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comment by orbat
orbat  ·  1794 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Modern Monetary Theory in Revolutionary France

I'm absolutely no economist and I only have a passing familiarity with MMT, but this really does seem more like a neoliberal hit piece than an honest reflection on what MMT's downsides are, right down to the Santa Claus analogy and the example countries. Soooo, I went digging around a bit, and found this article that takes an opposing viewpoint. I'll just paste a relevant section here:

    Venezuela’s problems are not the result of the government issuing money and using it to hire people to build infrastructure, provide essential services and expand economic development. If it were, unemployment would not be at 33 percent and climbing. Venezuela has a problem the U.S. does not, and will never have: It owes massive debts in a currency it cannot print itself, namely, U.S. dollars. When oil (its principal resource) was booming, Venezuela was able to meet its repayment schedule. But when the price of oil plummeted, the government was reduced to printing Venezuelan bolivars and selling them for U.S. dollars on international currency exchanges. As speculators drove up the price of dollars, more and more printing was required by the government, massively deflating the national currency.

    It was the same problem suffered by Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe, the two classic examples of hyperinflation typically raised to silence proponents of government expansion of the money supply before Venezuela suffered the same fate. Professor Michael Hudson, an actual economic rock star who supports MMT principles, has studied the hyperinflation question extensively. He confirms that those disasters were not due to governments issuing money to stimulate the economy. Rather, he writes, “Every hyperinflation in history has been caused by foreign debt service collapsing the exchange rate. The problem almost always has resulted from wartime foreign currency strains, not domestic spending.”

"Rock star" monikers aside, this does make sense.





kleinbl00  ·  1794 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'm no economist, either. What I will say is that neoliberal hit pieces must outnumber honest reflections at least 50:1 because I've probably read 50 articles hating on MMT and not a single one in its defense. Like I said - the pundits are losing their shit more than they did over Bitcoin.

Venezuela's problems have a lot more to do with cronyism than economics; when you fire everyone who knows how to do something and hire someone who's loyal, you end up with a bunch of loyalists who don't know how to accomplish anything. The Soviet Union had similar issues where one's predictability and loyalty to the party had more impact on one's hiring than one's ability to actually, you know, do the job. The printing of currency is more of an effect than a cause. It's not like Venezuela started printing money because things were fine.

What entertains me is the exact same pundits who think MMT is anthrax lollipops or some shit are totally 100% AOK with "inflating away the debt" or "declaring a debt jubilee." After all, Argentina did this and things are fine now. Just fine. Meanwhile they're mostly white Republicans in their 60s who sorta go "yeah you know fixed income? It's kinda fucked. And since I make so much more money than I'll ever get out of social security, let's just flush that shit. Inflate it away. Solve the pension problem by making a dollar worth a fifth of a dollar. Then our imports will be great there will be lots of foreign investment and all the old people will be dead sooner rather than later because they won't be able to afford cat food and things will be fine. But say "modern monetary theory" and suddenly they're clutching their pearls about Venezuela.

Forbes is apparently kinda serious about a reasonable discussion of MMT. I don't see any real differences between MMT and FDR's New Deal. If people need jobs, make work. End of story. The problem I see is that economies were a lot less entangled back then and a domestic make-work project is very different from injecting cash into the economy, which is about the only prism Republicans can see monetary theory through.

I mostly linked to the article because of the observation that whenever the currency is manipulated, those closest to the manipulation benefit while those furthest away tend to get fucked. Wage inflation is going to clobber everyone who can't work, and the 'boomers are in the process of retiring, thanks much.