressional action necessary for universal health care. Congress has to legislate Medicare for All, and then has to mandate that the Fed deposit an equivalent amount without either taxing or borrowing. So, where would the money come from? Beo goes on:

“The Federal Reserve Act was amended in 1980 to give the Fed governors (and NOT the FOMC) the authority to levy and adjust bank transaction fees. Of course this is completely different from bank transaction taxes, after all, only Congress can levy taxes! In 2005, UW-Madison Econ professor Edgar Feige proposed to President Bush’s tax reform panel a bank transaction tax (of approx. half of one percent) that would generate $1.8T in revenue (in 2002 dollars). My reading of the FRA is that the Fed could enact Feige’s plan on its own (though Congress can always push them if they won’t jump). In perhaps the most wonderful example ever of “its a feature, not a bug”, economist Bruce Barlett complained of Feige’s plan,

“Since GDP equals the money supply times the turnover of money—what economists call velocity—a fully effective transactions tax will presumably reduce velocity. Consequently, it would be severely deflationary unless the Federal Reserve substantially increased the money supply to compensate. It also means that the tax base will shrink as soon as the tax is imposed.”

“So this is the plan, the unstoppable force of $1 trillion in inflationary Medicare spending would meet the immovable object of $1 trillion in deflationary transaction fees. Of course we only need spending and revenue to match at full employment (and even that assumes no trade deficit demand leakage). At other times, The Fed could use this as an adjustable fiscal policy tool (the Board of Governors can amend their fee schedule at any time). When the economy falls short of full employment with balanced trade, the Fed could fund Medicare by cutting transaction fees and filling the deficit by way of the Mint with coin seigniorage (I’ll just note in passing that ordering, say, a $1 billion platinum coin seems less wasteful than a billion $1 coins, reasonable minds can differ).”

So, Beo has advanced an ingenious proposal for passing Medicare for All with perpetually mandated Fed funding coming from 1) bank fee revenue collected by the Fed and then deposited in the TGA, and 2) US Mint coin seigniorage profits generated by high face-value platinum coins during those years when recessions make it desirable for the Fed to back off some portion of its fee revenue for covering Medicare for All spending. Funding health care this way would not come up against the debt ceiling problem, and it would likely save the non-Government sector at least $800 B per year, or $8 Trillion over a decade, which it could use for other things besides health insurance/out of pocket spending, by putting the private health care insurers out of business and by disciplining the providers through cost negotiations with the Government, now acting as the single-payer.

An elegant proposal, right? But there are a few problems with it.

First, it makes the Fed always very subject to bank influence in the position of deciding what the bank fees will be. No doubt the banks will continuously push for reductions in the fee revenue and more reliance on seigniorage for Medicare funding.

Second, as indicated earlier, it increases the authority of an undemocratic institution that is already too powerful.

Third, why would Congress agree to mandate the Fed to go this way? The fees involved will be viewed as taxes by the banks, whatever they are called, so they will oppose them and will require their allies in both parties to defeat such a proposal.

Fourth, isn’t the fiscal tool given to the Fed in the proposal relatively ineffective and also unnecessarily generous to the financial sector in hard times? That is, backing off the transaction fee revenue will feed bank gross profits which will be transmitted disproportionately to wealthy executives and stockholders. So, isn’t the fiscal multiplier associated with backing off fee revenue and using coin seigniorage to fund Medicare for All likely to be relatively ineffective since we know that multiplier is likely to be similar to the one associated with tax cuts for the wealthy, which is roughly 30 cents on every dollar cut?

Fifth, isn’t this proposal unnecessarily complex from a political point of view? That is, if Proof Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PPCS) (the method of getting around the debt ceiling originally suggested by Beo some time ago) is going to be used anyway, and the Executive is going to be brought into the picture, then why start with the Congress to try to get this done?

Why not do what I suggested in this recent post and earlier? Namely let the President start with a $60 T coin, pay down all the intra-governmental debt within a week, have the executive pay off all the debt subject to the limit held by the non-Government sector as it comes due, and then have roughly $45 Trillion in unappropriated funds sitting in the TGA, waiting for Congress to target them at specific programs.

The $45 T sitting there would serve as a very visible reminder that the Government has the money to do whatever it needs to do to help solve America’s many problems; and certainly much more than enough needed to fund the full cost of Medicare for All for many years to come, in addition to State revenue sharing, payroll tax holidays, and a Job Guarantee program to entirely end the Great Recession and enable full employment at a living wage. I think this plan is much simpler than Beowulf’s new proposal, and it has the advantage that it can generate unremitting pressure on the Congress to create Medicare for All, which it could no longer easily turn aside by pleading that the US is running out of money with $45 T sitting in the bank, and the capability to generate still more money at will if needed. No one would be able to tell the lie that the US was running out of money ever again.

Finally, it should be obvious that “(MMT − JG) + Medicare for All = MMT” is false, because even if PPCS is used for Medicare for All, its substitution for the JG still falls short of MMT objectives. Adding Medicare for All to other MMT initiatives, without implementing the JG will bring the economy closer to FE, than would have been the case without Medicare for All, but that wouldn’t change the fact that we would still be relying on a buffer stock of unemployed persons to contain inflation. That’s not an MMT prescription, because it is less in conformance with public purpose than relying on a buffer stock of employed persons for a host of reasons reviewed in many posts here.

But, in addition, and just as important, the JG program in its MMT context makes real for the first time FDR’s proposed economic right to a job for all who are willing and physically and/or mentally able to work. I think that right is an essential aspect of the idea of public purpose, and that’s why the JG program ought to be, and is, so closely tied to MMT.

In short, (MMT − JG) + Medicare for All ≠ MMT, and the only way someone can believe that it does, is if they either don’t believe that the goal of economic policy in a democracy is to fulfill public purpose; or alternatively, if their ideas about public purpose don’t include the right to a job offer at a living wage. Do all who call themselves MMTers believe in this right? I don’t know.

But I do think that in the future, as more people in economics come to recognize that there are no value-free economic systems, and that MMT cannot be free of values and normative commitments, MMTers will come to recognize that they can’t avoid making their normative commitments explicit. And when that day arrives, I think most MMT supporters and practitioners will decide that the normative commitments to real Full employment and FDR’s right to full-time work are part and parcel of MMT, as is the JG itself, because it is the best method yet devised for fulfilling these aspects of public purpose.

And also because if MMT is anything at all, then it is surely the Economics for the Public Purpose that John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about in the 1970s. MMT is the modern embodiment of the tradition named by Galbraith in that fine book. Many of us still, and will always, revere the vision expressed in that book. To those who feel this way, Economics for the Public Purpose is the only economics we will practice, because it is the only economics worthy of the name.

(Cross-posted from Correntewire.com)

A few days ago my friend Beowulf decided to exercise his wry sense of humor with this title of a post he offered for our consideration: “(MMT − JG) + Medicare for All = MMT.” Beo then goes on to talk about some details of a comment exchange with Jamie Galbraith at one of FiredogLake’s Book Salon’s featuring Jamie’s new book Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis.

Dialogue 1, Jamie Galbraith/TomThumb

Beo points out that Jamie has been closely associated with the approach to economics called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), most recently in a pretty good Washington Post article by Dylan Matthews, someone who clearly has little familiarity with who’s who in MMT world. After setting the stage by pointing out that association, Beo goes on to quote part of Jamie’s comment giving his reply to a previous question about what he thinks of the MMT Job Guarantee (JG) proposal.

Here’s that reply:

“. . . To come back to the job-guarantee approach, I think asking the government to create jobs directly is not a robust solution. The problem is that the program goes right into the budget firing line, where it will get chopped up. That was the experience with CETA, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, back in the 1970s.

“So I prefer to think in terms of how to get decentralized institutions doing useful things, with their own funding streams, so that you can create jobs that endure. Education, health care, social services, home care, neighborhood conservation.”

Later FDL commenter TomThumb replied this way to Jamie:

“I worked under CETA as a Social Worker Assistant and then went right to Social Work graduate school when that ended in 1977. CETA works!

“Seems like you are giving up without a fight.”

To which Jamie replied:

“Good for you. I was on the congressional staff at that time so I still have some scars from the previous fight.

“But I think there are ways to get jobs funded — you just have to put a few degrees of separation between the program and the budget-cutters.”

TT quickly shot back:

“No. I disagree. I enjoyed it when you used to call for a direct frontal attack on their weasel words about creating jobs. Anything else is caving. In my opinion. Call them out for being do nothings. That is better than watching people get hurt every day and not making any changes.”

To which Jamie replied:

“Point taken. It’s a tactical issue and there are mornings when I agree with you.”

This exchange with TomThumb shows that Jamie is of two minds about direct Government job creation, and suggests the possibility that he might well prefer it if a Job Guarantee program could be structured as “. . . . a robust solution.”

I think it can be, but that discussion will have to wait for later in the post.

Dialogue 2, Jamie Galbraith/Beowulf

At this point Beowulf entered the discussion asking Jamie what he meant by the idea of getting jobs funded by putting “. . . a few degrees of separation between the program and the budget-cutters.”

To which Jamie replied:

“Well, I like the non-profit sector in this country a lot. Health care, education — these are useful things. Paul Samuelson once said to me “Health care is 15 percent of GDP, and it’s the best 15 percent of GDP.

“The thing about these sectors is, they have multiple funding streams. Higher ed has state money, federal money, tuition, philanthropy… This buffers the institution from cuts.

“If you go to (say) France, and look at what happens when you rely entirely on state funding for universities, you’ll see what I mean.

“That said, the federal government handles *insurance* extremely well. Social Security and Medicare are functional, efficient programs. That is why they are so hated by some people – and prized by others.”

To which Beo replies:

“That’s an interesting point, from a political standpoint, multiple sources of funding makes it more difficult to starve the beast (to say nothing of the politically powerful stakeholders in education and healthcare who won’t take losing their funding lightly).”

This dialogue is really interesting from an MMT point of view. Here’s Jamie Galbraith and Beowulf, both of whom have more than a passing familiarity with MMT, talking about job creation in the non-profit sector through funding that doesn’t derive from Government deficit spending.

Now, that kind of job creation isn’t impossible provided the fiscal multiplier trades involved are favorable, but both Jamie and Beowulf know very well that, assuming multiplier trade-offs are equal, without deficit spending by the Government sector, or the non-Government sector decreasing its total savings and perhaps increasing its debt, raising funding for non-profit sector jobs is likely to cost jobs elsewhere in the non-Government sector. They also both know that from a purely economic/fiscal point of view there’s no problem in funding a JG program. The problem with it is political. Namely, that in the current political climate a JG program, however structured, is very difficult to legislate (a point all three of us agree on).

Apart from that shared judgment of political difficulty, Jamie and Beowulf appear to diverge. Jamie says that not proposing a JG program is the best tactical choice right now. But Beowulf, who now favors the Modern Monetary Realism (MMR) approach, is opposed to the JG on strategic grounds because the MMR position is that the JG will not work as advertised by MMT, specifically, MMR believes that it will not produce full employment at a living wage with price stability, even if implemented as part of a broader MMT-like program including full payroll tax holidays and State revenue sharing.

