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Economic pundits who predicted the collapse of the euro at the start of the eurozone crisis have been proven wrong. But those who say the crisis is over are equally wrong. Four years after the start of the euro crisis, the bailed-out countries of the eurozone (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain) are still facing serious problems, as the austerity policies imposed on them by the European Union (EU) authorities and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) not only failed to stabilize their economies, but actually made matters worse; in fact, much worse: the debt load increased substantially, national output was seriously undermined, unemployment reached potentially explosive levels, a credit crunch ensued, and emigration levels rose to historic heights. Because of these highly adverse effects, the citizens in the bailed-out countries have grown indignant and mistrustful toward parliamentary democracy itself, euroskepticism has taken firm roots, and a cleavage has reemerged between north and south. Take unemployment, for example. The current unemployment rates in the four bailed-out eurozone countries are: 27 percent for Greece; 25 percent for Spain; 15 percent for Portugal; and 12 percent for Ireland, the nation with the highest emigration rate in all of Europe, and whose government was actually asking the unemployed recently to leave and take jobs in other European countries. A similarly dramatic picture emerges when one… Read More

L. Randall Wray appeared on Thom Hartmann’s radio show yesterday for a lengthy and wide-ranging interview: [iframe width=”480″ height=”270″ src=”//www.youtube.com/embed/q8YND_N_6ms?feature=player_detailpage” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe]

In previous installments 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. Warren Mosler puts it this way: the purpose of the tax is to create unemployment. That might sound a bit strange, but if we define unemployment as a situation in which job seekers want to work for money wages, then government can hire them by offering its currency. The tax frees resources from private use so that government can employ them in public use. To greatly simplify, money is a measuring unit, originally created by rulers to value the fees, fines, and taxes owed. By putting the subjects or citizens into debt, real resources could be moved to serve the public purpose. Taxes drive money. So, money was created to give government command over socially… Read More

Monetary Mechanics: A Financial View Éric Tymoigne “This paper presents an alternative framework that can be used to analyze monetary systems by drawing on the work of Smith, MacLeod, Knapp, Innes, Hawtrey, Keynes, Murad, Olivecrona, Wray, and Ingham, among others. The analysis asks what “money” is instead of what “money” does. Monetary instruments are not defined by what they do, or by what a researcher thinks they do, but by specific financial characteristics. By defining explicitly what “money” is, this framework provides some insights into past monetary systems and into monetary mechanisms.” Autonomy-enhancing Paternalism Martin Binder and Leonhard K. Lades “Behavioral economics has shown that individuals sometimes make decisions that are not in their best interests. This insight has prompted calls for behaviorally informed policy interventions popularized under the notion of “libertarian paternalism.” This type of “soft” paternalism aims at helping individuals without reducing their freedom of choice. We highlight three problems of libertarian paternalism: the difficulty of detecting what is in the best interest of an individual, the focus on freedom of choice at the expense of a focus on autonomy, and the neglect of the dynamic effects of libertarian-paternalistic policy interventions. We present a form of soft paternalism called “autonomy-enhancing paternalism” that seeks to constructively remedy these problems.” The Political Economy of Shadow Banking: Debt, Finance, and Distributive… Read More

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 installments 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 installment. In today’s installment 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? In this installment I will examine three analogous questions (each of which has the same answer): 1. Does the government need to receive tax revenue before it can spend? 2. Does the central bank need to receive reserve deposits before it can lend? 3. Do private banks need to receive demand deposits before they can lend? If you’ve already answered “Of course not!”, you are probably up to speed on this topic. If you answered yes (to one or more), or if you haven’t a clue what the questions… Read More

C. J. Polychroniou, reflecting on the results of the European Parliament elections: The stunning victory of Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France that came in first with 25 percent of the vote—when it had won less than 6.5 percent in the last European elections—is quite indicative of the general political and social trends in Europe today. The parties of the far right scored quite well in Europe’s parliamentary elections … What all these parties have in common … is their opposition to the current EU regime, which they blame directly for the loss of national sovereignty, the high levels of unemployment, the corrosion of traditional beliefs and values and the massive flows of immigrants. […] [I]t is also not clear whether the far right parties will form a political alliance amongst themselves in the new European parliament. It is not certain at all that UKIP, or even the Finns Party, will collaborate with Marine Le Pen’s National Front. In short, it is highly unlikely that the parties of the far right will pose a systemic threat to the status quo in the EU. What seems to be happening in Europe today is that the far right is simply taking advantage of the growing bitterness and resentment all across the continent towards the “New Rome”[*] and citizens’ lost faith in… Read More

In yesterday’s Financial Times, Jörg Bibow addressed Mario Draghi’s recent announcement that the ECB will take new steps (including cutting its deposit rate to -0.1 percent) in an attempt to deal with (or, one might argue, in an attempt to appear to deal with) the fact that inflation in the eurozone is too low, according to the ECB’s own alleged target. For Bibow, the proposed measures are unlikely to get the job done, and the same could be said, he argues, for any last-ditch attempt at quantitative easing (a prospect mentioned by Wolfgang Münchau in his last column). The problem is that it’s hard to characterize eurozone disinflation as some unforeseen bump in the road: The driving force behind the eurozone’s disinflation process is wage repression – exercised to a brutal degree across the currency union. In fact, wage repression – joined by fiscal austerity – is the eurozone’s official policy meant to resolve the euro crisis … With wages in übercompetitive Germany creeping up at a mere 2 to 3 per cent annual rate, the rest are forced into near, if not outright, deflation to restore their lost competitiveness. … The ECB was late to diagnose the issue and super-late to act. But the real issue is that neither its recent move nor any imagined future quantitative easing will do anything to reverse deflationary wage trends any time soon… Read More

