Options for Europe – Part 66

The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014.

You can access the entire sequence of blogs in this series through the – Euro book Category.

I cannot guarantee the sequence of daily additions will make sense overall because at times I will go back and fill in bits (that I needed library access or whatever for). But you should be able to pick up the thread over time although the full edited version will only be available in the final book (obviously).

Part III – Options for Europe

Chapter 17 Overt Monetary Financing

taboo

noun

… a social or religious custom prohibiting or forbidding discussion of a particular practice or forbidding association with a particular person, place or thing.

adjective

… prohibited or restricted by social custom.

verb

… place under prohibition.

[Oxford Dictionary]

Jens Weidmann

“we have to ensure that the prohibition of monetary financing is respected.”

Interview with MNI, March 21, 2014.

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As the story goes, the British explorer Captain Cook introduced the word taboo into the English language after he observed Tongan society in the 1777. There is a very detailed and diverse literature on the concept of taboos in western society. We learn early in life the things we can say and do in polite company and those things which will attract opprobrium – as forbidden behaviour. We isolate individuals who step over these rather indistinct lines and consider their behaviour aberrant. In some sense, these taboos are ways in which the conservative status quo reinforces itself and creates walls that resist change. Taboos are also not inscribed in marble and as social values evolve so do the list of taboos. Further, while there are some things that all societies and cultures will consider to be taboo, there are other things that are cultural relative or specific. But we are not aiming to go further into this literature here.

The only simple question that needs to be asked and answered in this chapter is this – how can a relatively simple monetary operation between a central bank and its corresponding treasury department (both part of what we can call the ‘consolidated’ government sector) possibly be considered a taboo? I refer to the concept of monetary financing otherwise known as debt monetisation and in the current debate in Europe as ‘Overt Monetary Financing’ (OMF), which simply means that in some form or another, the treasury arm of government tells the central bank it wants to spend a particular amount and the latter then ensures those funds are available in the government’s bank account for us. Various accounting arrangements might accompany that action. For example, the treasury might sell the central bank debt some government bonds which match the value of the funds put in the government’s bank account. None of these arrangements should cloud, in the words of Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann, “the fact that central banks can create money out of thin air” (Weidmann, 2013), a capacity he thinks “many observers are likely to find surprising and strange, perhaps mystical and dreamlike, too – or even nightmarish”. Always finish by promoting the taboo!

The meagre mention of the term – OMF – leads central bankers to fret. In a recent speech, Weidmann even quoted from the classic German story Faust, which recounts how the evil Mephistopheles tricks the Emperor into signing some paper to create a fiat currency. Immediately, the money multiplies and people become happy as their town “half-dead once, and decaying” is now “alive, enjoying life …” (Goethe, 1888: Act 1, Scene IV). In other words, when new money is spent into an economy, which is mired in recession and has plenty of idle capacity, the increased spending generates new commerce and happiness, presumably because unemployment is lower and incomes higher. But in Faust, the Emperor and his supporters realise the advantages of fiat currency but not its dangers and start spending it without regard to the capacity of the economy to respond to the higher spending by increasing output. The result, unsurprisingly is inflation. It should not be forgotten that Goethe was making a satirical statement about the monetary behaviour of the French government during the French Revolution.

What Goethe’s example can tell us is that human folly leads to undesirable consequences. What else is new? However, Weidmann thinks that the message from Goethe is more sinister, given that Mephistopheles is non other than the devil’s agent. He thinks that it tells us that money creation “degenerates into inflation, destroying the monetary system” (Weidmann, 2013). If you think about this for more than a moment you will wonder why central bankers would keep pumping out liquidity once the economy is beyond full employment and cannot increase output? Are the central bankers so irrational that they need to be placed in a straitjacket to stop their destructive tendencies? The questions might seem ludicrous or crass but they are responding at the logic level that maintains the taboo.

However, it is clear that the taboo of monetary financing permeates deeply into the German psyche. On September 23, 2012, the well-respected Frankfurter Allgemeine carried a story ‘Die Angst vor der Inflation’ (The Fear of Inflation) which documents a sort of national neuroses. The article discussed the ‘Securities Market Program’ introduced by the ECB in 2010, which we discussed in Chapter 21. The conjecture that higher inflation would be an inevitable consequence of this program. They were wrong clearly but the article signalled how deeply ingrained the fear of inflation is in Germany, which influences the policy choices available to the EMU.

