Category Archives: L. Randall Wray

TRUSTEE BANKS SUED FOR $250 BILLION

By L. Randall Wray

Here’s another story in the continuing saga of Bankster fraud.

As I’ve argued since 2008, it is likely that all—or nearly all–of the residential mortgage backed securities (RMBSs) are fraudulent. The Banksters engaged in fraud at every link in the RMBS food chain.

They defrauded the borrowers. They forced the appraisers to commit fraud (pressured them to overvalue property). They conspired with ratings agencies to overvalue the RMBSs. They created MERS to destroy property records and to cheat local governments out of recording fees. They separated the promissory notes from the deed of trust, invalidating the lien. They hired BurgerKing Robo-signers to create forged documents. They lie in court, committing perjury. They steal homes from owners who don’t even have mortgages. And on, and on, and on. Their depravity knows no bounds.

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NEP’s Randy Wray on Thom Hartmann’s Show

Randy will be on Thom Hartmann’s show July 18th, 2014 at 1:00 pm Eastern time. You can catch Randy and Thom live on radio stations coast to coast…live on XM/Sirius satellite radio…simulcast LIVE on Free Speech TV on Dish Network, Direct TV, Comcast Cable, RCN, Cox Cable, Time Warner, Verizon Fios and over 200 independent community cable providers nationwide including Manhattan Neighborhood Network.

The audio and video are streamed LIVE on Thom’s website. Free Speech TV also streams the program LIVE on their website.

The program is also streamed LIVE (audio and video) on The Thom Hartmann Program app available for iPhone and iPad (free of charge on iTunes)

EGREGIOUS FRAUDSTER: INTRODUCING BOB RUBIN’S CITICORP

By L. Randall Wray

By now you’ve heard that Citigroup admits—yet again—that it engaged in fraud. Heck, it was the business model under Bob Rubin. If you want to blame three individuals for the Global Financial Crisis, only Larry Summers and Alan Greenspan deserve more credit than Rubin.

Together they “softened-up” Congress so that it would free the Banksters, and then he ran Citi into the ground as he sucked gazillions of dollars of executive compensation out of the bank. Like all the CEOs of the biggest banks, he oversaw fraud on a scale never imagined—let alone seen—in the history of the globe.

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DEBT-FREE MONEY: A NON-SEQUITUR IN SEARCH OF A POLICY

By L. Randall Wray

While we are on the topic of monetary cranks, I thought it might be useful to quickly address a cranky idea that often comes up in comments to my blogs and also during Q&A after presentations: so-called “debt-free money”.

The first time I heard it, my immediate reaction was “Say what?”, and the second was puzzlement at the non-sequitur.

I am not sure exactly which of the crank approaches explicitly adopt the notion, but it seems common to a lot of them. I’m not going to address any particular approach but instead will address only the idea that we can have a “money” that is not a “debt”.

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Something is Rotten in the State of Denmark: The Rise of Monetary Cranks and Fixing What Ain’t Broke

By L. Randall Wray

Horatio:  He waxes desperate with imagination.

Marcellus:  Let’s follow. ‘Tis not fit thus to obey him.

Horatio:  Have after. To what issue will this come?

Marcellus:  Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Horatio:  Heaven will direct it.

Marcellus:  Nay, let’s follow him.

 Hamlet Act 1, scene 4

Marcellus is right, the Fish of Finance is rotting from the head down. It stinks. As Hamlet remarked earlier in the play, Denmark is “an unweeded garden” of “things rank and gross in nature” (Act 1, scene 2).   The ghost of the dead king appears to Hamlet, beckoning him to follow. In scene 5, the ghost tells Hamlet just how rotten things really are.

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To Consolidate or Not To Consolidate, that is the Question (or maybe it isn’t)

By L. Randall Wray

This is another short post on MMT, a sort of follow-up to my post from a couple of days ago. There was an interesting response to various comments on my piece, which was posted up on Mike Norman’s website.

We got the typical: “oh you MMTers always want to consolidate the Fed and Treasury, but really the Fed is a private institution that is not a part of government”, and “in reality the Treasury cannot spend unless the Fed will allow it to spend, otherwise it must get tax revenue before it can spend”, and hence “really government spending is constrained by its revenue, just like a household or firm”.

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MODERN MONEY THEORY: THE BASICS

By L. Randall Wray

*I’ll return to my series on the role of taxes in MMT later this week. Meanwhile, here’s a short post on MMT.

Modern Money Theory (MMT) seems to confuse two groups of otherwise sympathetic economists. First there are those like Paul Krugman who are generally of the Keynesian persuasion and who like MMT’s “deficit owl” approach. I think Krugman would really like to stop worrying about the deficit so that he could advocate an “as much as it takes” approach to government spending. The problem is that he just cannot quite get a handle on the monetary operations that are required. Won’t government run out? What, is government going to create money “out of thin air”? Where will all the money come from?

He really doesn’t understand that “money” is key stroke records of debits and credits. He still thinks banks take in deposits and then lend them out. He starts to tear his hair out whenever someone tries to correct him on this. He’s wedded to the deposit multiplier idea he got from his Econ 101 textbook.
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Tax Bads, Not Goods

By L. Randall Wray

This is another instalment in the series on the MMT view of taxes. I’m back from China, participating in the annual Hyman P. Minsky Summer Seminar at the Levy Economics Institute. Yesterday my colleague, Mat Forstater, gave a talk on the job guarantee and “green jobs”. Along the way he made two particularly insightful comments on MMT and taxes that I’ll use to introduce this instalment.

First, he discussed the MMT view of “modern money”—that is to say, the money that has existed “for the past 4000 years, at least, as Keynes put it in his Treatise on Money. The money of account is chosen by the sovereign and used to denominate debts, prices, and other nominal values. It is the Dollar in the US.

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CREATIONISM VERSUS REDEMPTIONISM: HOW A MONEY-ISSUER REALLY LENDS AND SPENDS

By L. Randall Wray

MMT has emphasized that there is a close relation between sovereign power to issue a currency and its power to impose tax liabilities. For shorthand, we say “Taxes Drive Money”. I’ve dealt with that topic in the previous instalments of this series on MMT’s view of taxes.

We’ve also demonstrated (as if it needed demonstration!) that sovereign governments do not “need” tax revenue in order to spend. As Beardsley Ruml put it, once we abandoned gold, federal taxes became “obsolete” for revenue purposes.  I’ll have more to say about good old Beardsley in the next instalment.

In today’s instalment I want to step back a bit to ask a more fundamental question: does the issuer of a money-denominated liability need to obtain some of those liabilities before spending or lending them?

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Taxes and the Public Purpose

By L. Randall Wray

In previous instalments we have established that “taxes drive money”. What we mean by that is that sovereign government chooses a money of account (Dollar in the USA), imposes obligations in that unit (taxes, fees, fines, tithes, tolls, or tribute), and issues the currency that can be used to “redeem” oneself in payments to the government. Currency is like the “Get Out of Jail Free” card in the game of Monopoly.

Taxes create a demand for “that which is necessary to pay taxes” (and other obligations to the state), which allows the government to purchase resources to pursue the public purpose by spending the currency.

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