Economics Professor, Musician, billy blogger ...
MMT is not something you do, it is something that is! Migrated to
@BillMitchell
@mastodon
.world - please follow
Jeremy Corbyn convincingly retains his seat in Islington North which is an embarrassment for the Labour Party and Starmer’s purge of the Left, but a victory for decency. Best result in the UK election.
So who is going to take responsibility for such an error after I pointed out in this blog post on April 29 - - that there was no way the original estimates could be correct.
I was the only economist who made that claim and was vilified for doing so. 2/n
The Tasmanian Parliament just voted for the introduction of a Job Guarantee after the Greens promoted a motion. I have been in discussions with them recently and they read a document into the official record that I had sent them on a true MMT JG. Great effort to get this through.
Our Macroeconomics textbook (published March 2019) has now gone to its first reprint.
As the US Congress consider a Bill that
“condemns” MMT and mainstream economists give us free publicity, we sincerely thank all those who have bought the book so far. Keep spreading the word.
Don't forget to enrol in the upcoming edx MOOC - Modern Monetary Theory: Economics for the 21st Century - begins on March 3, 2021. The course is free and will last four weeks and provide an introductory journey through the essentials.
Further details:
@billy_blog
It's been a long time! Mitchell-san.
I got the last seat in the Diet :)
that was a miracle...
Let us change the world to one where everyone can live with dignity.
In solidarity, Akiko Oishi.
p.s. Say hello to Louisa-san. I put the rug she gave me on my front door. I like it.
Larry Elliott “The choice is simple: start putting together a post-Brexit progressive project or have a monster sulk and watch the Tories make the political weather.” That was the only choice for Labour post June 2016. They were told. Let’s hope they finally grasp it this time.
Private wages growth flat for the last three quarters. There is no wage pressure to justify the interest rate increases in the face of a supply-driven inflation.
Largest crowd for a speaker’s event at Woodford so far listening to my MMT talk. Tent overflowing. We are making progress. Thanks to the organisers for their invitation and great help.
Announcing MMTedQ&A - which will be a weekly live program where we interact with audience members and answer their questions about MMT. Details coming soon -
I repeat what I have said often in the last weeks - the fiscal stimulus is at least 50% less than it should be.
Now it is more like 70% less. Trying to make virtue of the fact that you are spending $60b less than you thought while UR skyrockets should disqualify one from office.
Neither Chris nor I nor anyone associated with GIMMS has an anti-semitic bone in our bodies. Absolute nonsense Martin.
I am proud to stand with Chris who is a true Labour person and one of few MPs in Britain who works within an MMT frame against neoliberalism.
@GowerInitiative
has event with suspended from Labour 4 racism
@DerbyChrisW
&
@billy_blog
will be speaking with him! WTF!
Looks like solidarity with Chris. Not good look for Bill nor Gower team.
To think I defended Bill over insinuations of antisemitism from
@sjwrenlewis
.
Headlines today: "European leaders fail to agree stimulus package", "EU leaders clash over economic response to coronavirus crisis" - solidarity in play! Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Ireland should go it alone, spend as much as it takes. ECB has your back. If they reneg, exit!
Thank goodness the worst government in our history has been defeated tonight. Not sure though of the shape of the new parliament. Just that the conservatives are out - routed.
Our response to James Meadway's hysteria-laden, anti-MMT article, where we explain that socialists shouldn't be afraid to seize the means of production of currency
Mainstream economists claim that real wage cuts stimulate employment. The data (and logic) says different. Real wages have fallen sharply in Australia and employment growth has been near zero for the last two months.
The “restraints on a government’s spending are NOT primarily set by the amount it can borrow in its own currency without fuelling inflation”. The restraints are the available real resources that are for sale in the currency the government issues. Need to get this correct.
‘Macroeconomics’✨💥
An opportunity to attend a launch event on Friday 1st March in London to celebrate the long awaited publication of ‘Macroeconomics’ and listen to Bill Mitchell speak about the development of this book.
Limited places.
@EventbriteUK
Don't forget to enrol in the upcoming Edx MOOC - Modern Monetary Theory: Economics for the 21st Century - which begins on March 3, 2021. The free course will last 4 weeks and provide an introductory journey through the essentials.
Further details:
Latest HM Treasury analysis of long-term effects of Brexit to feed into Project Fear - quote “ the analysis does not account for any potential policy measures put in place to mitigate a no deal scenario.” So all the doom predictions are based on Government doing nothing!
Dear Akiko I am very happy to be coming to Japan in November to discuss issues with your team and to advance the progressive Left policy agenda and broaden the understanding of MMT with the aim of overturning the austerity bias. best wishes bill
@billy_blog
hello. billy-san. my name is Akiko Oishi. i read ur post and felt surprised. I am a staff of ROSE mark, a person in the middle of the photo.