The report indicated that:

Die Angst vor der Inflation zumindest erreicht in Deutschland gerade außergewöhnliche Dimensionen. In Umfragen geben mehr Menschen an, sich vor Inflation zu fürchten als vor schlimmen Krankheiten, brutalen Verbrechen, der Trennung vom Partner, Einsamkeit im Alter oder sogar einem Krieg.

Thus the fear of inflation in Germany has reached extraordinary dimensions. Surveys indicate that more people are afraid of inflation than they are of getting a serious illness, being victim of brutal crimes, the separation from their partner, loneliness in old age, or even a war. And the fear has been rising even though inflation was running at 2.6 per cent at the time of the Survey.

Winds of change in European monetary policy – quantitative easing is mooted

On March 31, 2014, Eurostat released the latest inflation data for the Euro area, which showed that annual inflation is fell in March 2014 by 0.2 percentage points to 0.5 per cent compared to February 2014. A year ago (March 2013), the Euro area inflation rate was estimated to be 1.7 per cent and has progressively falling since signalling that Europe is approaching a dangerous deflationary situation (Eurostat, 2014a). The next day, Eurostat released the latest unemployment estimates which indicated that the seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate in the Euro area was 11.8 per cent and hadn’t moved since October 2013 (Eurostat, 2014b).

These data releases are promoting a rethink of monetary policy in Europe as the policy makers realise that the EMU is not only failing to grow at any acceptable level, with some nations locked in depression rather than recession, but also that inflation is decelerating. There is even talk of deflation (price levels falling rather than the rate of increase slowing). Falling prices are extremely damaging for asset holders and firms. Both facts indicate a dramatic shortfall in total spending relative to productive capacity. While the economic policy debate has been mired in calls for increased ‘structural reform’ (aka cutting wages and working conditions and reducing the generosity of pension and income support schemes), there can be no reasonable structural explanation for this coincidence of outcomes.

On March 21, 2014, the German Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann was interviewed by the press agency Market News International (MNI) and admitted that the recent German Constitutional Court ruling discussed earlier “does not mean that a QE programme is generally out of the question”. In what was seen as a ‘radical’ departure from Bundesbank rhetoric, he claimed that the ECB could purchase “top-rated” private assets and even government bonds as long as this was in “conformity with the Maastricht Treaty”, which was code for ensuring “that the prohibition of monetary financing is respected” (MNI, 2014).

It is purely speculative, but it is questionable whether the ECB would have been prepared to openly consider quantitative easing without the Bundesbank impramatur. But when the ECB President Mario Draghi addressed the press on April 3, 2014 to announce the monthly interest rate decision he made it clear that quantitative easing (QE) had “explicitly” entered the discussions at the Governing Council meeting for the first time at the April meeting. In his ‘introductory statement’ at the April 3, 2014 press briefing Draghi said that in light of “the broad-based weakness of the economy”, the ECB “is unanimous in its commitment to using also unconventional instruments within its mandate in order to cope effectively with risks of a too prolonged period of low inflation” (ECB, 2014). The IMF also ratcheted up pressure on the ECB when its Director told a gathering in Washington that the ‘low-flation’ economies “particularly in the Euro Area”, are in danger of suppressing spending and output growth and that “(m)ore monetary easing, including through unconventional measures, is needed” (Lagarde, 2014).

QE, however, has been of limited success where it has been tried and is not the appropriate answer to the on-going malaise in the Euro area. QE involves the central bank exchanging a non- or low-interest bearing asset (that is, adding funds to the reserve accounts that banks have to hold with the central bank to faciliate the clearance of cheques) for some higher yielding and longer term assets (for example, 10-year government bonds or commercial bonds). It is nothing more than a simple asset swap between the central bank and the private sector. Proponents of QE claim it adds liquidity to a system where lending by commercial banks is seemingly frozen because of a lack of bank reserves. So by giving the banks more reserves, proponents claim it will, in turn, stimulate more lending to the private sector with commensurate higher rates of investment and economic growth.

