Responses to MMP Blog #46: The Job Guarantee – Program Manageability
Sorry, late yet again. One more week of teaching and then things should be less hectic. Note I had planned for 52 MMP blogs and we are nearing the end…… But it looks like we’ll need a few more. I’m going to be a bit lazy this week, cutting and pasting the comments and providing brief responses.
Affordability Issues. As we have seen over the course of the previous 44 blogs, a sovereign nation operating with its own currency in a floating exchange rate regime can always financially afford an JG/ELR program. So long as there are workers who are ready and willing to work at the program wage, the government can “afford” to hire them. It pays wages by crediting bank accounts. If it credits more accounts than it debits through tax payments, a deficit results. This initially takes the form of net credits to the banking system, held as reserves. If the reserve holdings are excessive, banks bid the overnight rate down. The government can then either choose to let the overnight rate fall toward zero (or its support rate if it pays interest on reserves), or it can intervene to sell interest-paying bonds at the desired support rate; this will drain excess reserves. In no sense is the government spending on JG/ELR constrained either by tax revenues or the demand for its bonds.
Posted in L. Randall Wray, MMP
Tagged job guarantee, MMT, Modern Monetary Theory, modern money theory
By Dan Kervick
Paul Krugman argues in a recent New York Times column that right-wing critics of Ben Bernanke and his colleagues are trying to bully the Fed into a misguided obsession with inflation, and that “the truth is that we’d be better off if the Fed paid less attention to inflation and more attention to unemployment. Indeed, a bit more inflation would be a good thing, not a bad thing.”
Krugman is absolutely right to lament conservative pundits’ and politicians’ obsessions with inflation when tens of millions of Americans are languishing in unemployment, with all of the personal, social and economic misery and waste that unemployment entails. But his argument, which assumes that the Fed can boost employment by engineering higher inflation, is problematic. He defends the inflationist approach this way:
“For one thing, large parts of the private sector continue to be crippled by the overhang of debt accumulated during the bubble years; this debt burden is arguably the main thing holding private spending back and perpetuating the slump. Modest inflation would, however, reduce that overhang — by eroding the real value of that debt — and help promote the private-sector recovery we need. Meanwhile, other parts of the private sector (like much of corporate America) are sitting on large hoards of cash; the prospect of moderate inflation would make letting the cash just sit there less attractive, acting as a spur to investment — again, helping to promote overall recovery.”
I believe this is the wrong approach. The Fed’s ability to boost employment is very limited, well-intentioned citations of the Fed’s full employment “mandate” notwithstanding. Rather than looking to central bankers and the banking system to accomplish a task for which they are not really cut out, we should turn our attention back toward fiscal policy as the primary tool for bringing the country up to full employment and keeping it there. And rather than seeking engineered inflation as the mechanism for boosting spending and employment, we should implement the MMT job guarantee proposal to achieve full employment and price stability at the same time.
By Dan Kervick
The recent exchange on the nature of banking among Paul Krugman, Scott Fullwiler, Steve Keen and others has been feisty and instructive. But some readers might be left wondering whether the whole exercise is too wonky by half. The anatomical details of banking systems might be juicy and interesting for the academics who like to dissect those systems and dig deep into their entrails. But how significant are the details for practical questions of public policy? They are in fact very significant.
Posted in Dan Kervick
Tagged fiscal policy, market monetarism, MMT, Modern Monetary Theory, paul krugman, public purpose, scott fullwiler, scott sumner, steve keen
Update: Paul Krugman has posted a reply to this post that is a straw man. He and Nick Rowe are viewing this all through the lens of the old Monetarist/Keynesian debates in which there was a choice b/n interest rate targets and monetary aggregate targets; the Monetarist critique assumed the Keynesians were going to keep interest rates at the same level forever and not change them. Once John Taylor came up with his “rule,” everyone agreed an interest rate target could work.
What we are talking about here is operational tactics–the CB can only target an interest rate. It cannot target a reserve balances or the monetary base directly. But that is different from strategy–that is, WHERE the CB puts its target and WHEN it chooses to change the target. There is NOTHING in anything I’ve ever said or anything any PK’er, MMT’er, etc., has ever said that suggests the CB can’t set the target wherever it wants whenever it wants. The point is that whatever the target is, THAT is what its daily operations defend directly, not a monetary aggregate, not the monetary base, not reserve balances. There is nothing in anything I’ve said that would preclude the CB from running a Taylor’s Rule type strategy, for instance, that responds at any point in time endogenously to the state of the economy. That is, the target rate is an exogenous control variable (i.e., it is necessarily set by the CB) that it sets endogenously in response to economic events.
