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Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers

Book by Pavlina R. Tcherneva · 22 quotes · Economics, Macroeconomics, Employment

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Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers Quotes

“One recurrent question relates to the conditions required to make governments implement an employment guarantee programme? How high would the unemployment rate have to be? How high would poverty have to be? And the answer in Argentina: until the protests were unbearable! When this happened, policymakers worked with real urgency to solve the problem.”

“governments budgeted anywhere from one-tenth to more than one-half of their economies to fight the pandemic. No taxpayers were called upon to foot the bill, no creditors were asked to lend them money. Governments voted for the budgets they considered to be necessary and their central banks made the payments. The size of the response was all the evidence one needed to grasp the monetary reality. Governments which issue and control their own currencies face no financing constraints and no threat of insolvency or default.”

“A half century of neoliberalism has brought the world to the brink of collapse. Only concerted effort and cooperation by the world’s governments provides any chance of survival. Understanding MMT does not make this easy. But it helps us to recognize what the true constraints are: resources, initiative, politics, imagination.”

“Nations do not exist in isolation. Peoples have always roamed the globe in search of different opportunities. Nations principally trade to expand their consumption possibilities. In a world where we produce to consume, receiving goods and services is better in material terms than sending them elsewhere.”

“The multilateral institutions that were introduced in the Post World War II period to coordinate international aid – the IMF and the World Bank – have failed in their respective missions. They became agents for the ‘free market’ ideology and through their structural adjustment packages and related policies have made it harder for a nation to develop.”

“A once-and-for-all increase in prices due to low-end workers finally seeing their wages catch up to historical productivity increases is a desired policy outcome, not something to be avoided. Thereafter, the goal would be for wages to stay roughly par with productivity, thereby creating price stability.”

“inflation is a zero-sum game: there are always winners and losers, not just losers. The idea that it is only the latter has been encouraged by neoliberal scholars in order to justify policies that lead to economic contraction every time upward pressure is placed on wages by low unemployment rates.”

“MMT recognizes that finance is not a limited resource. It is manufactured and created in the act of spending. In the modern world, the exclusive monopoly to issue the currency endows governments with unparalleled spending power. For MMT, that the issuer can spend without technical constraints is a rather trivial observation. What MMT stresses is that taxes and borrowing cannot pre-fund the issuer of the currency, as the currency must be provided before it can be used for tax collections or bond purchases. The substantive question for MMT then is how to deploy this spending power for achieving the two central macroeconomic goals: full employment and price stability.”