Financial journalists regularly claim that QE involves ‘printing money’ to ease a ‘cash-starved’ banking system. Invoking the evil-sounding ‘money printing’ terminology to describe QE is deliberately emotive (for exmpale, it stokes our irrational fears of Weimar scenarios). It is also highly misleading as we explained in Chapter 18. All transactions between the government sector (treasury and central Bank) and the non-government sector involve the creation and destruction of net financial assets denominated in the currency of issue. Typically, when the government buys something from the non-government sector they just credit a bank account somewhere – that is, numbers denoting the size of the transaction appear electronically in the banking system. These numbers signify a new financial asset has been created to the favour of the recipient of the spending. The reverse is true when taxes are paid. There are no printing presses involved!

Does QE work? The mainstream belief is that it will stimulate the economy sufficiently to put a brake on the downward spiral of lost production and the increasing unemployment. It is based on the erroneous belief that a bank is an institution that accepts deposits in order to build up reserves, which, in turn, provides it with the funds to on-lend at a margin in order to profit. But this is a completely incorrect depiction of how banks operate. Bank lending is not ‘reserve constrained’. Banks lend to any credit worthy customer they can find without, initially, worrying about how much funds they have in their reserve accounts. They know that if they are short of reserves (their reserve accounts have to be at least in positive balance each day) then they borrow from each other in the so-called ‘interbank market’. If that is not possible, then, ultimately, they know they can borrow from the central bank, which always stands ready to provide funds to meet reserve shortfalls. Ensuring there are adequate reserves (liquidity) in the system is part of the central bank’s charter to maintain financial stability. If the central bank refused to supply bank reserves on demand (at a price) then cheques might fail to clear and the financial system would be plunged into turmoil.

The ECB, itself, debunked the myth that banks need reserves before they will make loans, in their Monthly Bulletin for May 2012. In considering whether “a large increase in central bank liquidity … necessarily implies rapid broad money and credit growth”, the ECB said (ECB, 2012: 20-24):

The occurrence of significant excess central bank liquidity does not, in itself, necessarily imply an accelerated expansion of … credit to the private sector … The Eurosystem, however, as the monopoly supplier of central bank reserves in the euro area, always provides the banking system with the liquidity required to meet the aggregate reserve requirement … the Eurosystem always provides the central bank reserves needed on aggregate, which are then traded among banks and therefore redistributed within the banking system as necessary. The Eurosystem thus effectively accommodates the aggregate demand for central bank reserves at all times and seeks to influence financing conditions in the economy by steering short-term interest rates.

In sum, holdings of central bank reserves are thus not a factor that limits the supply of credit for the banking system as a whole. Ultimately, the growth of bank credit depends on a set of factors that determine credit demand and on other factors linked to the supply of credit.

The Bank of England also recently categorically rejected the idea bank lending is constrained by prior reserve holdings. They conclude that the “reality of how money is created today differs from the description found in … economics textbooks” (Bank of England, 2014: 14). Banks do not “receive deposits” and lend them out. Rather “bank lending creates deposits” (p. 14).

The point is that building bank reserves will not increase the bank’s capacity to lend, which has been a central premise of those advocating QE. The reality is that loans create deposits, which then generate reserves not the other way around. The reason that commercial banks in Europe are not lending much at present is because they are not convinced there are credit worthy customers on their doorstep. In the current climate the assessment of what is credit worthy has become very strict compared to the lax days prior to the crisis.

It is also important to understand that QE does not change the net financial position of the private sector. When the central bank exchanges one type of financial asset (an increase in a private bank’s reserve balance) for another type of financial asset (private holdings of bonds, etc), the net financial assets in the private sector are unchanged although the portfolio composition of those assets is altered. Typically there will be more short-term assets in the mix, a shift referred to as maturity substitution (short for long in this case). QE thus increases central bank demand for so-called ‘long maturity’ assets held in the private sector (for example, 10-year bonds), which reduces their ‘yields’ in the market place and, in turn, makes interest rates on longer-term loans cheaper. This might increase aggregate spending overall given the cost of investment funds is likely to drop. But on the other hand, the lower rates reduce the interest-income of savers who will reduce consumption (demand) accordingly. How these opposing effects balance out is unclear. The central banks certainly don’t know! Overall, this uncertainty points to the problems involved in using monetary policy to stimulate (or contract) the economy. It is a blunt policy instrument with ambiguous impacts.

