It's obviously becoming difficult to keep track of where the US government policy is on…
The Left has created the swing to the Right – some reflections
The last several decades of what is termed the neoliberal era has led to some fundamental changes in our social and economic institutions. It was led by the interests of capital reconfiguring what the polity should be doing, given that most of the significant shifts have come through the legislative or regulative capacity (power) of our governments. In turn, this reconfiguration then spawned shifts within the political parties themselves such that the traditional structures and voices have changed, in some cases, almost beyond recognition. The impacts of these shifts have undermined the security and prosperity of many citizens and redistributed massive wealth to a small minority. The anxiety created as the middle class has been hollowed out has been crying out for representation – for political support. Traditionally, support for the socio-economic underdogs came from the Left, the progressive polity, which, after all was the Left’s raison d’être. But that willingness by the Left politicians to give voice to the oppressed has significantly diminished as it surrendered the macroeconomic debate to the mainstream and got lost in post modernism. As a consequence, the ideological balance has demonstrably shifted to the Right, and the former progressive parties have been abandoned. My thesis is that the Left has created a burgeoning return of the Right with a daring and resolve that we haven’t seen for decades. The election and aftermath of Donald Trump’s elevation to presidency demonstrates the situation. Last weekend’s general election in Germany demonstrates the situation. And today a poll was released in Australia that suggests the current Labor government, which slaughtered the conservatives in the last election just 3 years ago are now facing a clear loss to the Opposition – that is advocating Trump-style radicalism. As the saying goes – you get what you deserve.
It is hard to imagine how Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) could garner around 21 per cent of the vote in Germany’s national election yesterday.
It wasn’t surprising that the SPD lost to the CDU/CSU given how appallingly weak the previous coalition has been.
But while the polls has been predicting a surge in AfD vote, the fact that it came second, not that far behind the CDU/CSU (which garnered around 29 per cent of the vote), and that the voter turnout was relatively high (a record of 83.5 per cent), is fairly shocking.
A leading AfD official has even used the illegal (but more importantly repugnant) phrase ‘Alles für Deutschland’ while campaigning in the past.
But given that Post-WW2 Germany has been playing catchup for years to become a legitimate part of the global community after its WW2 behaviour, it is extraordinary how a party like AfD can actually exist.
As I wrote in this recent blog post – Germany’s sectoral decline and its obsession with fiscal austerity (February 3, 2025) – the economic future of Germany is clouded because its economic model built on government austerity, suppression of domestic demand via wage suppression, and poor judgement with respect to its industrial policy vis-a-vis China, is finally breaking as those forces combine.
But that decline has, in no small part, been overseen and pushed along by the SPD when in government.
And it is well documented that when a community is in decline in economic terms antagonism towards issues like immigration become amplified.
The SPD was in power with Gerhard Schröder as boss when the first major attacks on workers’ rights and security began (the Hartz policy).
It also agreed to be a junior partner in a CDU/CSU coalition after it lost office in 2005.
That coalition spanned the GFC and its aftermath, which saw the rabid obsession with the ‘Schwarze Null’ elevated to such a place in German policy under Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble that the government left itself virtually no discretionary capacity for investing in public infrastructure, which had progressively become degraded under that coalition.
Bridges, transportation, education and health systems, etc deteriorated and eventually those impacts are felt by the population.
The Coalition also devised the so-called ‘debt brake’ which they embedded in the nation’s Basic Law (Constitution), meaning that neoliberalism was no longer just a political flavour but had transcended into the very legal structure of the nation.
In the September 2021 election, the SPD triumphed with Olaf Scholz assuming the role as Chancellor but that coalition (with Greens and Free Democrats) effectively continued the same restrictive policies as the plight of German workers intensified.
So what started life as a ‘Marxist’ party in 1875 is now a soft-Right party with no direction and rapidly diminishing electoral support, which has left the door open for the Right to assume power.
The swings in the 2025 vote are quite stark.
The preliminary results from the – Die Bundeswahlleiterin (Federal Returning Officer) – show:
1. CDU/CSU +4.4 per cent
2. AfD +10.4 per cent
3. SPD -9.3 per cent
4. Greens -3.1 per cent
5. Left Party +3.9 per cent
6. BSW (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht) – Left Party +5 per cent
7. FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei) – Right, neoliberals -7.1 per cent
According to the DW analysis – German election results explained in graphics – the SDP “recorded not only its worst result in a federal election but also its largest loss of votes compared to previous elections.”
