By L. RANDALL WRAY
In this part, I’ll resume with comments on the critical contributions to the special issue of rwer. We finished Part 2 with a discussion of the shocking lack of citations to MMT literature in the critiques—especially the dearth of citations to the more academic contributions (as opposed to the summaries of MMT written for undergrads and the general public). Let me return to the oversight of contributions made by scholars such as Fullwiler and Tymoigne—who have mostly written academic pieces.
Sawyer does cite Fullwiler (although with the name misspelled! If he was my undergrad student, I would chew him out—at least get the damned names spelled correctly!). In his piece, which is largely an exposition that parallels MMT but is disguised as a critique, he wants to argue that MMT doesn’t properly distinguish between what circuitistes call initial versus final finance (Davidson has a similar distinction). But in reality, I have long used the circuit approach in my exposition—including in my own contribution to the rwer issue. The initial finance of government spending is created when the spending occurs, and today takes the form of two balance sheet credits: the deposit account of the recipient and the reserve account of the recipient’s bank. Sawyer seems to mostly agree with that. But according to Sawyer, MMT ignores the point that because bond sales and tax revenues logically follow government spending and can be seen as the funding stage. However, Eric Tymoigne made exactly this point in a 2014 article, arguing: “Put in terms of the circuit approach, taxes and bond offerings are part of final finance (funding).” So Sawyer is just wrong about this.