The Upshot of the Dialogues

So, the upshot of these two contrasting dialogues is that both Jamie and Beowulf are talking outside of the MMT paradigm. And they are not acknowledging, or evaluating the implied MMT view that more “robust” job creation done in the non-profit sector without Federal deficit spending backing it, will in the end, either not be robust at all, or, alternatively will decrease the robustness of other non-Government sector employment.

Put another way, the lack of robustness critique of the JG policy idea based on the notion that JG funding will always be in the line of fire from deficit hawks and Republicans applies equally well to funding job creation in the non-profit sector, because ultimately that funding too, just like JG funding, can only be based on Federal deficit spending if it is to create new jobs, at least if we assume that imports will exceed exports, and that the non-Government sector will want to increase total savings during the period when new jobs are to be created.

Also, it looks like TomThumb, has it right. Jamie is giving up on the Job Guarantee idea too fast, because his view of its ultimate political fragility applies equally well to his proposal that the non-profit sector ought to do the job creation with non-Federal deficit funding. So, where do we go from here with the Job Guarantee proposal for direct job creation? Here are a few comments that contrast with Jamie’s doubts and his views on the lack of robustness of JG job creation.

First, from my point of view, none of the MMT recovery proposals are likely to be accepted in today’s political climate. So, the political feasibility criticism of MMT’s JG proposal isn’t any more weighty right now than similar criticisms of its payroll tax cut, and State revenue sharing proposals.

If any of them are to be passed, it will be necessary to overcome the ideology of austerity and get people in Washington to accept the fact that the American Government can’t have solvency problems. Doing that is job no. 1.

When and if that is done, and people really believe that the Federal Government can afford the social safety net and all sorts of other spending too, then we can consider whether the whole MMT program including the JG is politically feasible or not. My last post outlines some things the President can do to take austerity off the table and bring the day when we can do this with a real feel for feasibility closer.

But these are not to the point here. The point, instead, is that when it is off the table, then there will be no compelling reason why permanent automatic annual Federal funding of FDR’s right to a full-time job offer at a living wage, for every person if she/he wants to work, could not be funded through Federal spending, whether deficit or otherwise.

Second, Jamie says he prefers that the non-profit sector create the new jobs. However, the current MMT JG proposals are formulated so that even though the Government is the funder JG jobs, the work itself is actually defined, structured and supervised by the non-profit sector with the participation of local stakeholders who would define jobs that produce societally valued outcomes. Pavlina Tcherneva has been doing a lot of writing about this lately, (See also recent posts) as has Randy Wray. (See posts 38, 42-45 and also the response posts following each one.)

So, even though, the funding for an MMT JG program would come from the Federal Government, the non-profit sector would be heavily involved in specifying the jobs for the JG program. The result should be a program incorporating many of Jamie’s ideas about non-profit capabilities, based on Federal funding that might have no robustness problems at all, provided that the ideology of fiscal austerity is politically defeated by the time the MMT program, including the JG passed.

Third, Golfer1John, a commenter on one of Randy Wray’s recent JG posts suggested that the JG be renamed as The “Employment Insurance” program. I think this is a good name for it, because it describes what it offers to individuals who have been caught up by economic forces beyond their control, and it can also be marketed as part of an economic bill of rights.

In an environment where austerity has been defeated and the government is revealed as being able to fund anything that isn’t so expansive that it will cause inflation, it ought to be no problem to justify both an employment insurance program to guarantee a job offer to people who want to work, and also a universal health care program based on the idea of Medicare for All. So, we can have recovery, Job Guarantees, Universal Health Care, and Reconstruction of our severely damaged economy and society without having to worry about “running of of money.”

Beowulf’s Proposal

After highlighting Jamie’s view on the JG, but failing to review Jamie’s exchange with TomThumb, Beowulf goes on to offer a proposal of his own about Medicare for All, playing off Jamie’s remark that the Federal Government “handles ‘insurance’ very well. I’ll discuss that brilliant, but ultimately undesirable, proposal in a future post. And that’s when we’ll get into the humor reflected in the title: “(MMT − JG) + Medicare for All = MMT.”

(Cross-posted from Correntewire.com)

Matthew Yglesias posting in Slate, also gave us a few words on Dylan Matthews’s post about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). He starts with this thought:

”Is the inflation of the 1970s a myth? I don’t think it was, but something Dylan Matthews’ excellent overview of Modern Monetary Theory illustrates is that some people think it was. That to me is a mistake, and people should try to separate the merits of heterodox macroeconomic theory (which I think are considerable) from a handful of incidental political commitments that its adherents have. The core point of MMT is that if you have a freely floating fiat currency then the sovereign can’t “run out of money” and the point of taxes is to regulate demand not to finance government activities. But even though this is a “heterodox” view, I think few mainstream people would actually deny it. Instead they think that talking in these terms will lead to dangerous inflation. I think that fear is overblown, but not as overblown as Jamie Galbraith thinks it is.”

The 1970s Inflation

Reading this, I had the definite feeling that the old aphorism about people who fight new paradigms and ridicule/marginalize their adherents, and often opine later that there is nothing new there, is all too true. Matty ought to give everyone a break and admit that the mainstream has been beating the drums of insolvency terrorism since shortly after the Obama Administration began and still is. So, mainstream people have been saying that there can be an insolvency problem in very large numbers, and if they are doing so less now, it’s only because any fool can plainly see that austerity is failing all over the world, as MMT predicted when the austerity craze started, and also because many more people are reading MMT blogs than was the case two years ago, and they are beginning to pick up some of the core insights.

To say that “. . . few mainstream people would actually deny it. Instead they think that talking in these terms will lead to dangerous inflation” is to to imply that most mainstream people are elitist liars who have been engaged in deficit terrorism because they thought it was a more effective political tactic than using the inflation bogeyman.

That may, in fact, be true. But I wonder what the mainstream would have to say about Matty’s implication, that its economists haven’t really been being ignorant and dumb; just elitist, dishonest, and manipulative.

I lived through the inflation of the 70s, and I can attest to its reality, and severity for some people, but relatively mild impact for others. I also think that the causes of that inflation were not simply increases in nominal unit labor costs, but increases in interest costs caused by the Federal Reserve’s policies, the actions of the oil cartel, and particularly the Saudis, the activity of speculators, the constraining regulations on Natural Gas production, and the failure of the Carter Administration to employ price controls and rationing due to its neoliberal biases.

The other factors I’ve mentioned were much more important in causing the inflation than rising nominal labor costs, which were primarily reactive to the cost-push inflation caused by the other factors. Government deficit spending had almost no role in the 1970s inflation, which was due much more to cost-push than to demand-pull factors.

Types of Inflation

Matty next quotes Galbraith from Matthews’s article pointing out that we haven’t seen a serious demand-driven inflation since WWI and that one occurred under very unique circumstances unlikely to happen again.

”I think this contains some insight. Unfortunately the standard concept of “inflation” runs together two very different scenarios. In one kind of “inflation”, China abandons Maoist economic policies, its population gets richer, as it gets richer they start eating more meat, and this pushes the worldwide price of meat, dairy, and grains upward. That’s a real thing and it hurts real people in their pocket books, but these kind of global commodity price fluctuations aren’t effectively addressed by demand regulators. And one story some people have about the seventies is that it was just a global commodities issue. OPEC pushed up the price of oil, so we got “inflation” but this is nothing like the World War One case where dodgy government financial practices eroded the value of money.”

To me, this was really an “off the wall” response to Galbraith’s view, since Galbraith was clearly talking about the likelihood of demand-pull inflation inflation occurring in the United States, and was also implying that the Weimar and other WWI aftermath inflations had nothing to do with that policy. Also, in referring to “dodgy government financial practices” in the last sentence, Matty seems to be saying that the Weimar Government was guilty of such practices, but given the size of their Versailles-imposed reparations to be repaid only in goldmarks or foreign exchange, what could the German Government have done to recover from the War, except try the money-printing strategy to try to get the foreign exchange needed? If anybody was guilty of “dodgy financial practices” it was the Versailles peacemakers who, in imposing a Roman peace on Germany, insisted on payment conditions that the Germans could not possibly meet, especially since the French and Belgians seized control of the Ruhr and with it much of Germany’s industrial capacity in 1923.

But, that aside, Matty glosses over the fact that demand regulators can’t very well control worldwide demand-pull inflation in the international economic system from a legislative foundation in a single country, as long as they’re committed to maintaining a free market in the commodities that are the object of such inflation. That is, the China example basically says that when people in many nations other than the US and the previously developed nations get wealthy enough to create greater effective demand on certain commodities in a relatively free market, and that demand outruns supply, then price increases that hurt people will result.

But why is this a criticism or reflection on the MMT view, or what Galbraith had to say? Galbraith and the MMTers have clearly been talking about regulating demand-pull inflation in the United States caused by excessive deficit spending.

Moving to Matty’s example, MMT would certainly predict that when an economic system has no common currency, but a relatively free market in certain commodities, and also limited supply, then increasing demand might well result in inflation. As for the ’70s oil inflation, that wasn’t the result of either a free market or increasing worldwide demand for oil, but rather of the factors I called out above being called into play by the Oil Cartel’s control of the world supply of oil. So, that inflation was an instance of cost-push, not demand-pull inflation, and requires different measures to control.

I hesitate to say what MMT might recommend in the two cases of increasing world-wide demand, highlighted by Matty, because I’m not sure that all of us would say the same thing, nor am I one of the economists developing the MMT approach. But, speaking as someone who’s been researching MMT for some time, in the ’70s case, I would have placed domestic price and wage controls on commodities except on foreign sales to oil exporting countries, where prices of exports would have been pegged to increases in the prices of their oil exports. I would have also recommended de-regulating natural gas, and oil rationing to cut demand for the cartel-restricted supply. I would not have implemented higher interest rates as the Fed did. Until the very end, when the economic system was driven into recession, that only “fed” the inflation fire, while creating “stagflation.” I think such measures, consistent with MMT as I understand it, would have “choked off” the ’70s inflation in a much shorter time than the policies followed in the 1970s and the early 1980s.

As for the present increasing demand on the world’s food supply, that’s certainly not being caused by deficit spending by an International currency issuer, since there is none. And the only remotely similar entity to that is the ECB which is gradually choking off economic activity in the Eurozone to save its financial elites. I think commodity inflation must be fought by Governments legislating and enforcing existing laws against speculation, preventing cost-push inflation of the kind we saw in the 70s using the measures outlined, and by allowing commodity markets to adjust to the need for more supply, or producers to create substitutes for commodities in short supply. I also think control of speculation and market forces will probably suffice to relieve the pressure we’ve been seeing in commodities.