DW also presented an interesting graphic showing the ‘Voter migration: How did voters move between parties?’
In terms of the SDP votes in the last election:
1. 560 thousand abandoned SPD for the Left Party.
2. 440 thousand to the BSW.
3. 100 thousand to the Greens
4. 2 million to CDU/CSU.
5. 720 thousand to AfD.
In 2021, the SPD won 11,901,556 votes.
So about 23 per cent of its 2021 vote went to the Right or Extreme Right in the 2025 election.
Its overall vote slipped from 25.7 per cent in 2021 to 16.4 per cent (preliminary) in 2025.
The Greens slipped from 14.7 per cent in 2021 to 11.4 per cent in 2025..
It will be difficult for the CDU/CSU to actually form a workable government given the so-called ‘firewall’ preventing it from formally coalescing with the AfD.
But the CDU/CSU leader Friedrich Merz has already (before the election) been echoing AfD policies when he presented two motions to the Bundestag which would see Germany adopt a highly restrictive migration approach.
The ‘firewall’ might only be alive in formal terms rather than policy terms.
The most likely Coalition will be with the SPD, which will further entrench the old ‘Marxist’ party in the neoliberal mire.
If the SPD had actually stood for something approximating its roots and not bought into the neoliberal ideology and its disastrous policies, then I doubt it would have been destroyed like this.
But the decline of the progressives is not confined to Germany.
In Britain, the leading ‘progressive’ media voice, the UK Guardian continues to publish neoliberal nonsense.
For example, I read this article (unfortunately) – Consumers don’t have a debt problem. The US government does (published February 23, 2025) – which demonstrates a lack of understanding of macroeconomic reality, but is dangerous nonetheless because it feeds the sorts of messages that the far Right and the likes of Trump and his Gang are pushing.
The article was motivated by the latest Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s report – Household Debt and Credit 2024: Q4 – which was issued this month.
The report noted that:
Total household debt increased by $93 billion to reach $18.04 trillion in the fourth quarter … Aggregate delinquency rates ticked up 0.1 percentage point (ppt) from the previous quarter to 3.6 percent of outstanding debt in some stage of delinquency …
Transition into serious delinquency, defined as 90 or more days past due, remained stable for mortgages, but edged up for auto loans, credit cards, and HELOC balances. Auto loan balances saw an $11 billion increase to $1.66 trillion in the fourth quarter, while credit card balances increased by $45 billion from the previous quarter to reach $1.21 trillion at the end of December.
Part of this escalation was the extra spending during the Xmas period, so that is not the issue.
Some elements in the media though considered the increased delinquency rate to be a possible signal of an impending problem.
Several major news reports cited the lack of “emergency savings” in the household sector, or the difficulties that stretched households were facing in paying back their liabilities.
In general, there is clearly a limit to the level of debt households can sustain.
Eventually balance sheets become too precarious and overly sensitive to shifts in underlying economic conditions – such as interest rate changes, employment levels, etc – and household consumption expenditure growth declines significantly.
Then a recession looms unless government deficits respond to support the balance sheet restructuring, which is a lengthy process because paying down debt takes time.
With all the ructions associated with cuts to government spending in the US at present, the final result is yet unclear, rising household debt might become problematic.
We will see on that score.
But the UK Guardian chose to publish an author who claimed “I’m not worried about consumer debt. But as a business owner I am worried about our national debt.”
At least he didn’t pull the Greece bit about defaults, recognising that the US government debt was in US dollars.
But even so, while he considered the likelihood of default low (he might have said zero), he considered the rising interest bill to be the threat:
If 16 cents on every dollar is now being spent by the government on interest, where does that money come from? It has to be taken from somewhere. How does the government meet these obligations?
You get the drift: “where does that money come from?”
He lists three avenues:
1. Spending cuts elsewhere – which he doubts will occur.
2. Tax increases – he considers would be political suicide.
3. Last option “printing more money” – “the Fed can print money all day to meet our obligations. And that’s exactly what they’ll do.”
So we are back to this.
According to the authors the problem boils down to “simple supply and demand” such that if the Federal Reserve just ‘prints money’ it will be an “oversupply” and will “lose its value”.
Inflation.
And then the Federal Reserve, so the story goes will increase interest rates – “the same never-ending cycle”.
The prognosis – elevated inflation and interest rates which will cripple small business.
