Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you understand the reasoning behind the answers. If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of modern monetary theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you understand the reasoning behind the answers. If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
I get many E-mails from readers who are confused about stocks and flows. At least that is my diagnosis because from the questions that I get asked it is apparent that there is a deep misunderstanding of what a budget deficit actually is and how it is different from the stock of outstanding public debt. This is an important issue and bears on how many seek to comprehend the latest Eurostat – Flash National Accounts data – for the third quarter 2012. The data is now signalling a further descent into recession in the Eurozone and with further cutbacks being imposed on various nations, already mired in what should be called Depression, the outlook for 2013 is worse. This is a case of governments deliberately undermining their economies. The strategies in place cannot work. All they will do is add more workers to the millions that have already been forced into unemployment by this policy folly. I view the policies being imposed in Europe and the UK, for example, as criminal acts.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you understand the reasoning behind the answers. If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of modern monetary theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you understand the reasoning behind the answers. If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you understand the reasoning behind the answers. If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you understand the reasoning behind the answers. If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
I am in Perth today speaking at a public service employees union congress. The talk is based on a major report we have just finished tracking the implications of public spending cutbacks in Australia on the volume and quality of public service delivery. We did several case studies – one of which was child protection – and the cutbacks will lead to increased child abuse in Australia without doubt. The story is pretty grim and I will write about it once the Report is made public by the commissioning party. But with travel (Perth is a long flight from anywhere and I have to get back to Newcastle tonight – 6 hours) and commitments I haven’t much time to wax lyrical on my blog. But I have been meaning to write about the upcoming Scottish referendum on independence from Britain and it fits a nice theme with yesterday’s blog – The demise of social democratic parties – they are all neo-liberals now – where I argued that good intentions come to naught if the economic policy paradigm used is erroneous. I would recommend the Scots vote yes at the 2014 referendum. But only if they introduce their own unpegged, floating currency and avoid any talk of joining the Eurozone. Further, the yes vote should be conditional on the government committing itself to achieving full employment on the back of their newly created currency sovereignty. Then the yes vote will improve welfare for the Scottish people. If they continue to use the British pound – then nothing will be gained.
The scaremongering about inflation and higher interest rates continues to flood out of the mainstream economics community. The conversation has become a little more sophisticated since the claims in the early stages of the crisis that the fiscal and monetary policy innovations introduced by governments would be inflationary. Now we are hearing stories about longer lags – channelling Milton Friedman who also fell foul of the evidence more often than not. So inflation is just around the corner rather than coming tomorrow. As in the past, the mainstream macroeconomics has a serious credibility problem. It is no wonder it keeps making erroneous predictions. It begins with an erroneous construction of reality. It is all downhill for them after that.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you understand the reasoning behind the answers. If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you understand the reasoning behind the answers. If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you understand the reasoning behind the answers. If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you understand the reasoning behind the answers. If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
I was reading several older papers from the 1990s today as part of a project I am working on where I track predictions that leading mainstream economists were making at the time about the evolution of national and global economies. It is a very interesting exercise to build the narratives that were popular at an earlier time and then consider how far the economists got things right. I have noted that there has been some debate out in blog-land about who predicted the failure of the Euro. I am less interested in documenting which person was the first or the second – there were many who saw the design flaws from the inception and could extrapolate what they would mean if a negative shock occurred. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) economists were among them. I am more interested in groupthink (at the paradigm level) and how the failed predictions can be used to demonstrate the inapplicability of a certain body of theory. That is, what can we learn from the failure of mainstream economists in general to see the crisis coming (and being in denial now of what the solution is). In this blog I consider a part of the thinking that explains why my profession proved to be unreliable in this regard. I renamed this blog – appending it with the term redux because on March 23rd, 2009 – I wrote a blog – Budget surpluses are not national saving.
Everyday the major financial newspapers and magazines provide Op Ed space to so-called leading economists. For the majority of the public, it is these Op Ed articles that provide their interaction with my profession. It is a pity. The majority of the reasoning presented by these characters, most who occupied senior positions in US academic departments, is spurious to say the least. The public is thus being poorly educated (to put it mildly) on a daily basis and this represents a major problem for our democracies. Voting in elections is one thing. But when citizens are voting based on faulty understandings that they have derived from these economists, then what is the value of a free vote? Today I consider the views of leading Princeton economist Alan Blinder – who is another macroeconomist who is blind to the way the economy works.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you understand the reasoning behind the answers. If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.