QE is not a sensible anti-recession strategy. The pursuit of so-called ‘non-standard’ monetary policy tools, which are ambiguous in impact, when we know that every extra dollar of government spending goes straight into the expenditure stream and stimulates sales and jobs is a reflection of the neo-liberal bias against fiscal policy that we have discussed throughout this book. What will motivate consumers to borrow if they are scared of losing their jobs? Why would a company borrow if they expect their sales to remain depressed? The major problem facing the Eurozone and elsewhere at present is that the private sector is not willing to spend as robustly as it did before the crisis. The only way to fill the resulting spending gap is for governments to increase their deficit spending. There is a crying need in all Eurozone nations at present for increased government deficits.

QE may or may not be introduced at the same time as fiscal deficits are increasing. The latter is essential for recovery, while the former is largely inconsequential. However, the central bank can still play an important role in the recovery process. In this context, the idea of Overt Monetary Financing (OMF) has entered the European debate and, given the design of the EMU, such proposals put the ECB at centre stage. The aim of this chapter is to consider whether OMF is a viable option for a Eurozone recovery and to outline how it might work in practice. At the outset, it is a strategy that could allow the Union to persist with the single currency. But, we will see that it is also a preferred strategy should Member States agree to dissolve the EMU and restore their currency sovereignty. In this case, OMF would function through the cooperation of national level central banks and the corresponding treasuries.

The discussion initially focused on QE to ensure that it is not confused with OMF. As we have seen, QE is an asset swap and does not alter the net financial assets held by the non-government sector. By way of contrast, OMF is monetary operation conducted by the central bank and coordinated with fiscal policy changes, which increases the net financial assets held by the non-government sector. It increases private wealth rather than alters the mix of the existing wealth (between short- and long-term assets). OMF is a supportive operation conducted by the central bank to ensure government deficits are funded with public debt remaining unchanged.
What is Overt Monetary Financing?

Abba Lerner’s second law of Functional Finance (see Chapter 18) advocated the central bank ‘printing money’ to match government deficit spending sufficient to achieve and sustain full employment. The idea is very simple and as we saw in Chapter 18 does not involve any printing presses at all. While the exact institutional detail can vary from nation to nation, stylistically, governments spend by drawing on a bank account they have with the central bank. An instruction is sent to the central bank from treasury to transfer some funds out of this account into an account in the private sector, which is held by the recipient of the spending. A similar operation might occur when a government cheque is posted to a private citizen who then deposits the cheque with their bank. That bank seeks the funds from the central bank, which writes down the government’s account and the private bank writes up the private citizens account. All these transactions are done electronically through computer systems. So government spending can really be simplified down to typing in numbers to various accounts in the banking system.

When economists talk of printing money they are referring to the process whereby the central bank adds some numbers treasury’s bank account to match its spending plans and in return is given treasury bonds to an equivalent amount in value. That is where the term ‘debt monetisation’ comes from. Instead of selling debt to the private sector, the treasury simply sells it to the central bank who creates new funds (or financial assets) in return. This accounting smokescreen is, of-course, unnecessary. The central bank doesn’t need the offsetting asset (government debt) to function given that it creates the currency ‘out of thin air’. So the swapping of public debt for account credits is just a convention.

