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What is Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)? And why should we care?
To answer the second question first, MMT matters because it’s starting to trickle down from academia into serious politics. The theory is finding supporters on the ascendant Left-wing of the US Democratic Party. Indeed, some see it as the means by which a progressive administration might fund the Green New Deal (which carries a ten trillion dollar price tag).
As for the first question, it might be helpful to draw a parallel between economics and physics. The theories of the two disciplines can be expressed in the form of complicated equations. Physics theory has a much firmer foundation in reality than economic theory, but in both cases one can rearrange the maths and re-chop the logic to arrive at bold new interpretations. MMT is to economics what general relativity, quantum mechanics and string theory are to physics – a fundamental reordering of the theoretical framework.
In conventional economic policy, governments raise money through taxation and borrowing (or by turning on the real and metaphorical printing presses). They then spend that money. However, Modern Monetary Theorists say that’s the wrong way of looking at it. Because a sovereign nation ultimately creates its own currency, it need never default on any debt denominated in that currency. It can, therefore, create all the money it needs – the only limit is the risk of inflation (caused by too much money chasing the finite productive capacity of the real world economy). The purpose of taxation in MMT is not to raise revenue, but to control inflation – i.e. by taking away the ability of individuals and organisations to place demands on the economy’s productive capacity.
This is how Matt Breunig sums it up in a piece for the People’s Policy Project:
“What MMT advocates do is assert that actually all government spending is funded by money creation. Taxes and borrowing may look like ways the government gets cash to spend, but in fact all they do is delete money.”
Though MMT supporters tend to be on the Left, so are the theory’s most vociferous opponents – of which Breunig is one:
“…it has become clear to me that the bulk of MMT discourse is not really about what the best policy instruments are for maintaining price stability and debt stability, but rather about using word games to make people believe that the US can have Northern European levels of government spending without Northern European levels of taxation…
“The real point of MMT seems to be to deploy misleading rhetoric with the goal of deceiving people about the necessity of taxes in a social democratic system.”
Of course, there’s always a distinction to be drawn between ideas in their pure form and the grubbier uses that they’re put to. In this respect, conventional Left-wing economics (or Right-wing economics, for that matter) is no less unsullied than MMT. For instance the most prominent calls for higher taxation to fund higher spending have focused on squeezing the super-wealthy. This conveniently distracts from the fact that Scandinavian-style welfare states depend on a heavily-taxed middle class.
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SubscribeMMT is essentially a con. At the moment, cash (and its electronic equivalent) is a debt owed by the Bank of England to the note or account holder. Deposits, our main form of money, are debts owed by other banks to the acount holders. They have value to the holder of the money because they are a debt owed by the bank (i.e. an asset of the holder and an equal liability of the bank). I consider it misleading to call it “fiat” money because it is actually a debt.
MMT involves creating true fiat money: printing pieces of paper (or the electronic equivalent) which are supposedly assets of the holder but not liabilities of anyone. That would imply that the government can create actual wealth by fiat because total net worth is apparently increasing. But it’s not true. To test whether actual wealth is being created, the question to ask is: does the existence of the new money allow society to consume more goods and services than it produces? Obviously not. Therefore the money is not truly wealth, but only a means of wealth redistribution. The people who print it get something for nothing, and the people who own it at the point it is taxed away get nothing for the something they gave in exchange for the money.
Now in practice, the Bank of England is writing IOUs in exchange for government debts (gilts) which will never be paid, so in practice we have MMT already. That’s not a good thing. The Bank of England should only be accepting valuable assets in exchange for the money they create, and that means ending the assumption that government debts are worth face value.
Always look at net worth – it reveals the dubious reasoning in these theories.
Thank you for a clear rebuttal of the idea that we can have a ‘free lunch’. You clearly have a greater understanding than i do but as trustee of a pension fund I see the effect of quantitive easing on gilt yields which as had a dramatic detrimental effect on funding levels for the past 10 years. This is being paid for by sponsors in a variety of ways and the debt continues for the next few decades. We had not recovered from the 2008 crash – God knows what the next lot of printing money will do ?