If that fails, however, then Governments whose economies can produce abundant supplies will have to place export controls on commodities necessary for their own populations in order to contain domestic inflation. That will not be popular. But we do still live in a nation state system, and the first responsibility of national governments still is to the general welfare of their own populations. Of course, such measures will result in other nations placing their own export controls on abundant commodities, and nations will have to negotiate bilateral agreements to serve their respective populations.

Unit Labor Costs

Matty Yglesias continues with his remarks about inflation:

”That’s why my favorite indicator of inflation is “unit labor costs”:

“Unit labor costs are basically wages divided by productivity. It’s not the price of labor, in other words, but the price of labor output. If productivity is rising faster than wages, then even if wages themselves are rising, unit labor costs are falling. Conversely, if wages rise faster than productivity than unit labor costs are going up. Clearly there’s nothing wrong with a little increase in unit labor costs here or there. But over the long term, growth in unit labor costs needs to be constrained or else it becomes impossible to employ anyone. And you can see that in the seventies it’s not just that gasoline got more expensive, we had an anomalous spate of high unit labor cost growth. That was inflation and it’s what led to the regime change that’s governed for the past thirty years.”

Now that way of putting things is strange. Not that the general point is wrong, but if real unit labor costs exceed real labor productivity over the long term, that would create survival pressures for business. But, if there was an anomalous rise in labor costs in the 1970s, there was also an initial anomalous rise in the cost of oil before that rise, and later there was an anomalous pattern of interest increases implemented by the Fed that hasn’t been seen before or since, as well as anomalous rises in commodity prices. To read the quote above, one would think that the rise in unit labor costs was itself inflation, rather than just an adjustment of the cost of labor to all the price increases going on around it.

The truth, again, is that the inflation of the ’70s was caused by a complex of inter-related phenomena and the rise in unit labor costs was only one of these. It may have been the one that neoliberals focused on in the ’80s to avoid pinning the blame for what happened on the Cartel, the failures of the Carter Administration and the Fed’s policies, and to claim that the inflation was due to demand-pull factors, but that doesn’t mean that their analysis was correct.

Today, we know that Paul Volcker and Jimmy Carter handled the 1970s inflation incompetently, and we also recognize that the behavior of the Cartel, and the excessive regulations on natural gas made this a cost-push and not a demand-pull inflation, and that the Fed policy of targeting the unit cost of labor as a trigger for raising interest rates for the next 30 years or so was part of its low inflation at the cost of high unemployment policy that it illegally engaged in, in violation of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act. In his post, critiquing Matty’s missive, Steve Randy Waldman (SRW), had the following to say:

“. . . Yglesias has fallen into a trap. Unit labor costs are not “basically wages divided [by] productivity”. That’s not the right definition at all. [See update.] Unit labor costs are nominal wages per unit of output. With a little bit of math [1], it’s easy to show that

UNIT_LABOR_COSTS = PRICE_LEVEL × LABOR_SHARE_OF_OUTPUT

An increase in unit labor costs can mean one of two things. It can reflect an increase in the price level — inflation — or it can reflect an increase in labor’s share of output. The Federal Reserve is properly in the business of restraining the price level. It has no business whatsoever tilting the scales in the division of income between labor and capital.

Yet throughout the Great Moderation, increases in unit labor costs were the standard alarm bell cited by Fed policy makers as an event that would call for more restrictive policy. And all through the Great Moderation, except for a brief surge during the tech boom, labor’s share of output was in secular decline. (More recently, the Great Recession has been accompanied by a stunning collapse in labor share. Record corporate profits!)”

SRW continues his discussion in this vein pointing out the Fed’s hawkishness on unit labor costs has had a heavy constraining influence on the presidency because Presidents have wanted to be very careful about economic policies that might increase unit labor costs and cause the Fed to activate contractionary reactions. He says further:

“. . . . In this environment, the decline of labor unions and their shift in focus from wage growth to working conditions was understandable. If workers won on wages, they would lose when the recession put them out of work. As long as wages were contained, monetary policy was “accommodative”, and workers could supplement their purchasing power with borrowings and asset appreciation. During the Great Moderation, wage growth was rendered obsolete. A superior means of middle class prosperity had been invented. Or so it seemed, until we experienced the toxic after-effects in 2008. Now we have grown skeptical of debt-fueled pseudoprosperity. But the covert hostility to wage growth that underpinned Great Moderation monetary policy remains unchallenged.

“I imagine some readers saying to themselves, “But still. If the labor cost of ’stuff’ is allowed to grow, how can that not be inflationary? It’s common sense.” And that’s true, as far as it goes. But if the capital cost of stuff grows, that must also be inflationary. Suppose we define the complement to unit labor costs, unit capital costs. Unit capital costs might be defined as “business profits per unit of output”. Would it be politically tolerable in the United States to have a central bank that prevented expansions of business profit per unit sold? Is restraining profitability of investment a proper role for a central bank? If suppressing returns to capital would be improper, why on Earth do we tolerate a central bank that opposes returns to labor?”

Very good questions. Why have we allowed the Fed aided by presidents to implement policies that increase returns to capital, but suppress returns to labor? Is this what Americans think has been going on and what they approve, or has this been made possible only because of “the independence” of the Fed, its systematic lack of transparency to the public, and the unwillingness of Presidents to contest the power and “independence” of the Fed either legally or informally?

Time for a Change in Regimes?

Even though Matty Yglesias seems convinced of the importance of increases in nominal unit labor costs as a primary cause of inflation needing to be constrained in the long run, he, nevertheless agrees with SRW and I that the approach to constraining such costs that the US has followed for the past 30 years and more cannot be continued. He says:

”In the wake of the Great Recession, I think we need another change in regime. We can’t continue with an approach that always delivers on price stability but frequently leads to prolonged spells of mass unemployment. But I think to push for that regime change credibly, people need to acknowledge what went wrong in the past and need to explain why it won’t happen again. I would say, for example, that one of the great virtues of the more globalized economy of 2012 rather than 1972 is that the freer flow of goods across borders makes inflation much less likely.”

I agree that the approach we’ve been following won’t do, and with SRW’s notion that Fed policy should not be biased in favor of returns to capital and against returns to labor. It is very plain to me that the severe economic inequality that has developed in the United States, and that now threatens our democracy, is in great part due to the Fed’s policies in past decades and to its fixation on inflation control. But I also think that changing these policies to ones that would be more neutral won’t work to redress the inequality that has already been created. What needs to be done instead, is to positively bias Fed policy toward returns to labor for some time to come, as part of a more comprehensive policy to lessen the levels of economic inequality that beset the American social, economic and political systems.

I also agree with Matty Yglesias’s call for people to acknowledge what went wrong in the past and to explain why it won’t happen again. But as I said earlier, my thinking about what went wrong in the ’70s, and also MMT thinking about it are both very different from his. As a result, I think corresponding explanations of why it won’t happen again are likely to be very different also. Again, I don’t think what we have to acknowledge is that increases in unit labor costs caused the ’70s inflation.

In fact, I think that is a very partial, and therefore false narrative of what happened then. And I’m afraid I also think that Matty ought to take his own advice and acknowledge the roles of 1) the Cartel, 2) the Federal Reserve, and 3) the Carter Administration as all being much more important in the severity of that cost-push inflation then the rise in unit labor costs was.

And, I think an explanation of why that is unlikely to happen again, will have to be conditional on the wisdom of future Federal Reserve Governors and Presidents in providing the right responses to any reconstitution of the Cartel, or aggressive moves by the Saudis and oil speculators to drive prices up. If the ’70s are not to happen again, it will not be enough to rely on the more globalized economy of 2012, with its cross-border competition among workers, creating a race to the bottom in wages, and untoward returns to capital.

The Federal Government will have to be much more aggressive in implementing a response, recognizing that an inflation like that in the 70s would be cost-push and not demand-pull. And that to manage it, policies that choke off government deficit spending, and tighten credit, will be much more costly than policies involving trade retaliation, price controls, rationing, substitution of commodities subject to cost-push, and above all continuous and very substantial investments in government programs developing alternative energy sources.

(Cross-posted from Correntewire.com

Kevin Drum, posting in Mother Jones, also threw his hat into the ring of discussion about Dylan Matthews’s post about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Kevin begins by characterizing MMT as “. . . . an economic model that, roughly speaking, says government deficits are always good unless there’s a risk of runaway inflation.” He then favorably quotes Jared Bernstein’s post, which I recently evaluated, coming out against the idea that deficit reduction is “pure virtue,” and also coming out for the view we need to use Government’s ability “. . . to run large deficits in times of market failure” to replace lost aggregate demand. But Kevin doesn’t get why Jared says this is MMT’s greatest contribution. Kevin wonders why this is any different from what “ Old Keynesianism. And post-Keynesianism. And New Keynesianism” say, and he asks: “If that’s really MMT’s most important contribution, who needs it?” And then replies:

The more important side of MMT is its insistence that we should run substantial deficits even when the economy is in good shape. Only when inflation appears ready to run out of control should we use budget surpluses to rein things in.

And then through quoting Matthews and Jamie Galbraith as quoted by Matthews, Kevin makes the point that we haven’t seen a serious case of demand-driven inflation since World War I and that involved, as Jamie said: “. . . conditions that will never be repeated.” And then Kevin goes on:

In some sense, this all comes down to a question of how scared we should be of inflation. Mainstream economic opinion says that a strong focus on full employment will inevitably risk high inflation, just as our current obsession with low inflation produces generally high unemployment. If we were focused on, say, a target unemployment rate of 4%, we’d see some periods where unemployment fell below that rate and some where it rose above it. But as the chart on the right shows, that’s not what we’ve had over the past few decades. Instead, because our economic policy has been focused strongly on low inflation, we see only a couple of brief periods in which unemployment barely got close to 4%, followed immediately by a recession that kicked it back above 6%.

So should we focus instead on a genuine target of 4% unemployment, reining in budget deficits only when we fall well below that? That depends a lot on what you think the productive capacity of the country really is, and the mainstream estimate of NAIRU, the highest unemployment rate consistent with stable inflation, is around 5.5% right now. If that’s the right estimate, then you could argue that we’ve been doing OK for the past few decades. But if full employment is really more consistent with an unemployment rate of 4%, then we’ve been wasting an awful lot of productive capacity for nothing.

It is about our fear of inflation and our assessment of the risk of it. But it’s also about how we prioritize the risk of inflation against the reality of unemployment other than a “frictional” rate due to job transitions of 1 – 2%. Even 4% Unemployment measured by the U6 would still leave about 7.2 million Americans unemployed after a vigorous post-Keynesian expansion.

Those people would pay the price for the rest of us who are more concerned with containing inflation than with employing them. How serious is this price? Martin Watts and Bill Mitchell (one of the earliest and still leading developers of MMT) offer us a very good idea of how high this price is for those selected to pay the price of a 4% U6 target, much less a 4% U3 target which is what I suspect Kevin is referring to.

