Episode 12 - the finale for Season 1 in our new Manga series - The…
The Smith Family manga continues – Episode 5 is now available
Episode 5 in our new weekly Manga series – The Smith Family and their Adventures with Money – is now available. Have a bit of fun with it and circulate it to those who you think will benefit …
The Smith Family are a middle-class family living in a city somewhere in the world. The second-generation parents are university educated and have professional occupations. Their two kids attend the local public school.
Note after Episode 6, the series will become fortnightly.
As the story gets more involved and the concepts traversed more complicated, the writing and artwork is more time consuming.
So for the second-half of Season 1, the series will be updated on a fortnightly basis.
In Episode 5, the Smith Family head to Kyoto for their holidays to spend time with Elizabeth’s best mate, Mariko Fujii and her husband Hiroshi.
Mariko and Elizabeth went to university together and have been friends ever since, sharing all their intimate thoughts, hopes and worries.
Hiroshi Fujii works at the Bank of Japan and knows Chris from the time when the latter was also working at his central bank handling swap arrangements between the respective banks.
Ryan is singularly unimpressed with the choice of holiday destination and let’s everyone know that.
The conversation ranges from whether the Japanese government is going to run out of money, Ryan’s conjecture (which is just repeating what Professor Noitawl keeps saying on the morning TV finance segment, and what actually constrains government spending.
Hiroshi helps Kevin understand the idea of real resource constraints, whereas Ryan just thinks any extra government spending means he will have to pay higher taxes.
I hope you are enjoying the unfolding story.
And if you think you resemble any of the characters then either continue spreading MMT knowledge or get our textbook and get up to speed, depending on which character you might identify with.
If you have any feedback we will appreciate it, other than ‘this sucks’.
That is enough for today!
(c) Copyright 2023 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.
On the site where I post MMT stuff, I get this excuse all the time.
I say that accumulating deficits do not necessarily or usually cause inflation.
They say yes, they do, because someday there has always been inflation after enough deficits.
I say that the post covid inflation was caused by the shortages and then by the price gouging by corps with monopoly pricing power, like Amazon. So, eventually, some such event will cause inflation that can be blamed on the earlier deficits.
They say no, it was the accumulated deficits that added to the money supply.
I say that banks making loans have added far more to the money supply.
They say that the off-setting debts keep that money from causing inflation.
I say bullshit. Explain how that works.
Etc.
Ect.
Your point about loans seems solid to me.
When a bank grants a loan the money starts circulating in the market “that same day”, as soon as the borrower spends the money. The money keeps circulating until some day in the future when the borrower has to repay the loan; then they have to take money that they earned some other way, and instead of sending it, pay it to the lending bank. Until then the money is out there being used in bids and deals and price discovery.
The mainstream has to have the argument of Inflationary Expectations, which make people save what they just earned, because they will need more in the future, after prices have risen inflationarilly, and that saving drains money out of the market and prevents inflation.
Or do the Expectations make people spend money they just earned right away, because they will get less for it if they wait till prices have risen? I’m not sure.