Once again I remind readers of some basic facts.
First, government spending whether it be to fund hospitals, or fuel the military industrial complex, or pay interest obligations on outstanding debt, occurs in the same way each day.
There is no printing machine in sight, except perhaps for the printers that print out regular reports for officials to take to meetings etc to discuss latest trends.
The government treasury (or whatever it is called), which initiates policy, instructs the government’s central bank, to credit relevant bank accounts.
In the case of mailing out cheques (oh, another printing has been active, daresay), the procedure ends up equivalent in accounting terms to just crediting the relevant bank accounts.
Second, tax revenue is collected by various parts of government for various reasons, none of which is to provide prior funds to allow the crediting of bank accounts to occur.
Third, government debt is issued to provide the non-government sector with a zero-risk, interest-bearing asset to add to its wealth portfolio.
The funds used to purchase that debt have come, once you really dig down and understand all the financial flows, from fiscal spending in the past, which has not been fully taxed back – in other words, past fiscal deficits.
The currency-issuing government never needs to sell debt to fund its own spending.
As soon as the central bank taps the computer key to execute the crediting process the spending is funded.
So trying to segment ‘sources’ of spending as the UK Guardian author did is a basic error and reflects a lack of understanding of these matters.
Fourth, the Federal Reserve can whenever it chooses and quite separately from its role in facilitating government spending flows, credit the reserve accounts of the commercial banks that have clearing accounts with it.
That capacity is infinite minus one cent.
The Federal Reserve uses that capacity when it buys government debt in the secondary bond markets – so-called quantitative easing.
But they do not use that sort of transaction in the process where the Treasury Department (the Office of Debt Management area) pays interest flows and or redeems public debt that has matured.
So it is hard to see what the UK Guardian author thinks is the process where interest payments are made somehow by printing machines and which is separate from day to day government spending.
At any rate, the point is why is the UK Guardian continuing to publish this sort of material, given that it just feeds the sort of mad-Right trends that are now dominating across the world.
The UK Guardian doesn’t have any mandate to provide ‘balanced’ coverage.
Fox News certainly knows it is not like a public broadcaster.
Some might say that it would be censorship to not give voice to these ideas.
And they would be right.
Censoring fiction parading as fact.
The UK Guardian has certainly not shown a willingness to publish articles that I have proposed to them.
So it does discriminate along ideological lines.
Conclusion
The world is shifting rapidly to the Right because the Left has abandoned its voice and its role in given succour to the underdog.
We will all regret this era.
That is enough for today!
(c) Copyright 2025 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.
Interesting article – a small note on the Australian aspect of this larger phenomenon:
“And today a poll was released in Australia that suggests the current Labor government, which slaughtered the conservatives in the last election just 3 years ago are now facing a clear loss to the Opposition – that is advocating Trump-style radicalism.”
It’s worth bearing in mind that the current Labor government in Australia didn’t by any means, “slaughter” the conservatives at the election they “won”. In fact, what stands out is that Labor had the lowest primary (first preference) vote of an eventually “victorious” party in Australia’s entire history.
Demographically, Labor is a dead party walking, with The Greens as the default choice for any person younger than Gen X, and skewing further that way every generation (and those who do not skew Green, tend to go conservative, like their parents). So Labor have spent most of this term dumber than Knute, trying franticly to command the tide of demographic history, and wasting time fighting a manufactured “enemy” in the Greens, rather than *getting the job done* and governing. They’re so obsessed with continuity of policy from the last government, and being like the previous government, and so bereft of any aspirational vision of their own, that they missed the part where the previous government was dismissed *for being the previous government*.
The electorate knows that the most productive government in the nation’s history was a minority Labor government, where The Greens were the governing partner. We can see that the government’s priority is party politics.
While The Conservative coalition opposition are running Trumpian flavour to their campaign oppositions do not win power in Australia, and haven’t for decades. Governments *lose* power. The character of Australian elections are not a choice between two options for who is going to be better in the next term. Australians don’t “trade up” to a better administration.
Australian elections are a performance review of the government of the day, judged against their promises and voter expectations when they were last elected. Despite the media, and political classes wishes otherwise, the opposition does not enter the consideration. Australian elections are not a competition, or a horse race.
If the government of the day fails to meet its KPIs, it gets fired and the job is given to someone else *without any real consideration of whether they are going to be better at the job*.