Kevin Drum refers to the NAIRU, as if he and all economists agree that there must be a trade-off between inflation and unemployment at a to be determined NAIRU level. But, I wonder if he knows that MMT economists view the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, as both “a crock” and as closely tied to the neoliberal economic paradigm that MMT opposes, and specifically to its acceptance of the idea that there must be an unemployed “buffer stock” of people who want to work, but must stay unemployed, in order to contain inflation?

Bill Mitchell points out that MMT argues against such a buffer stock and the NAIRU by:

“. . . proposing a way to achieve full employment with price stability. As Randy Wray noted in the speech referred to earlier MMT, in part, “turned the Phillips Curve on its head: unemployment and inflation do not represent a trade-off, rather, full employment and price stability go hand in hand”. . . . .

“And the way MMT does that is intrinsic to the theoretical framework and logically consistent with it. It is crucial to understand that notions of price stability all have some buffer stock underpinning them. . . . the mainstream NAIRU theories deploy a buffer stock of unemployment to control price inflation. . . .

“ . . . the theoretical offering that MMT provides . . . is that if we are concerned about efficiency and price stability then there is a superior buffer stock available to a public currency issuing monopoly.

“That is, if we really understand the way the currency works and the way the labour market works then we can have both full employment and price stability by using an employment buffer stock rather than an unemployed buffer stock.

“Then you have a direct route into the current policy debate. The governments think that large deficits are bad so they spend on a quantity rule – that is, allocate $x billiion – which they think is politically acceptable. It may not bear any relation to what is required to address the existing spending gap.”

It may help to note at this point that this is exactly what President Obama did in passing the ARA in 2009. He received advice providing stimulus estimates as high as $1.8 Trillion in deficit spending achieved through either tax cuts or government spending for ending the recession, but he evidently wanted that bill to come in at around $900 Billion and to have some bipartisan support. So, he did the thing that seemed politically expedient using an arbitrary quantity rule, even though he knew, based on the advice he received, that it was unlikely to end the recession and bring the economy to full employment.

Bill goes on analyzing the MMT proposal to offer a Job Guarantee (JG) to any unemployed person who wants a job, and Full Employment with Price Stability:

“MMT shows you how it is far better to conduct fiscal policy by spending on a price rule. That is, the government just has to fix the price and “buy” whatever is available at that price to ensure price stability. But what is the price the government would be fixing?

“Answer: the price it offers labour to enter the employment buffer stock – that is, the JG wage. . . .

“In the face of wage-price pressures, the JG approach maintains inflation control by choking aggregate demand and inducing slack in the non-buffer stock sector. The slack does not reveal itself as unemployment, and in that sense the JG may be referred to as a “loose” full employment. . . .

“So in a fiat monetary system, price stability is maximised using employment buffers rather than unemployment buffers.

“There are those who might consider that the MMT proposal that national governments should first bolt down the nominal anchor via an employment buffer stock amounts to a disagreement with Post Keynesian policies of public infrastructure investment . . .

“Some might even think that the proposal to introduce an employment buffer stock amounts to a preference for “small government” in the Hayekian tradition.

“None of these views would be correct.

“What we argue is that to turn the Phillips curve on its head – and thus thwart the use of unemployment to control inflation – you need a different nominal anchor. Generalised expansion does not provide that.

“Once you have that anchor in place then your ideological preferences will determine what other public spending you might entertain within the capacity of the economy to embrace further nominal demand expansion.

“As I have said in the past I favour strong public sectors with lots of investment in first-class infrastructure to advance the prosperity and well-being of the citizens. Others, who consider MMT to be a valuable contribution (that is, get it) may have different preferences.

“My JG pool would be small (but sufficient for the purpose as a nominal anchor) others might have a larger JG pool and less public sector spending elsewhere.

But the essential point is that independent of our preferences with respect to the size of government we would maintain an effective and highly liquid employment buffer.”

In short, if MMT policies are adopted, including the JG proposal, then there would be no unemployment buffer stock, no one paying the price for one, and no estimates at all of the fictional NAIRU suggesting targets of 4% UE. But there would be Full Employment WITH Price Stability. So, Kevin, and other newly interested writers who are writing about MMT after the WaPo article; please note that the basics include no UE targets, just Full Employment. And no deficits and surplus targets either, just responses to demand-pull and cost-push inflation, and private sector cutbacks in employment, through automatic safety net and taxation stabilizers, and other responses to such effects.

MMT is always about policy, mostly fiscal, not monetary, that will enable certain economic, social, cultural, environmental, and political outcomes, and disable other outcomes in each of these categories. It is never about running deficits or surpluses as targets for their own sakes. Whether deficits, or surpluses occur are byproducts of MMT policy impacts, and are largely endogenous to the economy. In themselves they mean nothing. Only the economic policies and outcomes that drive them are important.

(Cross-posted from Correntewire.com

This post continues my critical evaluation of Dylan Matthews’s, post published on Ezra Klein’s blog called “You know the deficit hawks. Now meet the deficit owls.”

Other Issues

Here’s the next exchange envisioned by Dylan:

“According to Galbraith and the others, monetary policy as currently conducted by the Fed does not work. The Fed generally uses one of two levers to increase growth and employment. It can lower short-term interest rates by buying up short-term government bonds on the open market. If short-term rates are near-zero, as they are now, the Fed can try “quantitative easing,” or large-scale purchases of assets (such as bonds) from the private sector including longer-term Treasuries using money the Fed creates. This is what the Fed did in 2008 and 2010, in an emergency effort to boost the economy.

“According to Modern Monetary Theory, the Fed buying up Treasuries is just, in Galbraith’s words, a “bookkeeping operation” that does not add income to American households and thus cannot be inflationary.

“It seemed clear to me that . . . flooding the economy with money by buying up government bonds . . . is not going to change anybody’s behavior,” Galbraith says. “They would just end up with cash reserves which would sit idle in the banking system, and that is exactly what in fact happened.

“The theorists just “have no idea how quantitative easing works,” says Joe Gagnon, an economist at the Peterson Institute who managed the Fed’s first round of quantitative easing in 2008. Even if the money the Fed uses to buy bonds stays in bank reserves — or money that’s held in reserve — increasing those reserves should still lead to increased borrowing and ripple throughout the system.”

Evidently, Gagnon has no idea that increasing the amount of reserves does not lead to increased borrowing, because banks don’t need more reserves to make loans. All they need are credit worthy borrowers and access to the Fed discount window to make whatever quantity of loans they want to. This is one of the main points about the banking system MMT makes. Put simply: lending is not reserve constrained! It’s constrained by bank willingness to lend to credit worthy borrowers.

Dylan’s next point is:

“Mainstreamers are equally baffled by another claim of the theory: that budget surpluses in and of themselves are bad for the economy. According to Modern Monetary Theory, when the government runs a surplus, it is a net saver, which means that the private sector is a net debtor. The government is, in effect, “taking money from private pockets and forcing them to make that up by going deeper into debt,” Galbraith says, reiterating his White House comments.

“The mainstream crowd finds this argument as funny now as they did when Galbraith presented it to Clinton. “I have two words to answer that: Australia and Canada,” Gagnon says. “If Jamie Galbraith would look them up, he would see immediate proof he’s wrong. Australia has had a long-running budget surplus now, they actually have no national debt whatsoever, they’re the fastest-growing, healthiest economy in the world.” Canada, similarly, has run consistent surpluses while achieving high growth.”

Gagnon must be kidding, or at least totally ignorant about Jamie’s background, and the major contributors to the MMT synthesis, Of course, Jamie is quite familiar with Canada having close ties to the land of his father’s birth, and MMT economists know all they need to know about Australia, since MMT leader Bill Mitchell is constantly writing about the Australian economy and its various tragedies. However, the point here is that Gagnon doesn’t see that these two nations show that MMT’s Sectoral Financial Balances (SFB) model is exactly right in its explanations, since they are able to run surpluses without disaster, only because, unlike the United States, the foreign sectors of their economies run deficits (that is Canada and Australia run trade surpluses) large enough to accommodate the private sector savings desires of Australians and also the Government’s desire to run a budget surplus. The US however, currently has a need to run Government deficits of 10% to support both our private sector savings desires of 6% of GDP, and our foreign sector’s desires to export 4% of US GDP to US consumers so they can accumulate US dollars in the form of electronic credits.

Default vs. Hyperinflation?

“But MMT’s own relationship to real-world cases can be a little hit-or-miss. Mosler, the hedge fund manager, credits his role in the movement to an epiphany in the early 1990s, when markets grew concerned that Italy was about to default. Mosler figured that Italy, which at that time still issued its own currency, the lira, could not default as long as it had the ability to print more liras. He bet accordingly, and when Italy did not default, he made a tidy sum. “There was an enormous amount of money to be made if you could bring yourself around to the idea that they couldn’t default,” he says.

“Later that decade, he learned there was also a lot of money to be lost. When similar fears surfaced about Russia, he again bet against default. Despite having its own currency, Russia defaulted, forcing Mosler to liquidate one of his funds and wiping out much of his $850 million in investments in the country. Mosler credits this to Russia’s fixed exchange rate policy of the time and insists that if it had only acted like a country with its own currency, default could have been avoided.

“But the case could also prove what critics insist: Default, while technically always avoidable, is sometimes the best available option.”

Well, this last is a mouthful. Yes, Warren Mosler made a lot of money on his “bets” on Italy, and lost a lot on Russia. But what this shows is that Governments can voluntarily default if they choose to. MMT economists have always said this and still say it. So why is political stupidity or perfidy counted against the truth of the MMT proposition that Governments sovereign in their currency have no fiscal solvency problems, only voluntary constraints and political problems?

On the contrary, I think the Russian case is one of the primary illustrations of a point that deficit owls have been trying to spread far and wide. Namely, that sometimes default is due to stupidity and perfidy and not to economic forces and that citizens in a democracy need to be aware of that, and of the full capabilities of currency sovereign Governments to always pay debts incurred in their fiat currency and to spend whatever is necessary to enable full employment in their nations. They are never, never, out of money except by choice. So, the real questions are:

– why are they choosing to default?
– Who will benefit from this political choice?
– And who will be asked to pay the price?

And how does the Russian case “prove” that: “Default, while technically always avoidable, is sometimes the best available option”? Is Dylan, through this quote from Gregory Mankiw suggesting that “public purpose” in Russia was better served by its voluntary default than it would have been if the Russians repaid their ruble debts in the rubles they might have created had they wished to? I’m afraid that both Dylan and Mankiw will have to prove that statement to me, since Russian citizens seem to have suffered quite a lot by taking the default choice and accepting austerity when they didn’t have to do so.

This post continues the critical evaluation of Dylan Matthews’s, post published on Ezra Klein’s blog called “You know the deficit hawks. Now meet the deficit owls.”