The debate between Paul Krugman and my friend Steve Keen regarding how banks work (see here, here, here, and here) has caused me to revisit an old quote. Back in the 1990s I would use Krugman’s book, Peddling Prosperity (1995), in my intermediate macroeconomics courses since it provides a good overview of what were then contemporary debates in macroeconomic theory as well as Krugman’s criticisms of various popular views on macroeconomic policy issues from that era. One passage near the very end of the book has always remained in the back of my mind; in it, Krugman critiques a popular view that was and still is highly influential regarding productivity and trade policy. He writes: “So, if you hear someone say something along the lines of ‘America needs higher productivity so that it can compete in today’s global economy,’ never mind who he is or how plausible he sounds. He might as well be wearing a flashing neon sign that reads: ‘I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT.’” (p. 280; emphasis in original)
In his latest post in this debate (which Keen replied to here), Krugman demonstrates that he has a very good grasp of banking as it is presented in a traditional money and banking textbook. Unfortunately for him, though, there’s virtually nothing in that description of banking that is actually correct. Instead of a persuasive defense of his own views on banking, his post is in essence his own flashing neon sign where he provides undisputable evidence that “I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Posted in Scott Fullwiler
Tagged Federal Reserve, MMT, Modern Monetary Theory, paul krugman, steve keen
The JG posts here at MMP have generated a huge number of comments. I have focused my responses at the comments more-or-less directly directed to the actual posted blogs. I can understand the impatience: many questions have not been answered. However many of these questions and comments concerned upcoming topics.
Let us move on to macro stability issues. I have given JG talks all over the world and the two main objections raised always refer to inflationary impacts and exchange rate impacts. It seems to me that those who respond with these fears have not paid attention to the set-up of the program and to the MMT arguments.
Posted in L. Randall Wray, MMP, MMT
Tagged Employer of Last Resort, job guarantee, Modern Monetary Theory, modern money theory
Thanks for the comments, many of which get ahead of the story.
I’d like to remind readers that we are ADDING the JG onto the EXISTING system. So the correct comparison is NOT against some UTOPIAN IDEAL in which we all live like Wall Street’s finest in some sort of Ayn Rand blissful Fountainhead. But RATHER to compare the existing system against one in which the JG is added. I realize this is a difficult mental gymnastic. I hope this will be clear as I respond to seven comments (the others concern upcoming topics; indeed, even these really are about topics we have not explored in detail but they are worth discussing).
Thanks for all the comments and the interesting discussions. Sorry this will be late as I’m in Brazil at a couple of conferences. A number of the comments were on topics we will discuss later—especially Vincenzo’s design of his own preferred JG. I am purposely keeping it general in the beginning, and gradually we will introduce the specifics. But note that the discussion made it fairly clear that no “one size fits all” will work everywhere. The real world program will need to be carefully designed to fit “conditions on the ground” (as our Pentagon warriors love to phrase it). We need to look at the general, universal program first so I will stick to that. Later I will argue that in some circumstances it might not be practical (due to political, institutional, sovereignty, managerial capability, or productive capacity constraints) to implement the universal program from the get-go.
Posted in L. Randall Wray, MMP
Tagged Employer of Last Resort, full employment, job guarantee, Modern Monetary Theory
Sorry for the delay. I will respond to comments on my blog and also to comments on Dan Kervick’s excellent piece on MMT (part one—if I have any comments for part two I will post them after I get time to read the post and comments).
Posted in L. Randall Wray, MMP
Tagged austrian economics, ideology, Modern Monetary Theory, modern money theory
By William K. Black
(Cross-posted from Benzinga.com)
While the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement set its sights on occupying a financial center, Germany has accomplished the vastly more impressive feat of occupying an entire nation – Greece. Germany has experience at occupying Greece having done so during World War II. The art of occupying another nation is to recruit a local puppet to do the dirty work required to repress the citizens. Germany used several puppets, most notoriously the murderous Ioannis Rallis, to (nominally) rule Greece and terrify the Greek people during World War II. (After Germany’s defeat, Rallis was executed for his treason.)
Posted in William K. Black
Tagged greece, MMT, Modern Monetary Theory, modern money theory, occupy
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