“Demand originates with the state. Without state spending, the value of the currency is unspecified and there is no aggregate demand. Only subsequent to state spending can the currency obtain absolute value and non-government spending take place.”
Source: Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers
“when there is a line outside the Job Guarantee Office, you know you need to spend more; when there is not, you do not. And once in place as a programme, there is no need for new legislation in the face of every downturn.”
Source: Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers
“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.”
Source: Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers
“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.”
Source: Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers
“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.”
Source: Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers
“Given the differences in pandemic-related job losses across the globe, the second lesson of the pandemic was that unemployment is a policy choice.”
Source: Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers
“inflation is often a supply-side phenomenon with multiple
causes. Inflation generated by strong aggregate demand beyond full employment is rarely observed, apart from the immediate post-World War II (WWII) period.”
Source: Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers
“The surest way to deny our purpose is to search for it outside ourselves — or worse, to let others define it for us. The moment we look outward for something that can only be felt inward, we turn away from the very source we seek.
Trying to fit purpose into a sentence is like taking something alive — something ever-flowing, ever-changing — and freezing it into a monument of words. No matter how beautiful or precise, it becomes a still image of what was once moving. At best, it is a snapshot of a moment in time, a reflection that has already passed.
But life’s purpose is not meant to be carved in stone. It is a living current, flowing and evolving in rhythm with our life. To define it is to risk stripping it of its aliveness — we would barter something wild and sacred for something safe and fixed.
Purpose is to be lived, embodied, and surrendered to. It is something we meet anew in every moment we choose to show up in alignment with what stirs our soul.”
“MMT insists that full employment need not be sacrificed for price stability and that there are many tools available to the policymaker to start thinking about the things that matter – not budgets and accounting ratios, but public health, jobs, and the environment.”
Source: Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers
“The international monetary order distributes risk asymmetrically — reserve issuers export liquidity, while commodity-dependent economies import adjustment.”
Source: The Coin of Great Value: The Currency War and the Battle for Economic Independence