A shareable poster for the Job Guarantee proposal, a constitutive part of the MMT framework's approach to macroeconomic stabilisation, replacing the status quo NAIRU regime.
Disclaimer: Poster generated by chatGPT, content half written by me, half by the LLM.
Bond markets are back in the news again as they always are when someone even sniffs at rejecting the notion that democracy must dance to the bond trader's tune.
I wrote this the last time Andy Burnham caused this merry-go-round and think it's useful again.
The Green party is very clear that it wants to transform our economic management and break out of the neoliberal orthodoxy we've been under since Thatcher.
Part of that is understanding that bond markets don't rule us.
I'm from the UK and visiting the US and the culture shock with tipping expectations is real.
From what I can tell, tipping at 20% as standard, often independent of service quality, is a coercive charity donation to a labour force largely deemed to be underpaid by employers.
So tipping is directly subsidising employer wage costs and acts as a charity donation from the customer to the staff member. And this charity donation is often extremely socially coerced.
Really quite bizarre to me and very annoying as I dislike being manipulated into doing something I don't want to do, or people feeling automatically entitled to charity donations from me.
Is this widely understood in this way in the US?
Presentation given by Stephanie Kelton in Leeds, 2024.
Clear exposition of the policy space available to many governments concerning their debt management practices.
Makes absolutely clear that bond issuance is a choice the government makes about how much fixed income duration it wants to add to non-government net savings and not about financing or facilitating fiscal policy, achieving any given overnight interest rate target, or providing any counter-inflationary effect on the real economy.
Interest is an exogenous policy variable of the state with this understanding and can always be kept at a sufficiently low level (i<g) to provide long run fiscal "sustainability".
For anyone who cites (or sees others citing) historic periods of hyperinflation as somehow being relevant in a critique of the MMT framework, this analysis of the Weimar case should (it won't) put that to bed.
>The currency is a public monopoly, and monopolists are price setters. This makes the price level a function of the prices paid by the government. The Weimar inflation, as is necessarily the case, was driven by the German government’s policy of paying continuously higher prices to provision itself, thus continuously redefining the value of its currency downward. Once that policy changed, and the government limited its direct and indirect deficit spending, and ceased to continue paying higher prices, the price level stabilized. Inflation necessarily requires a state policy of continuously paying higher prices when it spends, and inflation ceases when that policy ends.