Monthly Archives: December 2013

Bipartisan Budget Deal

Posted on December 14, 2013 by | 5 comments

NEP’s Bill Black appears on TheRealNews.com. The discussion is about the new budget deal and the fact that it secures austerity policies and fails to extend unemployment benefits. (Bill appears at the 8:00 minute mark).

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Dr. Kelton’s Graduate Macro Students’ Video Project

Posted on December 12, 2013 by | 11 comments

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Blinder and the Banks

Posted on December 11, 2013 by | 54 comments

By Dan Kervick

Alan Blinder, writing in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, expresses enthusiasm about some recent hints at a possible change in the Fed’s policy on interest paid on excess reserves. The hints were contained in the minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee’s last policy meeting, which included a passage indicating that most participants in the meeting “thought that a reduction by the Board of Governors in the interest rate paid on excess reserves could be worth considering at some stage.”

Blinder has been a strong proponent of changing the current policy, so he thinks the hinted changes are of the utmost importance. “As perhaps the longest-running promoter of reducing the interest paid on excess reserves, even turning the rate negative,” he says, “I can assure you that those buried words were momentous.”

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Full Employment through Social Entrepreneurship

Posted on December 11, 2013 by | 2 comments

By Pavlina Tchnerva

Pavlina R. Tcherneva discusses her proposal for eliminating unemployment now and forever by running a job guarantee program through the social  entrepreneurial sector. She examines the problems with conventional stimulus policies and the price-stabilization features of her proposal.

It is the 12/10/2103 interview and starts at 17:30 min mark.

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Financial Governance for Innovation and Social Inclusion

Posted on December 11, 2013 by | 3 comments

The workshop on Financial Governance for Innovation and Social Inclusion brought together international economists working on issues related to “Reorienting Financial Reform” and “Re-shaping Financial Institutions for Innovation and Development” – under the Reforming Global Financial Governance  initiative of the Ford Foundation. Below are the appeareances of Drs. L. Randall Wray and Jan Kregel.  Recorded November 25th, 2013.

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Good-Bye Lenin? Is Ukraine’s ‘Revolution’ Pro-European or Pro-Oligarchic?

Posted on December 11, 2013 by | 8 comments

By Alla Semenova

Protesters topple a statue of a Soviet leader, Vladimir Lenin in downtown Kyiv, Ukraine on Sunday, December 8, 2013.

For more than two weeks, Ukraine has been swept by massive pro-European, anti-government protests, the largest the country has seen since the Orange Revolution of 2004. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have stormed the streets of Kyiv, following President’s Yanukovych decision to put on hold a major trade and cooperation agreement with the EU. Pressure from Putin’s Russia is cited as the main reason for the President’s U-turn.

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Of art and money, Bitcoins and Damien Hirst

Posted on December 11, 2013 by | 2 comments

By Glenn Stehle

Money and art, in the minds of some, are now one and the same.

Izabella Kaminska, for example, recently asserted that art is “the sophisticated man’s Bitcoin.” It is the “safe store-of-value” which “art aspires to that is our intended meaning,” she avers.  “Think sophisticated man’s Bitcoin rather than asset class outright.”

Kaminska goes on to elaborate that much art

is being ‘mined’ purely to satisfy the demand for ‘safe-ish’ assets in a liquidity saturated world. Safe assets, which we should add, are often held in bonded warehouses in places like Geneva, outside of the reach of tax authorities, and which later become a type of bearer security in their own right as the depository receipts which allow redemption of the assets begin to circle amongst the wealthy as their own type of non-taxable currency.

Much of the value of art, according to Kaminska, is just like that of Bitcoins.  It depends on the “the Emperor’s New Clothes effect.  “If we  —  art dealers, collectors, writers and experts – all agree a particular work has value,” she asserts, “it surely does, irrespective of its costs of production, utility and purpose.”

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Krugman, Helicopters, and Consolidation

Posted on December 11, 2013 by | 75 comments

By Scott Fullwiler and Stephanie Kelton

Paul Krugman has a new post that explains why the debate over money- vs. bond-financing of government deficits is really much ado about nothing.  In it, he essentially echoes longstanding MMT-core principles, as we will show below.  Indeed, MMT blogs have written as much many times previously (for example, see here, here, here, and here).

Krugman’s post looks at two alternative scenarios:

Case 1: The government runs a deficit, selling bonds to offset the shortfall, while the Federal Reserve does QE

Case 2: The government runs a deficit but does not sell bonds, instead financing all of its spending by “printing money” (i.e. with newly created base money)

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Bitcoin System: Some Additional Problems

Posted on December 9, 2013 by | 20 comments

By Eric Tymoigne

In my last post, I argued that the fair price of a bitcoin as a monetary instrument is zero BTC; a bitcoin contains no promise in terms of income, in terms of convertibility, in terms of maturity, or any other. As a commodity, I have no idea what its fair price is. BOA says it is $1300. I will let those who find utility in the bitcoin payment system and speculators decide how much they are willing to pay in USD for a number credited on their screen in BTC. All I can tell you is: “money does not grow on trees.” Money is not a natural occurrence, it is a man-made financial devise. It looks like the bitcoin creator’s views on money were shaped by the old and erroneous idea that “gold is money.” Gold was at best a collateral embedded in a monetary instrument (gold coin), the metal itself was never money. In today’s blog, I will focus on three other issues with the bitcoin system that prevent it to work well as a monetary system. While I explain what ought to happen to make the bitcoins work properly as a monetary instrument, I am not sure it can be done.

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Mosler Endorses ZIRP. Forever.

Posted on December 7, 2013 by | 23 comments

By Stephanie Kelton

Warren Mosler, writing for US News & World Reports, makes the case that the Fed should not “normalize” rates or go back to trying to fine tune the economy by raising and lowering the overnight interest rate but, instead, just leave rates where they are.  Let’s see if Warren’s argument will top the list of reader favorites. Read the full article here.

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