(but a leftist :) really looking forward to seeing u this fall in Japan.
my website
This is what you get when journalists bother to go to source and seek to understand. No stupid “printing money” or “governments spending unlimited amounts” nonsense. Just pure MMT
Thanks to the i3 team and I will see you in November to progress this
Our MMTed edX 4 week course on MMT is back. Starting mid-September. Full details on when enrolments open soon. This is a free course and has a variety of learning resources and is interactive. Hope to see those who couldn’t participate last time.
Episode 1 of our new Manga series - The Smith Family and their Adventures with Money - now available.
Our weekly series created by makes Modern Monetary Theory accessible for people, while at the same time having a bit of fun.
NYTs on Japan and MMT - the mainstream macroeconomists are scuttled - no explanation, no credibility. All they have left is that one day the sky is going to fall in and then we will see - apparently. Meanwhile, Japan’s unemployment rate is 2.5 per cent.
No, it would be a waste of paper and ink.
But the government can, within seconds, type numbers into bank accounts and the funds are created. Just like all government spending - each and every day.
We should just be concentrating on where we want the funds to go.
Franking Credit, GST, Capital Gain Concession, COVID Levy...... It doesn’t matter what it is, the fund has to come from somewhere. The country can’t just print money hand out to the voters.
#auspol
MMTed invites you to enrol for the edX MOOC - Modern Monetary Theory: Economics for the 21st Century. It’s free and the 4-week course starts on February 9, 2022.
Learn about MMT properly with lots of videos, discussion, and more.
Further Details:
MMTed invites you to enrol for the edX MOOC - Modern Monetary Theory: Economics for the 21st Century. It’s free and the 4-week course starts on February 9, 2022.
Learn about MMT properly with lots of videos, discussion, and more.
Further Details:
Repeat after me:
There is no such thing as "fiscal space".
A federal government using its own money cannot run out of it, but it can run out of resources that its citizens are willing to sell to it. "Fiscal space" is confusing real capacity with monetary capacity.
What? We make them all the time. interest rates will not skyrocket, governments will not become insolvent, central banks cannot go broke, bond yields will remain low, and whatever.
At JFK and about to fly. In my haste to get here I forgot to thank the MMT conference organisers for their excellent work and all the participants for coming. Strength to all of us.
Australian wage share falls to 48.5% while profits boom. Workers are not receiving the productivity gains nor sharing in the terms of trade boom. Australian govt has to step in and stop this indecency.
VIDEO PREMIERE NOW‼️
The man who coined MMT joins Bad Faith to explain the coordinated conservative effort to corrupt our economic system, and the establishment left's complicity in that project.
Eurozone now has to face the facts - the German court ruling has been given. ECB ultra vires. PEPP, the only real thing staving off insolvency for many nations, is now looking doubtful because capital key has to rule. And what authority does the CJEU now have? What a system!
Why use emotional metaphors such as “explode” to describe an orderly and discretionary increase in net government spending designed to safeguard the economy when non-government spending and income is contracting sharply due to the crisis? Better avoid this sort of language.
Government budget deficit is about to explode to fight the coronavirus. A knowledge of MMT is a lens to view the Federal deficit as
@billy_blog
has explained countless times.
@battleforeurope
Episode 4 of my podcast is now available -
I discuss the misbelief that as 'taxpayers' we provide government with the funds that allow it to spend. The idea that better govt services requires offsetting govt spending cuts or higher taxes is a fiction.
ECB boss Lagarde says “we are not here to close spreads, that's not function of ECB”.
It is beyond belief that these characters remain in charge. All Eurozone Member States should plan to exit what is a dysfunctional, poorly designed system run by recalcitrant elites. Now!
One week to go. Don't forget to enrol in the upcoming edX MOOC - Modern Monetary Theory: Economics for the 21st Century. The free course begins March 3, 2021 and over 4 weeks will provide an introduction to MMT.
More Details:
Don't forget to enrol in the upcoming edX MOOC - Modern Monetary Theory: Economics for the 21st Century - which begins on March 3, 2021. The free course will last four weeks and provide an introductory journey through the essentials.
Further details:
More than a debate within the “Left” it really highlights the difference between the ‘fictional’ mainstream macroeconomic analysis and MMT, which is ground in the real world. And thanks for the invitation to participate.
It is undeniable the
#eurozone
has its flaws, but it does not follow that its creation was a mistake. More important than relitigating past grievances, argues Daniel Daianu, is implementing the necessary reforms to put the
#euro
on a stronger footing.