You don’t just have to be better than the opposition to stay in power, you have to be good enough to stay in power on your own merits.
Most “left” parties pretend to be “left” while running for power, and turn to the right when arrive in power.
People will, naturally, rubber-stamp it as an “hoax”.
It happened in France, in Germany, in Italy, Greece, Holand… almost everywhere.
Others call “left” to something that NEVER was the “left”, as in the US.
So hoax it is too in the US, and so the “right” got back in power, even if everybody knew how bad it is.
Others so-called “left” parties came to power because the right parties were so bad, that they couldn’t lose the election (just think of the UK).
Giive them a few months, and the people will bring the right parties back to power.
But not everywhere.
There are still LEFT parties in the world.
There Is An Alternative.
TINA is as dead as thatcher.
Just like trickle down will become trickle up.
But this wont happen peacefully.
The dystopia is crumbling and when this happens, we end up in war.
The sclerotic western world says it needs time to make a war machine to defeat the eastern block.
Except that it wont.
“Everybody talking to their pockets” sang Leonard Cohen.
Goddam right, once again.
The empire is waiting, once again, for europe to commit suicide, and recover the lost hegemony.
Except that, now, there is another empire waiting too.
Macron and starmer are eager to make that happen.
The ALP didn’t slaughter the LNP 3 years ago but it was the anti-LNP forces that slaughtered them and which took a bat to the ALP, also. It was because of preferential (ranked choice) voting that the ALP won a slim majority. In crude primary vote numbers it was about 1/3 to each of the ALP (4776030), LNP (5233334) and Greens+others (5465634) with a 90% voter turnout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Australian_federal_election. The ignorance of Australian voters in how best to use their votes strategically is still relatively high but, in any case, it was no slaughter by the ALP. It was a drover’s dog election but the timid, neoliberal, small target tactics of the ALP led by a believe in nothing leader gave them a narrow win and not far away from minority government. This was an election with the prospect of a minority government outcome. Sadly, the rate of realisation for change based on the best interests of the vast majority of electors is slow out there. But the two party tribalism is breaking down.
The big city Liberal Party cohort tagged the “doctors’ wives” (coined over 20 years ago) seriously broke ranks in 2022, primarily in comfortably off rusted on conservative seats in Sydney and Melbourne. The putatively conservative side in Australia has transitioned into harder right reactionaries making it easier for those with an interest in ecology and social justice to leave, if they hadn’t already. As the neoliberal LNP has gone right wing Trumpian under Rinehart, so the neoliberal ALP has sidled toward them and opened up electoral space for the self-proclaimed socially progressive and fiscally conservative (without understanding how cognitively dissonant those two stances are when the actualities of fiat money operations are understood) independents in 2022.
If anything, the baptism of the community independents in the present parliament seems to have stiffened the resolve for more kitchen table candidates popping up in this year’s election in ALP and LNP held seats. Interesting times but too slow for me – it’s like watching paint dry but must continue browbeating their gatekeepers with monetary realities. Surely, there’s someone there with an ounce of curiosity who wants to look, see and learn?
The Guardian has been well captured by the economic orthodoxy and, like the most recent seemingly thoughtful community independents elected to Australia’s parliament, could be categorized as “socially progressive and fiscally conservative” as per their self description at election.
“Print” is shorthand for “creation of money ex nihilo.” When someone says “print money” they aren’t usually referring to the process undertaken by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. “Print money” is metaphorical. The phrase refers to typing keystrokes, not running a printer.
The person who worries about the 16 cents of every dollar going to interest payments may be worried about the wrong debtor (the currency issuing sovereign) but the confusion about the source of money to pay interest is understandable, given the fractional reserve banking system …
A bank can loan $1000 into existence. But the bank expects to receive $1100 back in one year’s time. All banks perform this same operation, over and over. Where does the money for all debtors to pay all the interest come from? That is what people don’t understand.
JOHN: You say “A bank can loan $1000 into existence. But the bank expects to receive $1100 back in one year’s time. All banks perform this same operation, over and over. Where does the money for all debtors to pay all the interest come from? That is what people don’t understand.”
I’m not sure if that means you are also someone who doesn’t understand where the money comes from to pay the interest. If you do know, I apologise for what I’m about to say, but it may be useful for people who don’t know.
