Monthly Archives: May 2013

The Penny Game

Posted on May 4, 2013 by Devin Smith | 16 comments

By Jonathan Denn

This demonstration will work well in the classroom or barroom. There are five levels, the first is designed for someone who knows nothing about sector balances, each level adds a new variable and complexity. Continue reading →

16 Comments

Posted in Guest Blogger

Tagged MMT, Modern Monetary Theory, sector balances

The Layman’s Case Against Austerity

Posted on May 4, 2013 by Stephanie Kelton | 48 comments

By Stephanie Kelton

Steve Kraske of The Kansas City Star recently interviewed me for a piece about austerity. The story ran in today’s paper. It doesn’t provide much depth (unlike bloggers, journalists have strict space constraints!), so I followed up with a few comments on the Star’s website. I thought I’d share them here, since I’m always trying to improve the way I communicate these ideas with non-economists. So here’s my best effort to make the anti-austerity case in simple terms. Continue reading →

48 Comments

Posted in Stephanie Kelton

Tagged austerity, debt-to-GDP ratio, full employment, tax holiday, unemployment

Make ‘em Prove the Causality before They Cause Any More Suffering: Part One

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Joe Firestone | 22 comments

By Joe Firestone

OK, austerity has always been about the causality. The people who are trying their best to get us to cut more and more spending, somewhat less than their best to get us to raise taxes, and who are doing nothing to fix our fraud-laden financial system, or the worst period of dis-employment we’ve experienced since the Great Depression, have been making other people (never themselves) suffer, because they believe the theory that excessive public debt hurts economic growth, and that to get rid of it we must follow a plan of long-term deficit reduction. And I’m being very charitable when I opine that they believe in this theory, because the alternative is that they don’t believe it, but are just using it as an excuse to make other people suffer, and widen the wealth gap between themselves and the rest of the population. Continue reading →

22 Comments

Posted in Joe Firestone

Tagged austerity, Brian Hartley, debt and deficits, debt-to-GDP ratio, deficit reduction, High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage, HVPCS, Kansas City, Matthew Berg, Michael Ash, MMT, modern money theory, Reinhart and Rogoff, Robert Pollin, Thomas Herndon, University of Massachusetts, University of Missouri

The Broader Costs of Lethal Lemons: “We Have so Many Ranas”

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Devin Smith | 3 comments

By William K. Black

This is the third article in a series on some of the additional lessons we should learn from the mass murder of Bangladeshi garment workers by anti-employee control frauds. I discuss new allegations about the senior executives involved in producing the terrible loss of life and maiming of so many workers because they are relevant to the broader harms that control fraud can cause that I discussed in the first and second articles in this series. Continue reading →

3 Comments

Posted in William K. Black

Tagged Bangladesh, Control Fraud, criminogenic environment, crony capitalism

How’s that Euro Thingy Working Out? An Update

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Devin Smith | 8 comments

By L. Randall Wray

European integration was a grand plan, perhaps driven by lofty motives. I don’t take a position on that since I’m not European. But as we have argued from the very beginning, the set-up of the EMU was fatally flawed. At the very least, they “put the cart before the horse”—adopting the euro before they achieved fiscal integration under a fiscal authority with sufficient sovereignty to protect the member nations. For references to our early work, see here, here and here.

Continue reading →