It’s well known that the wages of US workers have become disconnected from productivity growth, with real wages growing much more slowly than advances in productivity over the last several decades. This is a key part of the story of widening income inequality. But these observed trends actually understate the degree to which working people have been left behind. New research reveals that the US economy is doing a worse job passing on productivity gains to workers than the wage growth (or even stagnation) numbers suggest. The Levy Institute’s Fernando Rios-Avila and the Atlanta Fed’s Julie Hotchkiss looked back to 1994 and tried to see what proportion of real wage growth since then can be accounted for by key changes in the demographic profile of the labor force: principally, the fact that the average worker has become older (i.e., more experienced) and more educated. What they found is that over 90 percent of real wage growth between 1994 and 2013 was due to demographic shifts. And the 2002–13 period, commonly referred to as the decade of flat wages, is more accurately described as “a decade of declining real wages within age/education worker profiles.” If we control for demographics, wages are back to where they were in 1998. That’s what you’re seeing in the red line below: Of course, generally speaking, the fact that we have a more educated workforce… Read More

Paul McCulley, a familiar face at Levy Institute events (he gave a keynote at our Rio conference and at last year’s Minsky Summer Seminar), is back at PIMCO and his first note is (predictably) worth a read. His latest essay looks at Federal Reserve policy from the standpoint of what McCulley terms the Fed’s “secular victory in the long War Against Inflation” and discusses, among other things, how the Great Moderation fed into Minskyan financial instability, how we should think about the Fed’s “neutral” real policy rate, and what this means for the question of whether stocks and bonds are overvalued. Here he is on the Taylor Rule: The “neutral” real policy rate is not secularly constant. It evolves as a function of changing “real” economic variables – demographics, technological progress, productivity, etc. – as well as changing institutional arrangements, notably changes in the degree of regulation of banking and finance, domestically and internationally. Thus, the notion of a “fixed” center of real policy rate gravity for prudent monetary policy is an oxymoron. Which is why, for me, it is so befuddling that the Fed, and thus the markets, still clings – even if reluctantly – to one man’s estimate of an “equilibrium” real fed funds rate, made in 1993: John Taylor, who assumed it to be 2%, which, in… Read More

Last week the ECB’s governing council agreed on interest rate cuts and some fresh liquidity measures. The policy move has sparked off quite some excitement in all kinds of corners. Certainly financial markets highly welcomed the ECB’s much-awaited new easing initiative, with stock indices surging and bond yields plunging to record levels. International commentators generally felt that the ECB was – finally, if belatedly – doing the right kind of thing. And, generally speaking, the European political body seems to be sufficiently famished, and perhaps also a little terrified by the recent EU parliament election results, to welcome any perceived easing of pain. Only one party felt seriously short-changed by the euro’s independent guardian of stability: German savers. In Germany, the ECB’s latest policy decisions, featuring a negative interest rate to be paid by banks to the ECB for lending to the ECB by means of its deposit facility, triggered an across-the-board outcry orchestrated by the German media, ranging from heavyweight tabloid Bild to the mouthpiece of Germany’s conservative intelligentsia Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. German savers appear to be up in arms against the ECB’s outrageous decision to shave 10 basis points off its key policy rate and introducing a negative rate on its deposit facility. The president of Germany’s savings bank association declared that the ECB’s move amounted to expropriating… Read More

This is another installment 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 installment. 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. It is like the inch, the pound, the meter, the kilogram, the acre or the hectare—a unit of measure. Mat put it this way: the sovereign can no more run out of “money” than it can run out of “acres” or “inches” or “pounds.” We can run out of land, but we cannot run out of acres. We can run out of trees but we cannot run out of the linear feet we use to measure them. You cannot run out of a unit of measure! The “dollar” is the measuring unit in which we… Read More

In The Guardian, Dimitri Papadimitriou warns that the combined forces of persistent inequality, shrinking government budgets, and the US trade deficit are setting the stage for another private-debt-driven financial crisis: Right now, America is wrestling a three-headed monster of weak foreign demand, tight government budgets and high income inequality, with every sign that these conditions will continue. With that trio in place, the anticipated growth isn’t going to be propelled by an export bonanza, or by a government investment boom. It will have to be driven by spending. Even a limping recovery like the one we’re nursing along today depends on domestic demand – consumer spending not just by the wealthy, but by everyone else. We believe that Americans will keep consuming at the same ever-rising rates of past decades, during good times and bad. But for the vast majority, wages and wealth aren’t going up, so we’re anticipating that the majority of Americans – the 90% – will once again do what was done before: borrow, and then borrow more. […] The more – proportionally – that the top 10% has prospered, saved and invested (naturally, the gains found their way into the financial markets), the more the bottom 90% has borrowed. Look at the record of how these phenomena have travelled in lockstep. In the first three decades… Read More