Our hotel smelled like dead hooker vagina (before you ask I had gotten a detailed description from beardown)

There is not a damned thing wrong with people who are bull shitters.

Is he related to Enrique?

I am not a legal expert, how many times do I have to say it?

Could you please explain economics to Mr. Yglesias?

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status ... 3709136896

Only if Enrique changed his last name.

The various strains of thought that make up MMT have their roots in Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, along with more contemporary thinkers like Hyman Minsky and Abba Lerner, but only recently have researchers connected the dots in quite this way. “We’ve rediscovered old ideas,” Kelton said, “and assembled them into a complete macroeconomic frame.”

To a layperson, MMT can seem dizzyingly complex, but at its core is the belief that most of us have the economy backward. Conventional wisdom holds that the government taxes individuals and companies in order to fund its own spending. But the government—which is ultimately the source of all dollars, taxed or untaxed—pays or spends first and taxes later. When it funds programs, it literally spends money into existence, injecting cash into the economy. Taxes exist in order to control inflation by reducing the money supply, and to ensure that dollars, as the only currency accepted for tax payments, remain in demand.

It follows that currency-issuing governments could (and, depending on how you lean politically, should) spend as much as they need to in order to guarantee full employment and other social goods. MMT’s adherents like to point out that the federal government never “runs out” of money to fund the military, but routinely invokes budget constraints to justify defunding social programs. Money, in other words, isn’t a scarce commodity like silver or gold. “To people who’ve worked in financial markets, who work at the Fed, this isn’t controversial at all,” says Galbraith, who, while not an adherent, can certainly be described as “MMT-friendly.”

The decisions about how to issue, lend, and spend money come down to politics, values, and convention, whether the goal is reducing inequality or boosting entrepreneurship. Inflation, MMT’s proponents contend, can be controlled through taxation, and only becomes a problem at full employment—and we’re a long way off from that, particularly if we include people who have given up looking for jobs or aren’t working as much as they’d like to among the officially “unemployed.” The point is that, once you shake off notions of artificial scarcity, MMT’s possibilities are endless. The state can guarantee a job to anyone who wants one, lowering unemployment and competing with the private sector for workers, raising standards and wages across the board.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

The Fed creates money by buying up debt, notably treasury securities and mortgage backed securities. It is pumping money into our economy. Post financial crisis, it took extraordinary steps in so called open market operations (quantitative easing) because it couldn't lower interest rates anymore. That is the inherent problem with a fiat currency system. The Federal government and consumers can over spend via budget and trade deficits respectively, and unlike Turkey, we have a reserve currency that allows such over consumption to occur for long periods of time.

There is a lot of folly in modern economic thinking. The question is when will the day of reckoning hit us.

The victims are the American People and the Republic itself.

Good to see someone finally post this here.

Good to see someone finally post this here.

If and when that day comes you better own hard assets like real estate. I have noodled taking stakes in gold and silver, and there are many smart people I know that have made recurring investments in precious medals coins because our fiat currency may not be there.

As for the date, I honestly don't see it happening in our lifetime. Too many people are vested and believe fully in the current system (i.e. the dollar). As long as people believe in the dollar, then the folly will continue.

This soyboy lefty is actually correct though. "Money" is just a liquid way of transferring wealth. The reason printing money doesnt work is because it doesn't actually create any wealth.

But

The US government is in the very enviable position where it can just walk up to any country in the world, yes even China, and just demand wealth. There would be protestations, controversy and generally would be ill-regarded by almost everyone in the world, but if you're a foreign power what do you do with the nuclear gun pointed at your head? If they cave then the USA could take whatever it wants and if they refuse they get vaporized and the USA collects whatever is left in the rubble.

This would not cause any sort of inflation of the USD as it would be the taking of wealth by relatively cheap means. The USA has the nukes, submarines and missiles already and whatever the monetary cost is of deploying them would pale in comparison to just absorbing another country's GDP. Especially a big one like China.

You could have the opinion that China, Russia, France or the UK (the latter two have decent sized fleets of boomers, so dont laugh them off) could leave such a hurting on the USA that it wouldn't be worth it, but I'm not so sure. We'd shoot down most of what they would try and get through and after the initial wave of destruction they would be in such disarray that subsequent counterattacks would be puny and laughable. Different argument, though.

The Fed creates money by buying up debt, notably treasury securities and mortgage backed securities. It is pumping money into our economy. Post financial crisis, it took extraordinary steps in so called open market operations (quantitative easing) because it couldn't lower interest rates anymore. That is the inherent problem with a fiat currency system. The Federal government and consumers can over spend via budget and trade deficits respectively, and unlike Turkey, we have a reserve currency that allows such over consumption to occur for long periods of time.

There is a lot of folly in modern economic thinking. The question is when will the day of reckoning hit us.

Good to see Dennis coming around on Bitcoin!

Bitcoin is a bigger farce than fiat currencies. And I am perfectly comfortable being wrong on bitcoin if it truly becomes a legit means of transacting business rather than a scam that no one really understands and is valued by the great fool theory.

Hah, rising interest are going to explode the deficit. A one percent rise costs us $200B per year, and rates are probably 2% below where they need to be.

the cost cited is for new debt (Assuming they will need to borrow more)? or does an interest rate rise affect previously issued debt?"

There is not a damned thing wrong with people who are bull shitters.