Monthly Archives: January 2016

NEP’s Bill Black on The Real News

Bill appears on The Real News along with Public Banking Institute founder Ellen Brown. They are discussing Hillary’s record on regulating Wall Street. You can watch the video below and for the video with transcript, you can visit The Real News here.

Sovereign Spending in a Market Economy

By J.D. ALT

Even if we assume the principles of modern fiat money will be generally accepted at some point in the future, we must yet confront the problem that sovereign spending is a difficult issue for market economies. It could easily unfold that even with the new “modern” money perspective in place, a serious recession could still find federal stimulus spending unnecessarily constrained. This difficulty was on full display in the last recession when Obama’s stimulus package was finally passed by Congress—appropriating $800 billion for the federal government to spend—only to then confront the almost burlesque-show entertainment of watching Congress and the Obama administration trying to figure out how to actually do the spending.

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Money and Banking – Part 2: Central bank balance sheet and immediate implications

By Eric Tymoigne

[Revised 1/18/16 – updated t-account images]

Post 1 reviewed basic balance-sheet mechanics. This post begins to apply them to the Federal Reserve System (Fed).

Balance Sheet of the Federal Reserve System

For analytical purpose, the balance sheet of the Fed can be presented as follows:

f1

Figure 1. A Simplified Balance Sheet of the Federal Reserve System

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Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist

Victoria Bateman has a review of Randall Wray’s new book “Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist” over at Times Higher Education. You can read the review here.

Money and Banking – Part 1: Balance Sheet

By Eric Tymoigne

I struggled a few years to get an M&B course together. It lacked coherency and students had difficulty to link the different parts of the course. A good part of the problem comes from the M&B textbooks that, besides having outdated presentations, are a disparate collection of chapters without a coherent core. So I gave up with textbooks and went my own way, and comprehension dramatically increased among my students.

The core of the financial system consists of financial documents and among them are balance sheets. Balance sheets provide the foundation upon which most of an M&B course can be taught: monetary creation by banks and the central bank, nature of money, financial crises, securitization, financial interdependencies, you name it, it has to do with one or several balance sheet(s). As Hyman P. Minsky used to note, if you cannot put your reasoning in terms of a balance sheet there is a problem in your logic.

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Bernie Sanders Decries Lack of Wall Street Prosecutions

NEP’s Bill Black appears on The Real News and says it’s important to reimplement the Glass-Steagall Act – but it’s not enough to prevent another financial crisis. You can view here with transcript or watch video below.