The Inflation/Hyperinflation Bogeyman

“And while Modern Monetary Theory’s proponents take Keynes as their starting point and advocate aggressive deficit spending during recessions, they’re not that type of Keynesians. Even mainstream economists who argue for more deficit spending are reluctant to accept the central tenets of Modern Monetary Theory. Take Krugman, who regularly engages economists across the spectrum in spirited debate. He has argued that pursuing large budget deficits during boom times can lead to hyperinflation. Mankiw concedes the theory’s point that the government can never run out of money but doesn’t think this means what its proponents think it does.

“Technically it’s true, he says, that the government could print streams of money and never default. The risk is that it could trigger a very high rate of inflation. This would “bankrupt much of the banking system,” he says. “Default, painful as it would be, might be a better option.”

Well, Krugman has argued there is a danger of hyperinflation where deficit spending lasts for many years, but in a really balanced piece, the counter-arguments of MMT economists to his conjecture would at least be mentioned. Dylan doesn’t say what these counter-arguments are.

And as for Dylan’s reference to Mankiw, it’s easy to wave off MMT by saying there is a risk of inflation in using deficit spending to create full employment, but it is entirely another matter to say what the level of risk is, and to provide compelling arguments about why that risk is appreciable, and more costly than the effects of chronic unemployment in a stagnating economy. This Mankiw doesn’t begin to do. I think Dylan should have pointed this out, rather than just mentioning Mankiw’s opinion. Who cares about his opinion? It’s his arguments, his theories, for expecting inflation that we care about. So, why doesn’t Dylan outline what these are and critically evaluate them?

When Mankiw tells us that default might be a better option than risking inflation by printing money, he is going way beyond his claimed area of expertise in economics. The 14th Amendment to the US constitution prohibits even questioning Government debt, much less defaulting on it. Mankiw in his capacity as an economist is unqualified to say whether a violation of the US constitution is a better option than taking the risk of triggering hyperinflation by “printing money.”

“Mankiw’s critique goes to the heart of the debate about Modern Monetary Theory — and about how, when and even whether to eliminate our current deficits.

“When the government deficit spends, it issues bonds to be bought on the open market. If its debt load grows too large, mainstream economists say, bond purchasers will demand higher interest rates, and the government will have to pay more in interest payments, which in turn adds to the debt load.”

Well, this is what the mainstream says. But what do MMT economists say in return? Why doesn’t Dylan mention that?

What MMT replies is that bond issuance isn’t an inevitability, but a result of choices made by the US Congress and the Executive Branch of Government. The Congress could place the Fed under the authority of the Treasury Secretary in the Executive Branch, and then no debt would have to be issued to deficit spend, since the Fed could just mark up the Treasury General Account (TGA) under orders from the Secretary.

MMT also points out that the Fed controls the Federal Funds Rate which, in turn, heavily influences all bond rates. If the Fed targets a near zero FFR, and the Treasury issues no bonds longer than say, three months in duration, then bond interest rates can be kept near zero no matter how much debt is issued. Japan has proved this is the case since its debt-to-GDP ratio is now in excess of 200% while its interest rates are very near zero on short-term debt instruments.

Finally, Mankiw seems not to know that even if neither of these alternatives is pursued, the Executive Branch still has options to avoid further borrowing and paying higher interest rates and ro repay debt without either cutting spending or raising taxes. Here, I refer to Proof Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PPCS).

As I’ve outlined in numerous posts including this one, the President at his option could require the Treasury and the US Mint to create a coin of arbitrary face value and deposit it at the Fed. The coin’s value is limited only by the President’s specification. For example, a $60 T coin might be minted. The Fed must provide $60 T in electronic credits in return for the US Mint deposit of the coin in its Public Enterprise Fund (PEF) account. The Treasury can then “sweep” the PEF for the difference between the Mint’s cost in producing the coin and its face value, and place that difference in the Treasury General Account (TGA). Treasury could then use this “seigniorage” to repay all US debts as they fall due, and to implement all spending in excess of tax revenues appropriated by Congress. Using the PPCS option would require no new legislation. The President can use it at will to fill the public purse awaiting Congress’s appropriations providing authority to spend the electronic credits already in it to secure goods and services from the non-Government sector. Of course, there’s no possible inflationary effect of purse filling as long as Congress’s appropriations and the ensuing deficit spending aren’t inflationary.

Next, Dylan says:

“To get out of this cycle, the Fed — which manages the nation’s money supply and credit and sits at the center of its financial system — could buy the bonds at lower rates, bypassing the private market. The Fed is prohibited from buying bonds directly from the Treasury — a legal rather than economic constraint. But the Fed would buy the bonds with money it prints, which means the money supply would increase. With it, inflation would rise, and so would the prospects of hyperinflation.”

Again, Dylan only tells the mainstream side of the story and not the MMT reply to it. If the Fed buys bonds with money it prints, this will increase reserves in the private sector, but it won’t increase Net Financial Assets (NFA), because buying the bonds is just an asset swap. So with no new NFA being added to the private sector by the Government, this sort of Fed operation won’t be inflationary, as its massive QE programs have just demonstrated empirically. In fact, by removing the payment of interest on bonds from the private sector, and given that most of the Fed profits are returned to the Treasury, some MMT economists say that the end result of such operations may well be deflationary.

Dylan continues:

“Economists in the Modern Monetary camp concede that deficits can sometimes lead to inflation. But they argue that this can only happen when the economy is at full employment — when all who are able and willing to work are employed and no resources (labor, capital, etc.) are idle. No modern example of this problem comes to mind, Galbraith says.

“The last time we had what could be plausibly called a demand-driven, serious inflation problem was probably World War I,” Galbraith says. “It’s been a long time since this hypothetical possibility has actually been observed, and it was observed only under conditions that will never be repeated.”

Note, that Jamie refers to demand-driven inflation above. He doesn’t say that cost-push inflation can’t happen as the economy approaches full employment. MMT economists recognize this possibility, and consider that the 1970s inflation was of this type, but point out that cost-push inflation has little to do with Government deficit spending per se, and must be combated with anti-speculation law enforcement, price controls, targeted taxation, and sometimes even de-regulation (See: [01:03:29] and [01:03:47]) in the effected or related sectors, rather than by raising taxes or cutting spending.

(Cross-posted from Correntewire.com

In a comment on another post of mine, Kelly Canfield, a blogger and commenter at FDL, asked me for the following.

What I would appreciate is a simple, 3,4 bullet point method as to why I should support, and more importantly, tell others that MMT is superior to the Keynes theories which I have pointed out and illustrated to others before this current situation.

I can easily explain that the private sector is not providing demand, and that the Fed sector should, and people would be better off with demand stimulus.

Explain to me how I EXPLAIN that MMT is superior to that basic premise, if it is?

Not sure I want to do that in three or 4 bullet points. But what I will do is to state what I think are some differences that are very significant for policy activism between a Keynesian approach employed by people like Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, and Robert Reich and an MMT approach employed by people like Warren Mosler, L. Randall Wray, Bill Mitchell, Jamie Galbraith, Stephanie Kelton, Marshall Auerback, Scott Fullwiler, and Pavlina Tcherneva. So, here are some contrasts between the two approaches on seven important issues. Out of these contrasts, there should be much material for short explanations about why MMT is superior to Keynesian approaches.

1. Government deficit spending for recovery — Keynesian deficit dove position: provide Government deficit spending to stimulate aggregate demand.

MMT position: provide Government deficit spending: targeted on payroll tax cuts that will get more money into the hands of working people quickly; providing revenue sharing grants to States for maintaining existing State-level jobs; and direct job creation (job guarantee for anyone who want to work)

Significance: MMT says it’s not just about increasing aggregate demand and GDP. It’s about targeting and getting rid of unemployment!

2. Government fiscal policy over the business cycle — Keynesian deficit dove position: deficit spend in bad (less than full employment) times; have government surpluses in good (full employment) times.

MMT position: Government surpluses withdraw net financial assets from the private sector. Therefore, they should only be run when the private sector is over-heated and demand-pull inflation exists. Since the size of the Government deficit, without explicit Government attempts to raise taxes, is determined by 1) the level of savings of the private sector; and 2) the level of the trade deficit (surplus), it is perfectly possible that the Government may have to run deficits continuously to maintain full employment, if there is demand leakage from a trade deficit and/or private savings that the Government must make up for by deficit spending.

Significance: MMT says: ”Don’t worry about this simple fiscal rule.” Whether deficits are needed depends on the situation and specifically on our trade balance and our desires to save in the private sector.

3. Long Term Deficit Reduction Planning — Keynesian deficit dove position: We can and should engage in long-term deficit reduction planning since the fiscal policy can control the deficit, and since there is a long-term inter-temporal budgetary constraint on Government spending due to the potential of the bond markets to impose an insupportable interest burden on the budget when continuous deficits, increasing national debts, and increasing debt-to-GDP ratios accelerate too fast and/or get too high.

MMT position: We cannot and should not formulate or implement plans for long-term deficit reduction. First, because such plans assume that Government fiscal policy can accurately predict the effect on deficits of its attempts to close deficits by austerity measures. In fact, however, raising taxes or cutting programs always reduces net financial assets in the private sector, which in turn reduces aggregate demand and the level of economic activity, which, in its turn, drives up Government expenditures and, inadvertently increases its deficits. We already see this in the UK. the austerity measures of the Conservative/Liberal coalition government aren’t decreasing its deficits, but are increasing them, and driving the UK closer to a double-dip recession.

Second, because we should not be distorting fiscal policy by targeting it at deficits and surpluses, national debts, or debt-to-GDP ratios at all. Fiscal policy should, instead, be targeted on fulfilling public purposes including full employment, price stability, the elimination of poverty, providing universal health care as a right, maintaining public safety, creating an excellent educational system for all of our children, strengthening the social safety net, re-inventing the energy foundations of the economy, and so on. These, and not deficit reduction or debt-to-GDP ratio stabilization should be our real goals, because for fiat currency systems with floating exchange rates, non-convertibility of currency, and no external debts in any other currency or pegs to any external currency or basket of such currencies, there is no inter-temporal or any other kind of budgetary constraint on Government deficit spending imposed by previous deficit spending.

That is, it doesn’t matter what such a Government’s national debt is, or what it’s debt-to-GDP ratio is. It still has the same capacity it has always had to buy anything it wants to buy for sale in its own currency, since it can always spend/create what its legislature appropriates.

Third, unlike Keynesian deficit doves, who evidently think that without long-term deficit planning and control of deficits, interest rates will rise catastrophically, and eventually consume the Federal budget; MMT deficit owls, point to the capability of the Government to spend without issuing further debt, use coin seigniorage, or issue only short-term (3 months or less) debt as measures the Government can take to either eliminate Treasury bond interest costs altogether, or to lower them to a level arbitrarily close to zero. MMT deficit owls say: Governments sovereign in their own currency are “in charge” in the bond markets, not bond market vigilantes, whose very existence depends on the sufferance of the Government.