The money comes from the net spending of the currency-issuing central government (CICG). To pay the interest ($100) and also repay the principal ($1,000), the debtor, as a currency user, must save (not spend) $1,100 of his/her after-tax income. If we assume that this debtor is the only currency-user who is saving (not spending their entire after-tax income), the CICG must run a budget ‘deficit’ (I prefer to call it a ‘net fiscal injection’) of G – T = $1,100 to accommodate the savings requirement of the debtor. The $1,000 principal repayment destroys the $1,000 of credit money that the debtor borrowed. The $100 interest payment is a transfer of the CICG’s base money to the bank. Hence, the bank receives a $100 claim on real wealth for doing nothing more than creating credit money out of thin air and advancing it at interest. This is problematic.
Although the $1,000 principal repayment destroys $1,000 of credit money, it doesn’t destroy the $1,000 that a seller of a product or service received from the debtor (assuming the debtor used the $1,000 to purchase a $1,000 product or service).
I refer to deposits generated by a CICG net fiscal injection as ‘hard’ savings, because they are permanent (unless taxed away at some future date). Conversely, I refer to deposits generated by the advancing of credit money as ‘soft’ savings, because they are temporary (i.e., the deposits are destroyed upon repayment of the principal). The $1,000 initially received by the seller was soft savings. When the buyer/debtor saved $1,100 of CICG base money, it was $1,100 of hard savings of which $100 went to the bank (even though the back did not create any real wealth it can now claim) and $1,000 ‘went’ to the seller (who created and sold $1,000 of real wealth) in the sense that the seller’s $1,000 of soft savings have effectively been replaced by, or converted to, $1,000 of hard savings. The process completed, $0 of soft savings ($0 of credit money) and $1,100 of hard savings ($1,100 of base money) have been added to the system.
I have no problem with advances of credit money at interest, since prohibiting credit money presents its own problems. If private bank creation of credit money at interest is problematic (unjust), banks could be nationalised (owned by the CICG). Any interest paid is of no use to a CICG, so it would be destroyed as well as the repaid principal. The destroyed interest would be equivalent to a tax. The nominal interest charge should equal the inflation rate (zero real interest) so that the debtor pays back the real value of the advanced credit money, which is necessary to prevent the debtor enjoying an unearned (unjust) future claim on real wealth.
About 20 years or so ago, Chantal Mouffe wrote extensively about the problems created by unquestioning centre left adoption of centre right neoliberal dogma that effectively merged these mainstream political groupings.
That there was then created a vacuum in left thinking and leftish political action tended to alienate erstwhile core left supporters who are then persuaded to accept populist alternatives, often well to the right, as being in their interest.
In the UK I think the trends that led to these changes were being locked in during the Blair era.
Given that neoliberalist dogma involves austerity as its MO, with unemployment and insecure employment the every day trade off for monetary targets that serve finance and corporatism, then the abandonment of the core constituency of productive workers was inevitable.
Yet, there would seem to be a contradiction in how left collective support can transmute to support of right wing individualistic political agendas.
Mouffe identifies the attraction of a populist promise by charismatic leaders to act for the alienated interest groups, especially by then acting against groups othered as taking those resources and opportunites that should have been allocated to the alienated core left support.
By taking punitive actions against immigrants and othered groups, the populist leader will restore the abandoned interests of the previously left support. So right wing populism can emerge as a logical substitute for left political agendas to some groups of the electorate.
I hesitate to identify groups by traditional class, especially ‘working class’, because that definition has morphed so much in recent decades, as class boundaries changed after the social mobility of the 60s and 70s.. But I do see the UK as still weighed down by its class structure.
Until such time as the left, in its widest sense, coalesces around a clear set of priorities and actions that actually respond to the interests of the lower half of socio-economic groups, and across all post industrial nations, then the continued appeal of the right is unavoidable.
The British Labour Party will not provide that response in the UK. Reeves is entirely subservient to the neoliberal consensus, and Starmer, like Blair, is a technocrat of limited vision and zero capacity to articulate any form of social democracy.
The rebuttal of the neoliberal consensus primarily has to remedy the toxic financialisation of economies, and take monetary policy back from the banksters. They are currently in total control.
The left needs a coherent view of macroeconomics that includes MMT, but we certainly don’t have that in the UK – the Guardian piece cited being classic obfuscation.
Agree bill !!
In Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism, Stephanie Mudge looks at left parties in advanced capitalist countries over the last century and shows how the experts aligned with those parties pushed them in the direction of spin doctors and markets. In the process, left parties’ ability to represent the interests of their own working-class constituencies was eroded — and ordinary people were shut out of the halls of power.
leftism actually went through two reinventions in the last century, first from socialist to Keynesian, and then from Keynesian to neoliberal.
@someone (feb 24th 20.15)
Good post. I have sent emails to Labor MPs urging an examination of government money, as opposed to “taxpayer money”.
An election loss might concentrate their minds.
John (above) is channelling Positive Money talking points re: interest, and is factually wrong re: fractional reserve banking (which neither the US nor U.K. uses).
The interest repayable, in addition to the loan principal, comes from general govt spending (a source that the PM people seem to ignore!).
Moreover, because money doesn’t stop at first use, the interest that’s paid to the bank (perhaps undeservedly, as some may argue) doesn’t just disappear into a hole; it goes towards the bank’s expenses (incl salaries) and profits, which then get circulated (and taxed) in the usual way.
I would suggest John reads more of Bill’s archive here, abandons Positive Money thinking, and learns some MMT.
“But given that Post-WW2 Germany has been playing catchup for years to become a legitimate part of the global community after its WW2 behaviour, it is extraordinary how a party like AfD can actually exist.”
It’s not, really. Not at all. Denazification was mostly about blaming a few, snatching another batch for America, and re-integrating the rest into NATO and the German political apparatus. Then after reunification, the state rushed to support erasing those who died fighting it. After a couple of generations, all that was left for resurgence was a new target, and America provided millions of them by doing what they do in the middle east, but also elsewhere, financially and militarily. Israel, America, and the liberal left provided the final piece, repentance into civilization through violence to the real people to blame – if the zionist state and its foreign lobbies excuse even nazi salutes if you show allegiance via a photo op in Israel or Auschwitz, all is good: never again is now perfectly compatible with ethnostates, and, if in doubt, the Jews have their own place now, how bad can it get?
Predictably, it’s going to get a lot worse. But vassal discount fascism will be something different, probably unstable.
My understanding is that the “real” appeal of Nazism was reorganizing the German state into a managed economy with heavy public investment. Not just militarization, but all those infrastructure projects put people to work. It seems like people like Trump have all the incoherent racial rhetoric of fascism, but none of the economic policy. After all, from the bits of news that make it through to me, most of the current hand-wringing around Trump surrounds his even more clownish underling firing huge swaths of federal employees. This isn’t even how you replace agencies with loyalists, it’s how you render agencies nonfunctional. I… don’t think that’s how you make fascism work.
But I also don’t have a great sense of what this means for the near-term future of human civilization.
John, I also often use the term “printing” because I feel it resonates with average person on the street that I am trying to communicate with. Beyond that, there would be no functional difference if all the currency was physically printed instead of created electronically, it would just be less convenient and less secure.
It’s important to distinguish between government money (fiat) and bank money (convertible into government money, and therefore not fiat) even though both are created ex nihilo. The rules are different and the consequences are different, there are dangers with bank money that don’t exist with government money, namely risk of default.
At the risk of becoming tiresome, I object once again to characterizing Government bonds as debt, without recognizing that all money is debt. Paper notes, Central Bank deposits, and Treasury securities are all financial assets of the private sector and corresponding liabilities–debts–of the Government. Using the pejorative term debt for bonds and not for currency frames the issue in a way that serves the purposes of fiscal austerity. It’s all money — just call it that. Some of it is just future money, or as financial institutions actually think of bonds, wholesale money.
Commercial bank deposits, which constitute the bulk of money in our economies, are a liability–debt– of the respective bank, just as Government money is a liability of the Government. But nobody freaks out about bank debt, because we don’t typically talk about bank deposits as debt.
Incidentally, I’m currently reading The Money Problem by Morgan Ricks. He freely uses the term debt when he’s talking about things that ordinary people would consider to be money. Considering his intended audience, that’s appropriate. I haven’t got that far in the book, but the early chapters are extremely informative about short-term finance from non-bank or shadow bank sources.
Re The Guardian. A few of us tried to raise some alternative narratives – see Guardian letters January 20th
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/20/rachel-reeves-duty-is-to-the-people-not-the-markets
Dear Temeplayer, I missed those Guardian letters, despite my routine of scanning everyday online. I’ve sent the link to Patricia Pino/David Merrill who are co-ordinating a group of UK MMTers. We need your involvement, please.