Some left economists have started to critique MMT, I have written a recent blog article but like the rabbit hole to Wonderland, there’s always more. Here are my notes.
Here are some links,
- Against modern monetary theory … by James Meadway, not all currencies are equal and thus not all currencies are sovereign and he defends Labour’s Fiscal Credibility Rule. The UK’s over engagement in the world’s capital/currency markets makes the UK overly reliant on political support from the US because of our dollar liabilities.
- I found this article above via, There are ways to end neoliberalism globally that are not progressive and this will increasingly be the terrain the left is fighting on which makes similar points on economic policy but also attacks MMT as not being of the left, and ignoring economic power, productivity and inequality.
- Brexit: the Slippery Slope of Left Sovereigntism, from Modern Monetary Theory to Spiked. at tendance coatsey explores the political inertia that MMT’s exponents may be riding; much of this article is based on the interview (See 2) with James Meadway, once John McDonnell’s economics adviser. For Coatsey’s regular readers, you will be unsurprised at his pugnacious attacks on Faizi’s endorsement of the Full Brexit and Spiked.
- Modern Monetary Theory isn’t helping … at the Jacobin
- Functional Finance and Full Employment: Lessons from Lerner for Today?, a relatively recent paper 1999 on “Functional Finance“. Functional Finance is ascribed (on wikipedia) to Abba P Lerner on whose page there is a partial bibliography, there’s also Functional Finance: Old and New at the Levy Institute, no relation. This is important as it first posed the proposition that fiscal policy should have a real world outcome, not reflect an accountant’s desire to balance the books.
The two main sources proposing MMT, I have found are,
- Bill Mitchell’s blog
- And in Reclaiming the State, at least part two.
I have another article in this wiki Modern Monetary Theory which annotates earlier theorists contributing to the theory.
The featured image is from http://401kcalculator.org/ and is CC 2011 BY-SA, although the text on flickr documents it as CC0.