Significance: MMT says: long-term deficit reduction plans are a no-no and should be opposed! They’re based on false theories and put constraints on Federal deficit spending that are sure to damage the economy. Most importantly, they hinder progressives in solving real problems

4. Long Term Deficit Reduction Projections — Keynesian deficit dove position: Organizations like the CBO can produce useful long-term projections of deficits and debts that can be used as the basis for long-term deficit reduction plans

MMT position: Organizations like the CBO can produce long-term projections based on certain assumptions; but they aren’t and can’t be useful because the assumptions are always unrealistic, often self-contradictory, and always fail to take into account the emergent character of political and economic reality.

This is apparent when we look back at CBO, OMB, and other fiscal projections in the past. In 2002 and after, where were the surpluses as far as the eye can see being projected by CBO at the end of the Clinton Administration? Where were the projections of the housing bust of 2007 and thereafter and its effects back in 2006? Where were the projections in 2007 of the great crash of 2008? Where are the projections right now of what happens if the United States suddenly decides to stop issuing debt instruments while doubling its deficit spending? The answer is that projections like these could not be made by CBO because their projections are always based on assumptions that cease to hold because of their sensitivity to unanticipated political occurrences.

Significance: MMT says: Since long-term deficit projections are invalid, and since they don’t affect the Government’s fiscal capacity. Stop doing them! And stop worrying about them! Worry about jobs, poverty, education, energy foundations, health care, global warming, the environment, the rise of global plutocracy, etc. These are the real problems!

5. Funding Government spending — Keynesian deficit dove position: Government spending must, over the long-term, be funded by some combination of taxing and borrowing.

MMT position: Government spending isn’t “funded.” It occurs under the authority of the Government to issue currency, which authority is unlimited by any constitutional requirement for “funding.” There is therefore no intrinsic Government Budgetary Constraint, (GBC) either static or inter-temporal. This means that we never need to ask the question, “how will we pay for it?” when considering Government deficit spending. There are many things we do need to consider: the likely results of such spending, how it’s targeted, its implications for full employment; its impact on inflation. However, we never have to ask “how will we pay for it?” or worry that “the Government is broke and can’t afford it,” because the Government of the United States is the currency issuer, not the currency user and it always spends and simultaneously issues “currency” when it does so.

Significance: MMT says: We never have to worry about the Government finding financial resources or “how are we gonna pay for it!” So, we can just do what’s right when it comes to balancing off the real resources being used to create real wealth!

6. Social Security Solvency — Keynesian deficit dove position: The Keynesians accept the Government’s projections that Social Security will become insolvent and unable to pay full benefits by 2037. So they advocate doing something about that by raising the current salary cap on FICA taxes, and sometimes even raising the retirement age, though not by as much as deficit hawks want to see it raised. Even if a Keynesian deficit dove opposes all changes except for raising the FICA salary cap, they still acknowledge that there is a long-term SS FICA revenue shortfall that must be met either with increased taxes, or by cutting Social Security benefits, and which ought not to be handled through deficit spending.

MMT position: In contrast, MMT says that since Government spending isn’t and need not be “funded,” there is no Social Security revenue shortfall problem. The only problem is Congress and whether it is willing to guarantee Social Security at present or increased levels for retirees. Stephanie Kelton has put this very well:

”Funding Social Security is always and everywhere a political choice. The strongest evidence of this comes directly from the 2009 Annual Report of the Trustees. In that report, they predict gloom and doom for Social Security because “there is no provision in current law that would enable full payment of benefits, once the Trust Funds are exhausted”.

In contrast, the Supplementary Medical Insurance (SMI) Trust Funds are “both projected to remain adequately financed into the indefinite future because current law automatically provides financing each year to meet next year’s expected costs.”

It is that simple. The former is in ‘trouble’ because the government isn’t committed to making the payments, and the latter gets a clean bill of health because the government will always make the payments.”

Significance: MMT says: There is no revenue shortfall problem for Social Security because SS payments need not be funded, only appropriated, by Congress. The real problem is a Congressional and presidential guts problem; not a Social Security revenue problem!

7. Proposed progressive reform programs — Keynesian deficit dove position: Whatever programs are proposed must fit within “progressive” deficit reduction plans and their projected glide path toward a declining public debt-to-GDP ratio. However, important the programs, the problems they address, and the expected benefits from them, the overall deficit reduction plan with its various targets must have priority and provides spending constraints for the various progressive reform programs.

MMT position: Progressive reform programs must always be evaluated in the specific economic and social context of the proposed legislation and the key issue is always the assessment of their likely impact and the real benefits and costs (including side effects) of this legislation. Considerations of the size of deficits, debt-to-GDP ratios, or trends in such statistics are not among the impacts that are relevant. Impacts on employment, inflation, and a whole host of social, economic, and political factors are all relevant. And whether or not there is deficit spending, is certainly important because Government deficit spending adds to private sector net financial assets. However, prioritizing a long-term deficit reduction plan over progressive measures that will result in greater benefits for Americans is fiscally irresponsible because it sacrifices real increases in well-being to an erroneous theory about non-existent Governmental Budgetary Constraints.

Since Keynesian deficit doves as well as deficit hawks are doing just that with their long-term deficit reduction plans, they too are committed to fiscal irresponsibility over the long term. And in their willingness to compromise with deficit hawks out of a shared belief that their really is a long-term deficit problem, they also are willing to allow a certain amount of deficit reduction activity in the short and medium term, even though they know this is likely to be damaging to our already suffering economy.

Significance: MMT says: Escape from real fiscal irresponsibility (trying to target abstract fiscal indicators of budget performance rather than real outcomes of spending) and fiscal unsustainability (pursuing fiscal policy that reduces real economic capacity by destroying industry, manufacturing, and people skills) to true fiscal responsibility (targeting government spending at full employment, price stability, and other real public purposes) and fiscal sustainability (Government spending that at least maintains and generally increases the real, rather than nominal capacity of the economy to produce the goods, services, and conditions that people value and fulfill public purposes).

(Cross-posted at All Life Is Problem Solving and Fiscal Sustainability).

By

Scott Fullwiler

(Reprinted with the Permission of the Author)

(Editor’s Note: This is a long and difficult piece, originally published at Yves Smith’s Naked Capitalism site, and has an academic style. But, nevertheless, if you want to understand more about what the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) school of economics has to offer, it is well worth your investment of time. It is the definitive critique of Paul Krugman’s two recent blog posts on MMT, in my view.

In addition, in the process of criticizing Paul’s views, Scott Fullwiler illuminates a lot of the deep thinking and knowledge developed by those following the MMT approach over many years, now. If you read this, you can see just how far off-base Paul Krugman is in his attempt to de-construct MMT, and you can also see how much work Paul has to do to really understand what his colleague economists using the MMT approach have developed.)

The old saying that bad press is better than no press is definitely true in this case. Without the advent of the blogosphere, our work would likely never even be noticed by the likes of Paul Krugman, so the fact that he’s writing about us (here and here) this weekend at least means we’re doing better than that, even if his assessment of us is far less than glowing. At the same time, and particularly given that Krugman is so widely read, it’s imperative to at the very least set the record straight on where MMT and Krugman differ. I should note before I start that others have done very good critiques already that overlap mine in several places (see here, here, here, and here).

Krugman makes three incorrect assumptions about what MMT policy proposals actually are while also demonstrating a lack of understanding of our modern monetary system (as is generally verified by volumes of empirical research on the monetary system by both MMT’ers and non-MMTer’s). These are the following:

Assumption A: The size of the monetary base directly (or indirectly, for that matter) affects inflation if we’re not in a “liquidity trap”

Assumption B: MMT’s preferred fiscal policy approach or strategy—Abba Lerner’s functional finance—is Non-Ricardian

Assumption C: Bond markets alone set interest rates on the national debt of a sovereign currency issuer operating under flexible exchange rates

Assumptions A and C are central to the Neo-Liberal macroeconomic model. Assumption B is a common misconception about MMT and a common perception of Neo-Liberals about the nature and macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy (i.e., Neo-Liberals often believe that activist fiscal policy is Non-Ricardian).

While MMT’ers argue that all three assumptions are false, one does not need to necessarily agree. The point is that to critique MMT on the basis of assumptions that are inconsistent with MMT is to actually not a critique MMT at all. It is a straw man.

I explain these assumptions and how they relate to Krugman’s two posts as I go through the text of both, written below in italics. Krugman begins,

Right now, deficits don’t matter — a point borne out by all the evidence. But there’s a school of thought — the modern monetary theory people — who say that deficits never matter, as long as you have your own currency.

Of course, Krugman grants in his follow-up (below) that MMT’ers don’t say this at all, perhaps due to the many responses to this post pointing out his error, as this is simply a straw man that makes Assumption B—more on this below.

I wish I could agree with that view — and it’s not a fight I especially want, since the clear and present policy danger is from the deficit peacocks of the right. But for the record, it’s just not right.

Again, MMT’ers don’t say it is, either.

The key thing to remember is that current conditions — lots of excess capacity in the economy, and a liquidity trap in which short-term government debt carries a roughly zero interest rate — won’t always prevail. As long as those conditions DO prevail, it doesn’t matter how much the Fed increases the monetary base, and it therefore doesn’t matter how much of the deficit is monetized. But this too shall pass, and when it does, things will be very different.

Krugman here is using the basic Economics 101 view of a liquidity trap, where interest rates and spending are unresponsive to continued increases in the monetary base. Paul Davidson has explained numerous times that this mainstream conception of a liquidity trap is not at all what Keynes was after, though I won’t go into that specifically here.

The MMT point here, instead, is that changes in the monetary base NEVER matter per se, at least not in terms of causing anything. Recall what the monetary base is—the outstanding quantity of currency (physical “money” held by the households and businesses, or in bank vaults) and reserve balances held by banks in reserve accounts at the Fed.

Increases in currency are portfolio shifts, generally out of deposits or savings accounts. These are not controlled by the Fed—the Fed enables banks to trade reserve balances for currency as banks anticipate their customers’ withdrawals. There is no such thing in the real world as the Fed dropping currency from a helicopter—that would be an increase in private sector income, not a shift in their wealth from savings accounts to physical currency (see here for more on this point). At any rate, the key point is that an increase in currency is a trade made by banks of currency for reserve balances. This occurs in response to the private sector’s desired currency holdings out of existing wealth and relative to existing income, and to the extent they are related to an increased desire to spend, the latter is certainly not caused by the fact that the Fed accommodates the desired portfolio shift.

