Monthly Archives: October 2015

Who Needs Balanced Trade? Who Needs Balance Budgets: A New Book on Trade and Fiscal Policy

Posted on October 29, 2015 by Joe Firestone | 3 comments

The intensity of the conflict over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has died down since last June, after the Administration won its victory in getting Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) through Congress. During the Intervening months, the efforts of the Special Trade Representative (STR) to complete TPP negotiations have continued. At the end of June, the goal was to complete negotiations by August so that the Administration could send the Agreement to Congress in enough time to start the clock on the 90-day countdown period Congress has to vote on an agreement negotiated under the TPA, and to schedule a ratification vote on it before the end of 2015.

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Posted in Joe Firestone

Tagged A Holistic Approach to Trade and Fiscal Policy, Balanced Budget Fiscal Policy, balanced trade, Budgeting for Public Purpose Fiscal Policy, Deficit Neutrality in the Long Run Fiscal Policy, fair trade, free trade, Impact Assessment for Trade Policy, MMT, modern money theory, public purpose, TISA, TPP, Trade for Public Purpose, TTIP

Yes, ExxonMobil Committed “Unparalleled Evil” Yet that Evil Can Distract From Taking Action

Posted on October 28, 2015 by Michael Hoexter | 8 comments

By Michael Hoexter

In a series of revelations over the past three months, the Pulitzer Prize winning website Inside Climate News has revealed what may be the greatest crime of the 20^th and the 21^st Centuries. Via interviews and archival research, ICN recovered irrefutable evidence that Exxon scientists (and then ExxonMobil) had an extensive climate research program in the late 1970’s and 1980’s and came to the conclusions that fossil fuel use would lead to heating of the atmosphere, a radical change in climate, and would lead very likely to catastrophic consequences. In the 1980’s, Exxon scientists participated in scientific conferences that explored the role of carbon dioxide in warming and other climatic effects. However, ExxonMobil, once government officials were alerted in 1988 by the broader scientific community that global warming was occurring and was a global crisis, changed course and funded climate denial, delaying and weakening climate action and nascent climate policies. Exxon’s current CEO, Rex Tillerson, claims that global warming’s effects are exaggerated and won’t be that bad for humanity. The Los Angeles Times has used some of the same archival material to come to similar conclusions as has ICN.

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Posted in Michael Hoexter

Tagged Bill McKibben, climate, climate change, climate policy

Fiscal Myths of Campaign 2016: A New Kindle e-Book

Posted on October 23, 2015 by Joe Firestone | 1 comment

Most of the world, and most notably the United States, is in the grip of fiscal myths fostered by the ideology of neoliberalism. There is virtual unanimity across the major political parties in the United States in accepting the viewpoint of neoliberalism, and the fiscal myths associated with it.

This book is about these myths, the arguments showing that they are, indeed, myths, and the truths that can counter them. It is about Campaign 2016, and some of its issues, because the fiscal myths will certainly be used in the Campaign; since, for the first time in a very long time, there is a major party candidate running, who, because he advocates for a very broad agenda and for fighting inequality, will, sooner or later, find that some, and perhaps a large number, of fiscal myths are being directed at him by his opponents and their supporters, who want to persuade voters that his agenda is “fiscally irresponsible.”

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Posted in Joe Firestone

Tagged bernie sanders, Burden of Government Debt, consols, fiat currency, fiat money sovereigns, Fiscal Myths of Campaign 2016, Fiscal Responsibility, Fiscal Sustainability, fiscal truths, Government Austerity, Government Debt, Government Family or Household, government solvency, Hyper-inflation, inflation, money, Our Economic Future, platinum coins, Running Out of Money, Shared Sacrifice, Wall Street Journal

The Platinum Coin Returns

Posted on October 22, 2015 by Joe Firestone | 22 comments

Upon my oath, I didn’t intend to bring back the coin proposal until much later in the renewed process of Republican hostage-taking over the debt ceiling. After all, there’s not much chance that the President would ever use the platinum coin option, because his budget policy direction of getting ever closer to a budget surplus, is best served by a “forced” compromise with the Republicans, that results in another few hundred billion in spending cuts for 2016, while allowing him to place the blame on them for that outcome. Using the platinum coin option would not have that result, because it would deliver a clear victory to him.

