Monthly Archives: January 2013

Framing Platinum Coin Seigniorage: Part One, Basics

Posted on January 31, 2013 by | 58 comments

By Joe Firestone

How many times have you heard that the Government can only spend money after it raises revenue by either taxing or borrowing? Nearly every time someone talks or writes about the US’s public deficit/debt problem? How come nobody asks why, since Congress has the unlimited authority to create coins and currency, it doesn’t just create money when it deficit spends? The short answer is that Congress in 1913, constrained the Executive Branch from creating currency or bank reserves, delegated its power to do that to the Federal Reserve System, and never looked back when we went off the gold standard in 1971, even though this removed the danger of money-creation outrunning gold reserves, and also created a new monetary system based on fiat currency.

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Yglesias pours the Geithner, Holder, Breuer (GHB) banksters immunity doctrine in our drinks

Posted on January 31, 2013 by | 21 comments

By William K. Black

It’s early, but Salon has published on January 30, 2013 either the funniest or saddest column of the year to date: “Are Banks Too Big To Prosecute?” 

The column is attributed to Matthew Yglesias, a blogger who studied philosophy as an undergraduate.  It could be a brilliantly ironic satire of the Geithner, Holder and Breuer doctrine of immunity for banksters (which I am dubbing “GHB” for short).   GHB is the “roofie” that the Obama administration gave us so the banksters could screw us repeatedly with impunity.  Alternatively, and far more likely, Yglesias has written the saddest and most immoral apologia for elite white-collar crime that has yet made it into electronic bits.  It takes a rerouted beginning student of philosophy, posing as a commentator on finance, to replace what should be a discussion that includes virtue ethics with a virtue-free, criminology-free, and economics-free apologia for the felons who became wealthy by costing the Nation $20 trillion and 10 million jobs.

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Only Public Enterprise Can Heal Our Sick Economy

Posted on January 30, 2013 by | 51 comments

By Dan Kervick

For most Americans, the news that the US economy contracted by 0.1% in the fourth quarter of 2012, the first quarter of negative growth since the pit of the Great Recession 2009, has undoubtedly come as a disappointing shock.  For readers of this blog and the other MMT blogs, however, the emotion felt is probably closer to bitter frustration, since we have all been warning for a very long time about the danger of the utterly misguided austerity drive that has wrecked the European economy, and was officially imported last year to the United States.

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NEP’s Marshall Auerback on BNN

Posted on January 29, 2013 by | 1 comment

Marshall appeared on Business News Network on January 29th. There are 2 separate clips and are listed below. In the second clip, Marshall appears beginning at 1:11, after market updates. Click a link in order to view.

http://watch.bnn.ca/#clip854050

http://watch.bnn.ca/#clip854058 (Marshall appears beginning at 1:11)

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NEP’s William Black in Davos

Posted on January 28, 2013 by | 5 comments

William Black’s Speech at the 2013 Public Eye Awards in Davos Switzerland.

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A Coin for Reading

Posted on January 28, 2013 by | 19 comments

By J. D. Alt

In a recent essay I suggested that MMT might be applied incrementally to put people to work creating certain very special public goods. I suggested that the social norms which prevent people from “seeing” the logic of issuing fiat money to pay for sovereign spending might be placated by this incremental approach—especially if the public goods in question were something overwhelmingly and incontrovertibly beneficial to our country as a whole. This suggestion was strongly criticized by Joe Firestone. So far as I can tell, the essence of his objection is that a proposal to mint a smaller sovereign coin—to be used to achieve some specific goal—would more likely be repudiated by the status quo than a proposal to mint a very large one with the express purpose of overturning the status quo itself.

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The Handmaiden of Capitalism v. the “Swamp” Denizen of Detroit

Posted on January 28, 2013 by | 23 comments

By William K. Black

A preliminary note:

Greetings from Davos!  I’m actually writing this over the mid-Atlantic as I return from being a keynote speaker at the annual “Public Eye” “shame prize” awarded to Goldman Sachs for its abuses.  The shame prize award was made in Davos during the World Economic Forum as a counter-WEF event.  Shell also “won” a shame prize, but I spoke on Goldman Sachs, the role of epidemics of accounting control fraud, and the WEF’s anti-regulatory and pro-executive compensation policies.  I explained that the anti-regulatory policies were intended to fuel the destructive regulatory “race to the bottom” and why the executive and professional compensation policies maximized the incentives to defraud.  I also explained that WEF was a fraud denier.  Collectively, these three WEF policies contributed to creating the intensely criminogenic environments that produce the epidemics of accounting control fraud driving our worst financial crises.  Detailed written developments of these arguments can be found here on our UMKC economics blog: New Economic Perspectives. Continue reading →

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By their responses ye shall know them

Posted on January 27, 2013 by | 1 comment

By William K. Black
(Cross posted at Benzinga.com)

A preliminary note:

Greetings from Davos!  I’m actually writing this over the mid-Atlantic as I return from being a keynote speaker at the annual “Public Eye” “shame prize” awarded to Goldman Sachs for its abuses.  The shame prize award was made in Davos during the World Economic Forum as a counter-WEF event.  Shell also “won” a shame prize, but I spoke on Goldman Sachs, the role of epidemics of accounting control fraud, and the WEF’s anti-regulatory and pro-executive compensation policies.  I explained that the anti-regulatory policies were intended to fuel the destructive regulatory “race to the bottom” and why the executive and professional compensation policies maximized the incentives to defraud.  I also explained that WEF was a fraud denier.  Collectively, these three WEF policies contributed to creating the intensely criminogenic environments that produce the epidemics of accounting control fraud driving our worst financial crises.  Detailed written developments of these arguments can be found here on our UMKC economics blog: New Economic Perspectives. Continue reading →

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Can the Federal Reserve Really Refuse To Accept and To Credit A Platinum Coin Deposited By the US Mint?

Posted on January 26, 2013 by | 28 comments

By Joe Firestone

The issue of whether the Fed can really refuse to accept and credit a deposit of a platinum coin with its face value, is being raised frequently on blog posts about Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) and the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC). In the past, I’ve argued that the Fed cannot; and the final decision on taking the TDC off the table was actually made by the President, and not by Chairman Bernanke.

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Goldman Sachs Proof that God hates its Customers

Posted on January 26, 2013 by | 9 comments

By William K. Black

The chief executive of Goldman Sachs, which has attracted widespread media attention over the size of its staff bonuses, says he believes banks serve a social purpose and are “doing God’s work.”

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