Some OMF proponents have invoked the 1948 article by Milton Friedman as evidence that even arch free market economists support the money financing approach. There is a sort of security in this approach – it suggests the radical idea is not all that radical at all. This is a negative approach for progressives to take. The preferred option is to demystify and educate such that what the conservatives generally claim is taboo is in fact just a simple extension of logic once we understand how the monetary system operates. Friedman (1948: 5) wrote that “government expenditures would be financed entirely by tax revenues or the creation of money, that is, the use of non-interest bearing securities. Government would not issue interest-bearing securities to the public.” Adair Turner, then Chairman of the British Financial Services Authority, suggested that serious consideration be given to “extreme option” of “overt money finance (OMF) of fiscal deficits”, which would involve the “permanent monetisation of government debt” (Turner, 2013: 2). He certainly channels Friedman by concluding that Friedman argued “that government deficits should always be financed in that fashion” (Turner, 2013: 3). However, Wood (2014) correctly points out that Friedman’s proposals were part of what was known as the Chicago Plan (emanating out of the free market bastion of the University of Chicago), which proposed a broad regime change where private banks would be prevented from creating new money and public deficits would be the only source of new money. Equally, the government would run a balanced fiscal position over the cycle and destroy the money created in the downturn when they ran offsetting surpluses in the upturn. This is a very different proposition to the current suggestion for OMF, which is correctly seen as a policy change to address the current crisis. As Turner postulated “How do we get out of this mess?” Of-course, MMT advocates OMF as a permanent part of fiscal policy implementation a point we will expand upon in the final chapter.

Overt Monetary Financing enters the European debate

On April 24, 2014, the ECB presented its Annual Report 2012 (ECB, 2012) to the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) of European Parliament. The ECB is accountable to the European Parliament. Following the protocol and clearly exercising its political functions, ECON considered the 2012 ECB Annual Report on June 11, 2013. The Rapporteur of the Committee and Deputy President of the Parliament, Gianni Pittela tendered a draft ECON response (Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, 2013a), which was intended to motivate the discussion and provide the basis for their final Report.

Under the heading Monetary Policy, the draft ECON report contained two interesting paragraphs (9 and 10) (Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, 2013a: 4-5)

9. Considers that the monetary policy tools that the ECB has used since the beginning of the crisis, while providing a welcome relief in distressed financial markets, have revealed their limits as regards stimulating growth and improving the situation on the labour market; considers, therefore, that the ECB could investigate the possibilities of implementing new unconventional measures aimed at participating in a large, EU-wide pro-growth programme, including the use of the Emergency Liquidity Assistance facility to undertake an ‘overt money financing’ of government debt in order to finance tax cuts targeted on low-income households and/or new spending programmes focused on the Europe 2020 objectives;

10. Considers it necessary to review the Treaties and the ECB’s statutes in order to establish price stability together with full employment as the two objectives, on an equal footing, of monetary policy in the eurozone;

Referring back to Chapter 18, these proposals resonate strongly with the foundation principles of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and would serve to redress some of the social and economic damage that the flawed design of the EMU and the subsequent implementation of austerity has caused.

The draft report was then subjected to a lengthy process of debate, which resulted in 247 amendments (Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, 2013b). By the time the ECON process had worked it way through to the Final Report (Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, 2013c), which was released on November 13, 2013, we had learned a lot about European politics and why the current monetary system is unworkable. The Final Report bore little relation to the Draft Report and appears as a largely innocuous document that will engender no significant changes. But the process did provide continued impetus to a major debate in Europe about the taboo topic of monetary financing, which had been given life in March 2013 when Adair Turner proposed that serious consideration should be given to OMF. Turner set his speech in context by noting the severity and persistence of the crisis. He considered the pre-crisis emphasis on inflation targets was misguided and any recovery should be based on policies that explicitly give weight to achieving low unemployment as well as price stability. In addition to more aggressive use of fiscal policy, Turner said that he supported the “overt money financing” because it allowed fiscal stimulus to directly enter “the income stream” (channelling Friedman) (p.25), which means that the impact of the spending is immediate – a dollar of extra government spending is immediately a dollar of extra income and output. This is in contrast to monetary operations such as interest rate cuts and QE, which are indirect and rely on consumers and firms responding to the changes. The impact is always uncertain and drawn out. We will consider the objections to OMF in a later section.