Of course, he doesn’t want a default due to Republican brinksmanship either, so if the Republicans do drag everyone too close to the cliff, then he may decide to take some extraordinary measures and the coin is one that is available, so it’s conceivable that he might choose this undoubtedly, from his point of view, distasteful option. It is for this reason, I suppose, that the Brookings Institution is warning him off the coin to weight his choice towards some more conventional approach. Continue reading →

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Posted in Joe Firestone

Tagged $100 Trillion coin, 14th Amendment, Brookings Institution, debt ceiling crisis, debt limit, fiscal myths, Philip A. Wallach, platinum coin seigniorage, Trillion Dollar Coin

Scott Fullwiler’s Central Banking Operations Now in Italian

Posted on October 22, 2015 by Devin Smith | Comments Off

Our friends over at RETE in Italy have done it again! They have translated and posted Scott Fullwiler’s works on central banking operations into Italian. For our Italian speaking friends, you can now check out Scott’s translated posts here.

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Posted in Scott Fullwiler

Tagged banking operations, Italian, MMT, Modern Monetary Theory, RETE

Can the Bank of England’s New ‘Ring-fencing’ Rules Work?

Posted on October 22, 2015 by Devin Smith | 1 comment

NEP’s Bill Black and Wharton professor of legal studies and business ethics Peter Conti-Brown discuss the Bank of England’s move to re-regulate the banking industry in Britain and protect depositors and taxpayers. You can view the article and listen to the podcast here.

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged Bank of England, banking, banksters

Why Shouldn’t the US Federal Government Invest $4-$6 Trillion Per Year on Climate Protection? (Part 2 of 2)

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Michael Hoexter | 4 comments

By Michael Hoexter

Part I | Part II

4. “We shouldn’t invest $4 to $6 Trillion per year more in federal dollars to save humanity because we already have carbon pricing instruments that are doing the job and are still under attack from opponents of climate action. We should stand by, applaud, and not “rock the boat” because serious climate policy makers are only talking about carbon pricing (cap and trade or carbon taxation) and not your full-scale mobilization proposal with its high price tag and dirigiste, mission-driven role for government.”

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Posted in Michael Hoexter

Tagged climate, climate change, climate policy

Why Shouldn’t the US Federal Government Invest $4-$6 Trillion Per Year on Climate Protection? (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Michael Hoexter | 9 comments

By Michael Hoexter

Part I | Part II

Summary: Why We Should

Recently New Economic Perspectives posted a three-part provisional US Climate Platform I have put together. The US Climate Platform outlines why and how the US federal government should invest somewhere in the area of $4 trillion to $6 trillion per year on stabilizing the global climate, in addition to preparing the United States and other nations for the upcoming effects of our 200-year long fossil fuel binge. The climate expenditures would more than double current federal government spending over a period of ten to twenty years, where “spending” means investment in real, useful resources and people.

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Posted in Michael Hoexter

Tagged cliimate, climate change, climate policy, climate protection

The Ideology of Money Scarcity

Posted on October 5, 2015 by J.D. Alt | 10 comments

By J.D. ALT

I’ve been continuing to work on the book I first proposed here at NEP last spring—The Millennials’ Money—and am getting close now to having it ready for publication. The aspect of it that was least successful (and there were several NEP comments to that effect) was the framing of the “ideology of money scarcity” as having evolved from the particularities of the baby-boomer’s generational experience. That was always a shaky and not-very-insightful argument—and I recently came to realize it had to be replaced with a “framing” that focused the “target” of the book in a more useful way. This “target” became clear to me while reading a series of collected essays by Wendell Berry (The Art of the Commonplace) in which he very forcefully explains how and why local, self-sufficient economies are being exploited and destroyed by the multi-national corporate economy—and why it is essential for those local economies to somehow be re-established and regain some useful portion of their self-sufficiency. I realized this was, in fact, precisely what my book was suggesting ought to be the ultimate purpose of the “millennials’ money”—and that modern fiat currency, itself, makes achieving that goal uniquely possible. What follows here is part of my revised introduction, which is titled: “The Ideology of Money Scarcity—A Brief History”.

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