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.

Readers of my blog often ask me about how modern monetary theory sits with the views of the debt-deflationists (and specifically my academic colleague Steve Keen). Steve and I have collaborated in the last few days to foster some debate between us on a constructive level with the aim of demonstrating that the common enemy is mainstream macroeconomics and that progressive thinkers should target that school of thought rather than looking within.

Household saving ratios (saving as a percentage of disposable income) have risen significantly in most countries since the onset of the recession. In many countries this has come after a period of increasing indebtedness as national governments pursued budget surpluses. As a result, the macroeconomic concept of the paradox of thrift has been resurrected in the popular press as a discussion point. There are fears that the end of the “consumer boom” will lead to stagnancy. A recently published IMF paper addresses this point but just cannot let themselves address the elephant in the room. They present a new way version of deficit hysteria.

The mainstream economics profession is not saying much during the crisis apart from some of the notable interventions from conservatives and a few not-so conservative economists. In general, what can they say? Not much at all. The frameworks they use to reason with are deeply flawed and bear no relation at the macroeconomic level to the operational realities of modern monetary economies. Even the debt-deleveraging (progressives) use such stylised models which negate stock-flow consistency that their ability to capture sensible policy options are limited. This blog discusses New Keynesian theory which is a current fad among mainstream economists and which has been defended strongly by one of its adherents in a recent attack on Paul Krugman. The blog is a bit pointy.

Today we go into the kitchen cupboard for a lesson in macroeconomics. That is according to the main economics writer of the Sydney Morning Herald, which is published in a city of over 4 million people. The reality is that while we are encouraged to get our heads into the cupboard, all we succeed in doing is further obscuring any understanding at all of how budgets work and the opportunities and capacities of a sovereign government operating within a fiat monetary system. We were really scraping the barrel today!

This week’s Economist Magazine (print edition) is running a story Making fiscal policy credible – Bind games, continues the mounting conservative push for governments to return fiscal conduct back to the days before the crisis. The conservatives (except the really loopy ones) are begrudgingly being forced to recognise that the fiscal stimulus packages have saved the World economy from a total disaster. But after taking a deep breath they get back on track with the “debt is bad” “surplus is good” mantra that got us into this mess in the first place.

Today the retail sales data came out in Australia and showed a 1.0 per cent fall in the month of July and the beginnings of a declining trend (2 negative months in a row). Many economists are seeing this as a sign that the impacts of the fiscal stimulus packages have come to a screaming halt and all we have left for our troubles is a public debt burden that will kill our kids and pets. While the fall-off in retail activity is a problem I don’t think we are about to follow the US path into temporary oblivion. Further, debates about retail sales allow me to extend my Austrian theme. Attack dogs on the ready!

It is clear that next year’s federal election will be based on the deficit-debt-waste agenda, if the mounting calls for the federal government to cut back net spending now to avoid us drowning in a mountain of debt are any guide. However, the political rhetoric is at odds with the major forecasts (such as the OECD and IMF) which confirm that the stimulus packages must not be wound back. The fact that the IMF and OECD are saying that is some endorsement given their neo-liberal credentials. Today, I thought I would do some digging to construct some of my own scenarios. This is what I came up.

Mostly, financial markets (the wealth shuffling casino) and the real economy (where people live and work) run as parallel universes. But occasionally as in the case of the GFC morphing into a full-blown real crisis with massive income and job losses the two merge. In many cases the merger is driven by a poor understanding of the way the fiat monetary system operates. As a consequence we get decisions taking by the gamblers (they prefer to be called speculators – it sounds better) based on faulty analysis of how the econmy works, pushing asset prices up (or down) which in turn affect the way governments are reacting to the “real crisis”. The surge in gold prices in the last few days might be an example of that.

On July 8, 2009 a world first occurred in Sweden when the Swedish Riksbank (its central bank) made announced that its deposit interest rate would be set at minus 0.25. While this has set the cat among the pidgeons around the financial markets, it is a classic example of “central banking gone crazy” or more politely “quantitative easing on steroids”. The only problem is that performance enhancing drugs seem to make athletes ride or run faster. This move will do very little to make the Swedish economy increase output or employ more people. For a background to my analysis on this event in central banking history you might like to read my blog – Quantitative Easing 101.

I saw the latest Government Finance Statistics released by the ABS today just after I read the Financial Times where there was an article by former Cambridge Professor of Modern History, Peter Clarke entitled This is no time to throw away the crutches. There was a symbiosis in time. Then I read all the geeing up that is going on about rising manufacturing output in China and Japan and the News Limited themes that we have to get interest rates up sooner rather than later or the inflation genie will escape and I remembered the real world.

I have been intrigued with Japan for many years. It probably started with the post-war hostility towards them by the soldiers who saw the worst of them. The Anzac tradition was very unkind to Japan and its modern generations. It always puzzled me how we could hate them so much yet rely on them for our Post-World War II boom. I also thought we owed them something for being part of the political axis that dropped the first and only nuclear weapon on defenceless citizens when the war was over anyway. Whatever, I have long studied the nation and its economy. So yesterday’s election outcome certainly exercises the mind. Will it be a paradigm shift or a frustrating period where an ostensibly social democratic government runs up against the neo-liberal machine? I put these thoughts together about while travelling to and from Sydney on the train today.

As part of some research I am doing for a book that will come out next year on the dynamics of recessions I have been looking at asymmetries in the response of the labour market to changing economic activity. The analysis has produced some very interesting set of graphs that inform us, very starkly, how recessions damage the labour market. They also reveal why I am at present dubbing the current downturn the underemployment recession.

In today’s Australian newspaper ex Federal Treasury official Tony Makin writes that We keep repeating Keynes’s mistakes. Do we now? The story is a litany of half-truths and basic conceptual errors. He is now a professor of economics. Bad luck for his students. The article, one of a regular contribution he makes to the increasingly squawking right-wing News Limited daily, is a classic example of how to deceive the public with spurious economic reasoning – that the author knows most of the public will just accept without question.

In yesterday’s (August 23 2009) Financial Times, so-called financial markets expert Nouriel Roubini wrote that The risk of a double-dip recession is rising. The American academic was recently in Australia as a speaker at the Diggers & Dealers Forum which is an annual mining conference. The problem is that Roubini is an influential advisor to the US Government and so will have a hand in determining the direction of fiscal policy. He continually demonstrates, however, that he does not understand how the fiat monetary system operates and in that context becomes part of the problem.

Someone wrote to me today and said they had been reading Paul Krugman’s 1999 book Peddling Prosperity, where he presents the now-famous baby-sitting model. You can read a shortened version of the model HERE. The reader asked me whether the model had any relevance to modern monetary theory. The short answer: yes but not necessarily in the way Krugman thinks (he is still locked into gold standard thinking).