A lot can be learned about European mentalities by studying the ECON amendment process for this report. Amendment 116, proposed by the German conservative member Werner Langen to replace Paragraph 9, is illustrative (Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, 2013b: 54):

Considers that the monetary policy tools that the ECB has used since the beginning of the crisis may have provided welcome relief in distressed financial markets in the short term, but the easy money policy has done nothing to bring about a lasting economic recovery; considers, therefore, that the only way to promote growth is through sustainable economic policy and purposeful structural reforms, that the ECB must concentrate primarily on the goal of price stability, and that ECB financing of government debt is unlawful and must be prevented at all costs;

In the context of the debate, where unemployment was rising to record levels, youth unemployment in some nations had risen to around 60 per cent, and the monetary union economy had entered a period of protracted stagnation,the claim that the ECB must resist OMF “at all costs” is an extraordinary statement of priorities. But, of-course, that is the nature of this taboo – the simple idea that a central bank should facilitate government deficits through money creation invokes immediate claims that this choice would be highly inflationary, and also, within the European context, strikes at the heart of the paranoiac fear among Germans of hyperinflation.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Additional references

This list will be progressively compiled.

Bank of England (2014) ‘Money creation in the modern economy’, Quarterly Bulletin, Quarter 1. www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarterlybulletin/2014/qb14q102.pdf

Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (2013a) ‘Draft Report on the European Central Bank Annual Report for 2012’, European Parliament, ECON/7/12316, June 11, 2013. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2009_2014/documents/econ/pr/939/939362/939362en.pdf

Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (2013b) ‘Amendments 1-247 – Draft report – on the European Central Bank Annual report for 2012’, European Parliament, ECON/7/12316, July 12, 2013. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2fEP%2f%2fNONSGML%2bCOMPARL%2bPE-516.605%2b01%2bDOC%2bPDF%2bV0%2f%2fEN

Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (2013c) ‘Report on the European Central Bank Annual report for 2012’, European Parliament, ECON/7/12316, November 13, 2013. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/201311/20131113ATT74398/20131113ATT74398EN.pdf

ECB (2012) ‘Monthly Bulletin, 05/2012. www.ecb.int/pub/pdf/mobu/mb201205en.pdf

ECB (2013) ‘Annual Report 2012’, European Central Bank. http://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2013/html/sp130424.en.html

ECB (2014) ‘Introductory statement to the press conference (with Q&A)’, Mario Draghi, President of the ECB, Frankfurt am Main, 3 April 2014. http://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pressconf/2014/html/is140403.en.html

Eurostat (2014a) ‘Euro area annual inflation down to 0.5%’, Flash Estimate March 2014, published March 31, 2014. http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/2-31032014-AP/EN/2-31032014-AP-EN.PDF

Eurostat (2014a) ‘Euro area unemployment rate at 11.9%’, February 2014, published April 1, 2014. http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/2-31032014-AP/EN/2-31032014-AP-EN.PDF

Frankfurter Allgemeine (2012) ‘Die Angst vor der Inflation’, September 23, 2012. http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/eurokrise/schuldenkrise-die-angst-vor-der-inflation-11899733.html

Friedman, M. (1948) ‘A Monetary and Fiscal Framework for Economic Stability’, American Economic Review 38, June, 245-264.

Lagarde, C. (2014) ‘The Road to Sustainable Global Growth-the Policy Agenda’, Speech to the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC, April 2, 2014. http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2014/040214.htm

MNI (2014) ‘Interview with Jens Weidmann’, March 21, 2014. http://www.bundesbank.de/Redaktion/EN/Interviews/2014_02_28_weidmann_mn.html

Turner, A. (2013) ‘Debt, Money and Mephistopheles: How do we get out of this mess?’, Speech to Cass Business School, London, February 6, 2013. www.fsa.gov.uk/static/pubs/speeches/0206-at.pdf

von Goethe, J.W. (1888) ‘Faust: A Tragedy’, London, Ward Lock and Co.

Weidmann, J. (2012) ‘Money Creation and Responsibility’, Speech at the 18th colloquium of the Institute for Bank-Historical Research (IBF), Frankfurt, September 28, 2012. http://www.bundesbank.de/Redaktion/EN/Reden/2012/2012_09_20_weidmann_money_creaktion_and_responsibility.html

White, W. (2013) ‘Overt Monetary Financing (OMF) and Crisis Management’, Project-Syndicate, June 12, 2013. http://www.project-syndicate.org/blog/overt-monetary-financing–omf–and-crisis-management

Wood, R. (2013) ‘Overt Money Financing and Public Debt’, September 3, 2013. http://www.economonitor.com/blog/2013/09/overt-money-financing-and-public-debt/

(c) Copyright 2014 Bill Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.