Regarding reserve balances, the Economics 101 story is that banks use excess reserve balances to create loans. The reality is that a loan is created when a credit worthy borrower desires a loan at a bank’s stated interest rate (that is set consistent with the bank’s anticipated costs of liabilities and the anticipated credit risk of the borrower), and this loan creates a deposit for the borrower. No prior reserve balances necessary. If the bank is short its required reserves after creating the loan/deposit, it will borrow reserve balances in the wholesale markets; in the aggregate, the Fed will ensure sufficient reserve balances to meet requirements are available at its target rate, since that’s what it means to set a target rate. Should the borrower withdraw the deposit (as when a household takes out a mortgage and immediately uses the proceeds from the loan to buy a house), if the bank is short reserve balances to settle this payment it will automatically receive an overdraft to its reserve account and that it will clear by the end of business; again, the Fed ensures that sufficient aggregate balances are circulating that the target rate is achieved. For any individual bank, what matters is the cost of the liabilities the bank anticipates it will ultimately be left with as an offset to the newly created loan along with the capital charge associated with the loan. For this, it is the Fed’s target rate that can matter, but never the aggregate quantity of reserve balances circulating.

As an aside, it should be obvious that this all works exactly the same if a bank purchases, say, a bond from the private sector. The bank simply acquires the asset and credits the seller’s account with deposits. If this raises reserve requirements, then the bank acquires them in wholesale markets if necessary. If the seller banks at a different bank, then the bank may need to borrow in wholesale markets to cover an overdraft as it settles the bond purchase with the seller’s bank.

As with currency, an increase in reserve balances will occur in response to economic activity as reserve requirements increase after a loan has created a deposit (assuming the deposit ultimately remains a deposit and isn’t converted into a money market account or time deposit). More reserve balances don’t help banks make more loans; in the aggregate this will only reduce the overnight rate below the Fed’s target unless the Fed pays interest on reserve balances at its target rate as it has since late 2008.

This has been understood for decades by many heterodox economists operating under various titles such as MMT, neo-Chartalist, endogenous money, horizontalists, and Circuitistes. Particularly since 2008, an increasing number of mainstream monetary economists have started to figure this out, though it has yet to make its way to any of the undergraduate or graduate textbooks.

Returning to the main issue, Krugman here has invoked Assumption A—that the monetary base would matter if the economy wasn’t in a liquidity trap. The MMT response, as I’ve explained here, is that the size of the monetary base never matters per se. The currency component of the monetary base is entirely set in response to economic conditions, whereas reserve balances do not help banks “do” anything they couldn’t otherwise. Indeed, banks in Canada “do” exactly what banks in the US “do” even though the banking system in Canada has operated with 0 reserve balances for many years already.

So suppose that we eventually go back to a situation in which interest rates are positive, so that monetary base and T-bills are once again imperfect substitutes;

Again, Krugman’s Assumption A is false.

Further, his assertion that the monetary base and T-bills eventually will be “imperfect substitutes” demonstrates his lack of understanding of monetary operations. The reason why reserve balances and T-bills are substitutes right now is because they both earn the same return—reserve balances earn the target rate, that is. (Note that the currency components of the monetary base earns nothing, and thus is not now and will not be, in the case of any positive rate on T-bills, a substitute for the latter.) If the Fed someday in the future does raise its target rate, the question is whether or not it will continue to pay interest on reserve balances at its target rate. If so, then reserve balances and T-bills will be substitutes, at least for banks (since non-banks don’t have reserve accounts and thus can’t hold reserve balances). If not, then the Fed will be forced to drain all the excess reserve balances not consistent with achieving its target rate by selling its own assets, reverse repos, or issuing its own time deposits.
True, reserve balances and T-Bills will no longer be substitutes, but “why” this is so, and “how” the Fed will respond to this, are far more important than asserting that this will occur. That is, whether or not reserve balances and T-bills are substitutes is entirely dependent on how the Fed chooses to achieve its target rate. Note further that if the Fed chooses to simply pay interest on the excess reserve balances at its target rate, leaving this part of the monetary base at its current size even when the economy leaves the so-called liquidity trap, this will not matter since banks can’t do anything with reserve balances besides settle payments and meet reserve requirements, and the Fed always supplies enough reserve balances in the aggregate to do these things anyway.

also, we’re close enough to full employment that rapid economic expansion will once again lead to inflation.

Remember this point, since it’s key to Krugman’s Assumption B below.

The last time we were in that situation, the monetary base was around $800 billion.

As above, Krugman’s Assumption A is wrong and demonstrates a lack of understanding of monetary operations. Whether the monetary base is $800 billion and the national debt held by private investors is $9 trillion, or the two are reversed, such that it is the monetary base that is $9 trilllion, is of no consequence. It’s merely a choice of monetary policymakers about how to achieve the target rate. In the former case, the Fed has set the target rate above the rate it pays on reserve balances and has drained all excess reserve balances not consistent with its positive interest rate target; in the latter case, the Fed has kept the target rate and the rate paid on reserve balances equal such that T-bills and reserve balances are “perfect substitutes” still for banks.

Suppose, now, that we were to find ourselves back in that situation with the government still running deficits of more than $1 trillion a year, say around $100 billion a month.

Here we see, for the first time, Krugman’s Assumption B: Functional Finance is Non-Ricardian. To define terms, “functional finance” refers to a fiscal policy strategy that uses deficits to manage the macroeconomy (for purposes here, the precise mechanisms by which this is done are not important; there’s a lot of MMT research on that point for those that are interested). The core point is that it is not the size of the deficit that matters, but rather the effects of the deficit. As such, MMT’ers only support large deficits to the extent that they do not push the economy beyond full capacity utilization and thereby create demand-pull inflation. Consequently, Krugman’s assumption here that the government is running $100 billion deficits/month must also assume that this deficit is consistent with full capacity utilization, and no more utilization than that, otherwise it is a larger deficit than any MMT’er would ever support.

Ricardian fiscal policy is a Neo-Liberal economics term that refers to a policy strategy that brings the path of the government’s primary budget balance (the total deficit less interest on the national debt) in line with the government’s so-called inter-temporal budget constraint. Where this is not the case, the path of the government’s primary budget balance ultimately brings rising inflation—even hyperinflation—or default to avoid this outcome due to exponential increases in debt service. This is referred to as Non-Ricardian fiscal policy. All sorts of fiscal policy strategies can be Non-Ricardian—running large, fixed deficits regardless of the state of the economy; maintaining a primary deficit at its current size even as debt service rises exponentially; and so forth.

MMT’ers generally don’t have much use for the inter-temporal budget constraint (as I explain here—largely because it requires Assumption C to be true; MMT’ers reject Assumption C for a sovereign currency issuer under flexible exchange rates, as I also explain below). Nonetheless, and interestingly, Wynne Godley and Marc Lavoie demonstrate that a functional finance-consistent fiscal policy strategy is in fact Ricardian. This is true regardless how large the interest rate on the national debt becomes relative to the growth rate of the national debt since an increase in debt service that pushes the economy beyond full capacity utilization and thereby raises inflation is necessarily—in order to remain consistent with the functional finance strategy—offset by a decline in the primary deficit (see pages 12-23).

It’s important to clarify that while functional finance is Ricardian, it is not so “on purpose”; that is, the policy strategy is to sustain full capacity utilization—no more and no less stimulus than necessary to reach this point (again, MMT’ers have little use for the inter-temporal budget constraint given the latter’s reliance on Assumption C). That the functional finance strategy is in fact Ricardian is a side effect—and, again, a very interesting one at that—not something that is pursued directly.

And now suppose that for whatever reason, we’re suddenly faced with a strike of bond buyers — nobody is willing to buy U.S. debt except at exorbitant rates.

This is Assumption C: Interest rates on the national debt are set by “market forces.” Krugman tries to push this heroic assumption without anyone noticing by inserting “for whatever reason” into the sentence, as if somehow he can just wave his hands and make it so. Indeed, “whatever reason” is the crux of the matter, and in this two-word phrase he has assumed MMT’s vast literature on the monetary system away in order to make his argument against MMT. It’s like proving theory X is wrong by simply assuming all of the supporting evidence for theory X—for “whatever reason”—is wrong.

There is probably nothing more central to MMT than the idea that the government does not need its own money, since a currency-issuing government is by definition the source of its own money. Taxes, in the MMT framework, have the effect of giving the government’s money value, and also serve the purpose of managing aggregate demand. But since it does not need its own money, it also does not need the bond holders, wherever and whoever they are (and the last time I checked, China’s government created yuan, not US dollars).

Of course, governments—particularly when they are operating on an outdated understanding of the monetary system—can and do impose constraints upon themselves. In the US case, laws previously written by Congress forbid the Fed from providing direct overdrafts to the Treasury. As such, if the Treasury wants to spend and its balances are dwindling, it must either tax or issue bonds to do so. Unfortunately, this self-imposed political constraint is the starting and ending point for Krugman and most others, even as it has little to no economic significance according to MMT.

MMT’s approach to this self-imposed political constraint is more general. A currency issuer under flexible exchange rates that allows itself to receive overdrafts in its central bank account will see the interest rate on its debt equal to the central bank’s target rate at the very lowest. This is because the central bank cannot achieve its target rate in this case unless it pays interest on the reserve balances created by the government’s spending net of balances drained by taxes, and these central bank outlays will reduce the profits it turns over to the treasury (a de facto interest payment by the treasury). This is what I like to refer to as the strong form of MMT regarding interest on the national debt. If the treasury instead decides to issue short-term bills, or is required to by self-imposed constraints, these will arbitrage against the central bank’s target rate; if it issues longer-term bonds, these will mostly arbitrage against the current and expected Fed targets. I call this the semi-strong form, and explained it in more detail here and here. Randy Wray does, too, here. Losing access in the semi-strong form is a non-starter—the arbitrage opportunity grows stronger as the non-govt sector can borrow at a lower rate, and there are primary dealers and thousands of hedge funds that would love to take advantage of that trade.

In neither of these cases should interest rates on the national debt be considered to be set by “market forces” (aside from what Warren Mosler likes to call “technicals”). Further, the self-imposed political constraint is not a constraint of any economic significance—if one is given the choice between an overdraft at the central bank’s target and issuing debt at roughly the central bank’s target, does it really matter if the overdraft option is then withdrawn? MMT’ers say “no.”

Failing the strong and semi-strong forms of interest on the national debt—which I would argue would be exceedingly rare, though the probability is probably not 0—a final option would be for the central bank to purchase the government’s debt in order to keep interest rates on the debt from rising. I call this the weak form of MMT regarding interest rates on the national debt. Marshall Auerback and Rob Parenteau explained this option in more detail here. Here again, access to the bond markets isn’t the issue.

The overall point here is that the interest rate on the national debt for a currency issuing government under flexible exchange rates always is, or at the very worst always can be, a monetary policy variable. Concerns about “bond market vigilantes” are misplaced, as they could apply only to non-currency issuers (e.g., Greece, California) or fixed exchange rate regimes. Assumption C is false.

Finally, note that Krugman’s Assumption C here is related to his Assumption B, since, as explained above, neo-liberal economics holds that a government running a Non-Ricardian fiscal policy strategy can lose access to the bond markets (explained in more detail here). . But, again, functional finance is Ricardian, so even if Assumption C were correct, the fact that that Assumption B is wrong makes it unlikely that Assumption C would be relevant at any rate.

