A podcast recording I made in September with the MMT Podcast crew has just been issued. It's here to listen to:
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
The Gold Mark, the Papier Mark (same thing but no longer gold-backed), the Rentenmark, the Reischmark 🙂 The take-away here is that the Germans recovered from hyperinflation via a process which included printing money, something which we curiously don’t seem to have been taught at school. Printing money’s a tool, therefore, and not the immediate passport to hyperinflation it’s routinely presented as and we’re miseducated to believe it to be.
Thank you Richard.
Very coherent I might add.
Within the context of your podcast address the situation of all euro currency members.
Are you saying they would be able to carry out MMT as INDIVIDUAL sovereign states or are they as I suspect beholden to the monetary and fiscal whims of ECB Frankfurt in a one size fits all template?
The euro is an MMT disaster
Hi Fran,
This episode of our podcast deals with monetary sovereignty. A monetarily sovereign government means a government that can issue its own currency, ie is the monopoly currency issuer and does not promise to convert their pounds or dollars or whatever into something else, like say another currency that it doesn’t control (a pegged currency) or a fixed amount of gold (gold standard). So for instance, Italy cannot issue its own currency. It gave up its power to create however many drachma it needed to tackle unemployment when it joined the single currency. The economic pain the Greeks are suffering right now I think is largely down to this. None of the euro currency member states have issuing power. It’s working out for some of the states, but not for others. This is not an argument for Brexit, btw – just an argument for controlling your own currency. So Greece is like your local council/municipality – it can run out of currency, because it is the user of the euro and not the issuer of the euro. The ECB is in the position of our central government in this analogy, because the ECB is the issuer of the euro. Hope this is helpful, all the best! http://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/2-monetary-sovereignty
Thanks Christian
@ Christian Reilly “None of the euro currency member states have issuing power.”
They do, but not of Euros. There’s an Italian plan which is innovative and would enable them to issue currency within the existing rules: http://www.progressivepulse.org/economics/a-solution-to-imposed-austerity
Something I came across some time ago is the ‘zero-coupon perpetual puttable security’ (see http://www.jdawiseman.com/papers/finmkts/deutsche-zentralbank.html ): and if you are wondering what it is, it isn’t money – at least in name, and in relation to the Maastricht treaty.
I’m not doing twitter even to listen to you Richard.
@Christian Reilly. You talking Italy ( Lire) or Greece ( Drachmae) ?
Fran, Ha! Yes sorry – Lire!
I’d love to hear the harrumphing and spluttering if you were to say things such as ‘Government debt is private wealth’ to the likes of John Humphries or Andrew Neal. Thanks for this excellent exposition of the MMT perspective.
So would I
Krugman, who definitely doesn’t support MMT, didn’t invent the Trillion dollar coin idea and probably only even heard about it from a commentator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion_dollar_coin#Emergence_of_the_concept