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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.