Today I read an interview with Richard Koo from the Nomura Research Institute in Japan who is the touring the world promoting his views of why the fiscal stimulus packages are so important. His views are drawn from his extensive experience of the Japanese malaise that began in the 1990s. The interview was published in the September 11 edition of welling@weeden which is a private bi-weekly emanating from the US. I cannot link to it because you have to pay to read. Anyway, much of what he says reinforces the fundamental principles of modern monetary (MMT) and is quite antagonistic to mainstream economic thinking. It is the latter which is now mounting political pressure to cut the stimulus packages. Koo thinks this would be madness, a view I concur with.

GIGO … that process or mechanism that we are beguiled by what amounts to nothing. GIGO emerges out of highly specialised and technical structures that bright minds create. It occupies hours of time that might be spent finding a cure for cancer or making renewable energy instantly viable on a wide-scale. GIGO keeps our most disadvantaged citizens in states of joblessness and poverty for no reason other than we think it is something. GIGO ravages the developing world and leads to wars, terrorism and other pathologies. Something has to be done about it.

It is on days like today that you see how far away from the mainstream economic opinion my macroeconomic thinking is. Why today? For overseas readers, the central bank (RBA) started hiking its official cash rate target by 0.25 basis points to 3.25 per cent. What is wrong with this? There is around 14 per cent of available labour resources currently underutilised and rising. Last month full-time employment continued its collapse. The only signs of activity in the labour market are some casualised, low-skill, low-paid jobs being created. My conclusion: neo-liberal paradigm remains intact. Stay tuned for the next crisis.

The New York Times Editorial on October 2 was bitter-sweet – Wanted: Leadership on Jobs. Bitter because of the topic. Sweet because a leading newspaper is finally focusing on real issues in this crisis. It followed a devastating month of labour force data in the US which should be the clarion call for immediate intervention and a ramping up of budget deficits. Although Australia has not deteriorated as much as the US, our labour market is in a parlous state and, in my view, justifies a third stimulus package.

With the debate now over (more or less) I caught up on my backlog of reading today. I store articles from all over in a database and then access them when I have time. So on this very wet Sunday, I was working on two papers for an upcoming field trip to Kazakhstan on an Asian Development Bank contract, and, in-between, I read some (so-called) analysis. The basic conclusion is that none of these economics journalists portray the slightest understanding that we are no longer living in a convertible currency system (ended in 1971) and that most national governments issue their own currencies within a flexible exchange rate environment. If a car mechanic tried to apply the art that was practised before electronic ignitions and computerisation to our cars they would go out of business very quickly.

The debate seems to be slowing down which means this might be my last response although we will see. But in general the debate has raised a lot of interesting perspectives and I hope it has stimulated interested parties to read more of our work. I also think that while (as in any debate) “battle lines” appear to be drawn, I repeat my initial point some days ago. Steve and I saw this as a chance to focus on the common enemy – the mainstream (neoclassical) macroeconomics. That (failed) paradigm has nothing to say about the world we live in. The work of Steve and the modern monetary theory I work on both have lots to say and should not be seen as being mutually exclusive. Indeed, Steve operates in what we call the horizontal dimension of modern money.

Today, I offer Part 2 of my responses to the comments raised in the debate so far. I am still about 40 comments shy of the total. In general, I thank Scott, JKH, Ramanan, Sean and others who have provided excellent interventions into this debate based on their knowledge of how the monetary system actually works rather than a stylised representation of it which leaves out the government sector and is liberal with the accounting conventions applied to account for asset and liability flows and flow to stock relations. But there still appears to be major confusions which I will try to address here.

Today, we step down from the heights of the modern money-debt deflation debate and consider macroeconomic developments which demonstrate the deficit-debt hysteria is ramping up here. I may come back to the debate in later blogs but I think the issues have been well considered. While the debate has uncovered some useful issues that I often get asked about (particularly in relation to the accounting and definitional matters) it also demonstrated that very simple and unthreatening concepts get conflated into horror stories if we let the dominant neo-liberal ideology control the way we think and the language we use. Also, I know I promised a G-20-IMF blog and that will emerge but some things emerged today that need commentary.

As indicated yesterday, Steve Keen and I agreed to foster a debate about where modern monetary theory sits with his work on debt-deflation. So yesterday his blog carried the following post, which included a 1000-odd word precis written by me describing what I see as the essential characteristics of modern monetary theory. The discussion is on-going on that site and I invite you to follow it if you are interested. Rather than comment on all the comments over on Steve’s site, I decided to collate them here (in part) and help develop the understanding that way. That is what follows today.