Complementary articles in The Weekend Australian today:
William Mitchell - Full Employment a choice Morrison must make
Noel Pearson - The case for government job guarantee
For the record - Warren and I are on the public record (2001) as saying the continued issuance of public debt is unnecessary and should be discontinued. That certainly would change the CB-Treasury relationship.,
For a start, a Job Guarantee automatically expands government spending until the last person needing a job walks through the door. No forecasts needed.
@albericie
@billy_blog
Seriously, this is fascinating because it has implications for MMT. If forecasting is too difficult then how can extra Govt expenditure be calibrated to not step on toes of the private sector & individual enterprise?
What if data can't determine decisions? What then?
Japan:
1997 Sales Tax rises - recession follows.
2014 further rises - recession follows.
October 2019 further rises - economy now contracts 6.5 per cent.
See my September 2019 prediction -
Like day, follows night. Mainstream macro incompetence.
Central Banks are the biggest creditors of their nations. Bank of Japan holds almost 50% of outstanding govt bonds.
#ECB
holds 25% of outstanding bonds, could rise to 28%, acc to Goldman Sachs.
I will have enrolment details soon for our next offering of the MMTed edX MOOC - Modern Monetary Theory: Economics for the 21st Century.
The free course will begin in mid-September and will run for 4 weeks.
Stay tuned.
It seems that Meadway hasn’t journeyed outside of his neoclassical textbooks. He certainly doesn’t understand history & has clearly not comprehended real economies such as Japan. His comments are idiotic and deeply uneducated. His advice is holding back Labour and Britain. Sadly.
MMTed will be launching its new weekly program MMTed Q&A from next Wednesday (May 20). If you are curious about MMT and want to ask the experts a question submit your query on-line at
British astrophysicist Martin Rees: “ensure everyone has a living wage. But this shouldn’t be a handout. It should be achieved by creating huge numbers of upgraded public sector jobs where the human element is crucial and the which are now undervalued and where demand is huge …“
Pity he didn’t say this when he had power. He advocated a light touch on the greed of the financial markets and extolled the virtues of fiscal surpluses.
I have worked in SAf and have first-hand knowledge of the opportunities & limitations of policy there. The SA govt can clearly utilise its available labour resources in paid jobs to reduce poverty, improve housing and urban amenity. Denying that reflects a failure to understand.
Pretty simple really. Mainstream New Keynesian macroeconomics gets almost everything wrong that is important to understanding how the economy operates while being obsessed with counting angels on the top of pinheads. Further information can be gained by deeper study. Best wishes
Except for one macroeconomics textbook -
Perhaps Summers and Krugman and all the rest of those trying to revise their positions will start recommending universities use our textbook
You know what’s REALLY interesting about the thread? It overturns virtually everything of importance in macro textbooks, as well as the vast majority of macro advice given by the mainstream to policy makers over the last 20+ years.
Peculiar that you didn’t find that interesting.
What like the millions that the EU drove into joblessness and increased poverty risk? Like Macron’s war on workers? Like the Hartz war on workers? I will run out of characters if I was to continue the list.
7/ Let's zoom out. Why does EU provide strong protections for employment/environmental/health and safety? Because over decades it developed common standards e.g. anti-discrimination, maternity pay, air quality AND to be in EU you have to comply with the standards, no ifs or buts
Our MOOC - Modern Monetary Theory: Economics for the 21st Century - is off and running. You can still enrol. It is free.
Here is a map of the current participants so far.
Come along and join the crowd.
The Australian government should immediately announce a Job Guarantee and expand the fiscal stimulus by at least $150 billion.
What a day in our history! End.
You owe it to your readership to, at least, get beyond these crude misrepresentations of our work. The goal posts, summarised for a lay audience in this blog post, are not what I would call shifting -
Prediction: MMTers will say that this doesn't fairly represent their views. Why? Because they say that about *any* attempt to represent their views clearly. MMT is an attitude, not a model; try to pin it down and they move the goalposts.
Some lying creeps have said that MMT events I have spoken at recently were funded by Warren Mosler. As I said in London, I received no $s for giving my time to GIMMS or for travel from Australia. I did hitch a free ride from Birmingham to London (thanks Claire 💋). Stop lying!
@wbmosler
@underground_net
@meadwaj
@JoMicheII
Warren’s support for our efforts to push
#MMT
informed macroeconomics is most definitely not financial. We greatly appreciated him speaking at our recent event in Birmingham and for his generous encouragement to us and the activism community around the world.
Except they keep revising estimated NAIRU up & down, when inflation dynamics refute the ‘theory’. No sound (structural) reason is ever present to justify the revisions. A moving feast of meaningless. With a Job Guarantee the last person through the door defines full employment.
When neoliberals talk about “full employment” they don’t mean “full employment, they mean the ‘Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment’