Author Archives: Devin Smith

Financial Governance for Innovation and Social Inclusion

Posted on December 11, 2013 | 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 | 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 | 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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Bitcoin System: Some Additional Problems

Posted on December 9, 2013 | 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 | 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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MMT 101: A Response to Critics Part 6

Posted on December 6, 2013 | 42 comments

Policy Aspects of MMT

By Eric Tymoigne and L. Randall Wray

[Part I] [Part II] [Part III] [Part IV] [Part V] [Part VI]

From the theoretical framework discussed in the 5 previous installments, MMT draws specific policy conclusions about fiscal, monetary and financial policy. In this final post we address the policy implications.

In line with Keynes and Minsky, MMT recognizes that unemployment, arbitrary distribution of income, price instability and financial instability are central problems of market economies that require some government involvement for resolution. 

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MMT 101: A Response to the Critics Part 5

Posted on December 5, 2013 | 7 comments

Adding the Foreign Sector

By Eric Tymoigne and L. Randall Wray

(Revised Figure 8 on 12/6/13)

[Part I] [Part II] [Part III] [Part IV] [Part V] [Part VI]

Paul Davidson has recently written:

What is Bitcoin?  According to Modern Money Theory, bitcoin can not be money since it is not accepted in payment of taxes by any government — nor is it issued by any government via the governed purchase of goods and/or services from the private sector.  So what is bitcoin in terms of MMT?  I do not know what MMT  proponents would respond to this query?

Similarly, Tom Palley argues that government currency is demanded for reasons other than paying taxes and that foreigners who may want to hold the domestic (foreign to them) currency do not pay taxes to the domestic government. In addition, he says, in some countries the domestic private sector does not want to use the domestic government currency in many, or even most, economic transactions even though the government is imposing a tax; thus taxes do not drive currency. 

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MMT 101: A Response to the Critics Part 4

Posted on December 4, 2013 | 20 comments

Adding the Central Bank

By Eric Tymoigne and L. Randall Wray

[Part I] [Part II] [Part III] [Part IV] [Part V] [Part VI]

Beyond the inflationary aspect of MMT, Palley (2013) argues that MMT does not account for the flooding of reserves in the economic system that results from a monetary financing of government spending. In this case, a deficit leads to a decline in interest rates and potential financial instability.

Fiebiger (2012a, 2013) argues that Treasury operations do not lead to a change in the level of central bank liabilities and so there is no monetary creation, and that it is disingenuous to exclude the Treasury General Account at the Fed (TGA) from the money supply. He also wonders why the Treasury continues to issues bonds when the fed funds rate (FFR) is effectively zero today, if, following MMT, bond offerings are voluntary operations used to drain excess reserves.

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12th Annual International Post Keynesian Conference

Posted on December 3, 2013 | Comments Off on 12th Annual International Post Keynesian Conference

Conference dates have been announced for September 25-28, 2014 in Kansas City MO

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MMT 101: Response to the Critics Part 3

Posted on December 3, 2013 | 43 comments

Adding the domestic private sector

By Eric Tymoigne and L. Randall Wray

[Part I] [Part II] [Part III] [Part IV] [Part V] [Part VI]

In the previous installment, we focused mostly on the government side of the circuit. In this piece, we study the interaction between the government and nongovernment sectors while retaining the consolidation hypothesis.

For the purposes of the analysis, we will think of the nongovernment sector as equivalent to the domestic private sector, however, the analysis could just as well include state and local (nonsovereign) levels of government as well as the foreign sector in the nongovernment sector.

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