So then what? The Fed could directly finance the government by buying debt, or it could launder the process by having banks buy debt and then sell that debt via open-market operations;

This is Assumption C again, though this time with the Fed’s intervention to keep rates from rising, as in the weak form described above.

either way, the government would in effect be financing itself through creation of base money.

Before Krugman again invokes Assumption A below, note that the Fed actually cannot do this and achieve a positive interest rate target unless it pays interest on the large quantity of excess reserve balances left circulating (Krugman’s “base money,” since, as above, these Fed operations aren’t about currency). In other words, an understanding of monetary operations reveals that the only way this can happen is if the Fed makes reserve balances and T-bills perfect substitutes, which was the scenario under which Krugman argued above that the size of the monetary base doesn’t matter.

So? Well, the first month’s financing would increase the monetary base by around 12 percent. And in my hypothesized normal environment, you’d expect the overall price level to rise (with some lag, but that’s not crucial) roughly in proportion to the increase in monetary base. And rising prices would, to a first approximation, raise the deficit in proportion.

This is Assumption A, as the rising monetary base is believed to increase the price level directly.

Recall, though, that the monetary base (actually, reserve balances, since that’s what’s increasing here) in this case is a perfect substitute for T-bills, since the Fed cannot engage in these operations to purchase the government’s debt without paying interest on the reserve balances at its target rate. The alternative would be for the Fed to be unable to achieve a positive target rate. Again, Krugman’s own view is that the size of the monetary base doesn’t matter when it and T-bills are perfect substitutes—his mistake was that his lack of understanding of monetary operations led him to believe this would only happen when the economy was in a so-called liquidity trap.

More importantly is the fact that a deficit that results in the non-government sector holding government securities is not less stimulative than where the non-government sector does not hold securities. To some degree at least, this should be obvious given that the latter operationally requires that T-bills and reserve balances be perfect substitutes. Note that any government spending results in recipients having more income and increased deposits in their bank accounts, while their banks have greater reserve balances. Taxation does the opposite, reducing income and reducing deposits.

A bond sale does neither of these. It is simply a drain of reserve balances (in the case of a bank purchasing the security) or deposits (in the case of a sale to a non-bank such as a primary dealer) and reserve balances (of the dealer’s bank) in exchange for the security. And the new owners of the security, or security holders in the aggregate, don’t suddenly have less spending power. Treasuries are the most liquid of financial assets and can be sold at any moment should the holders for whatever reason prefer deposits, and dealers that would purchase these from current holders generally finance their purchases by borrowing in repurchase agreement markets—that is, this process can result in the creation of additional deposits. Indeed, unlike deposits created by government spending, Treasuries can and do enable additional credit creation via repurchase agreements, often several times the market value of the security itself.

Similarly, if banks are holding Treasuries instead of reserve balances, as explained above, they don’t somehow have less ability to create additional loans/deposits. And given that the Fed would have to pay interest at the target rate on reserve balances in order to purchase government securities, the banking system would be indifferent between holding T-bills and interest earning reserve balances.

The issue is not whether a given deficit is offset by interest earning reserve balance or securities, since this choice does not create more or less inflation (aside from potential interest rate differentials if longer-term bonds are issued—and in that case the bonds can in fact be more inflationary than not issuing securities), but rather whether the deficit itself—which is raising nominal incomes—and the accompanying debt service—given the Fed’s interest rate target—is pushing the economy beyond full capacity utilization and thus potentially resulting in demand-pull inflation. If this occurs in a functional finance policy world, the appropriate response according to MMT is to reduce the primary deficit. Assumption B is wrong.

So we’re talking about a monetary base that rises 12 percent a month, or about 400 percent a year. Does this mean 400 percent inflation? No, it means more —.

All three assumptions are required to get this result:

The monetary base will only grow as fast as Krugman is implying if the Fed has set interest rates that high; the Fed could slow the growth by simply reducing its interest rate target. Assumption C is wrong.

It doesn’t matter how fast the monetary base grows, per se; what matters is the deficit itself relative to full capacity utilization. Assumption A is wrong.

MMT would argue that the primary deficit should be reduced if the combination of the existing primary deficit and the interest rate on the debt is creating demand-pull inflation. Assumption B is wrong.

. . . because people would find ways to avoid holding green pieces of paper, raising prices still further

Apparently Krugman believes that Fed security purchases raise the quantity of “green pieces of paper.” They don’t. They increase the quantity of reserve balances while reducing the outstanding quantity of Treasuries. And we’ve already established that the Fed can’t do this unless T-bills and reserve balances are substitutes, while it is the interest paid on reserve balances that ensures banks will hold the reserve balances at the Fed’s target rate. Assumption A is wrong.

I could go on, but you get the point: once we’re no longer in a liquidity trap,

Assumption A is wrong.

running large deficits without access to bond markets

Assumptions B and C are wrong.

. . . is a recipe for very high inflation, perhaps even hyperinflation.

Assumptions A and B are wrong.

And no amount of talk about actual financial flows, about who buys what from whom, can make that point disappear: if you’re going to finance deficits by creating monetary base, someone has to be persuaded to hold the additional base.

Assumption A is wrong. Yet again, what has to happen when the Fed buys Treasuries is that in order to achieve a positive interest rate target reserve balances must earn the target rate. This is sufficient to ensure someone will “hold the additional base.”

Whether this scenario is inflationary is based on (1) the primary deficit, (2) the interest payments on the national debt set by the Fed, and (3) the size of these two combined relative to the non-government sector’s net savings desired at full employment real GDP. If so, then one or both of these can be reduced.

At this point I have to say that I DON’T EXPECT THIS TO HAPPEN — America is a very long way from losing access to bond markets,

Assumption C is wrong.

. . . and in any case we’re still in liquidity trap territory and likely to stay there for a while.

Assumption A is wrong. Krugman’s own straw-man scenario unwittingly makes T-bills and reserve balances substitutes.

But the idea that deficits can never matter,

Deficits can matter for MMT because Assumption B is wrong.

that our possession of an independent national currency makes the whole issue go away,

It makes the issue of “involuntary default” go away, while the interest on the national debt is or at least can be a monetary policy variable. Assumption C is wrong. The resulting size of the monetary base doesn’t matter either, since Assumption A is wrong.

is something I just don’t understand.

Clearly it is difficult for a Neo-Liberal to understand MMT.

Krugman’s follow-up 24 hours later continued with:

I think one way to clarify my difference with, say, Jamie Galbraith is this: imagine that at some future date, say in 2017, we’re more or less at full employment and have a federal deficit equal to 6 percent of GDP.

Just to be clear, the assumption here must be that the six percent deficit is consistent with being at or near full capacity utilization and no additional demand-pull inflation. If not, then Krugman is making Assumption B, which is wrong.

Does it matter whether the United States can still sell bonds on international markets?

Why would it need to? And if it wanted to, why wouldn’t it be able to at roughly the Fed’s target rate? This is Assumption C again, and it is wrong.

As I understand the MMT position, it is that the only thing we need to consider is whether the deficit creates excess demand to such an extent to be inflationary.

Yes.

The perceived future solvency of the government is not an issue.

I don’t really know what “perceived future solvency” means. There are a lot of people, like, say, Bill Gross of PIMCO, who currently perceive that there are problems with the government’s future solvency. Has that mattered in any economically significant way for the prevailing interest rate on the national debt? No. And even if it did, there’s still the weak form of interest on the national debt available as a policy option.

What MMT’ers say is this: How could a government that issues its own currency face involuntary default? This is obviously not to suggest that deficits can’t be inflationary—though this would be imposing Assumption B, which for purposes here is obviously wrong—or that governments cannot impose default on themselves (see here and here).

I disagree. A 6 percent deficit would, under normal conditions, be very expansionary; but it could be offset with tight monetary policy, so that it need not be inflationary.

If it’s overly expansionary, then MMT would be against it and would argue in favor of a smaller primary deficit. Assumption B is wrong. Using tighter monetary policy instead will only “work” if the higher overnight rate reduces credit creation more than it raises government debt service; consequently, this could potentially require a larger reduction in the primary deficit than not altering monetary policy at all.

But if the U.S. government has lost access to the bond market

“Losing access” to the bond market for a sovereign currency issuer is a non-starter. The closest approximation would be for the central bank to set the interest rate too high or, in the weak form scenario, is purchasing the government’s bonds at too high a rate, such that interest on the national debt is rising so fast that inflation is rising. Assumption C is wrong.

But if this happens, then a primary surplus will be necessary to avoid inflation according to functional finance approach. Assumption B is wrong.

. . . the Fed can’t pursue a tight-money policy —

The Fed can raise the rate it pays on reserve balances—recall that for Krugman’s scenario to work, the Fed must pay interest at its target rate. True, this may not actually “tighten,” since it will raise interest on the national debt that much faster, and thus raise aggregate demand absent a reduction in the primary deficit. But interest rates certainly are still under the Fed’s control even if the transmission mechanism is not as the textbooks suggest.

In any event, fiscal policymakers can reduce the primary deficit if a reduction in aggregate demand is desired. Assumption B is wrong.

. . . on the contrary, it has to increase the monetary base fast enough to finance the revenue hole.

Assumption C is wrong—debt service will only grow that fast if the Fed sets an interest rate target that high.

Assumption B is wrong—the primary deficit can be (and under a functional finance strategy, should be) reduced if it is large enough that demand-pull inflation is occurring.

And so a deficit that would be manageable with capital-market access becomes disastrous without.

Assumptions A, B, and C are wrong.

Now, this has NOTHING TO DO WITH OUR CURRENT SITUATION:

It has nothing to do with our situation now or in the future, or the situation of any other currency issuer now or in the future, as I’ve explained. It can only ever be otherwise if all three of Krugman’s assumption are true. But they are all false.

. . . the rapid growth in monetary base since 2007 has taken place because the Fed is trying to rescue the economy, not because it’s trying to finance the government —

True. Not that it matters, though, since, yet again, Assumption A is wrong.

. . . and that base growth can and will be reversed as soon as the economy gets anywhere close to full employment. (Actually, the big danger is that it will be reversed too soon.)

One last push for Assumption A, this time in reverse. That’s wrong, too. If a larger monetary base doesn’t matter, then it doesn’t need to be wound down, either.

So at the moment this is just an intellectual exercise. Still, it’s a point that needed making.

If only to demonstrate, for anyone who still remains unconvinced, that Krugman doesn’t understand MMT and, perhaps even more, doesn’t understand the basics of how the monetary system actually works.

To conclude by way of reiterating the main point here, one need not agree with MMT that the three assumptions Krugman makes are incorrect. The overarching problem is that Krugman has simply assumed the Neo-Liberal macroeconomic model is correct, and the MMT view is incorrect. This is far different from actually demonstrating that MMT is incorrect, which Krugman has yet to even attempt.

(Cross-posted at All Life Is Problem Solving and Fiscal Sustainability).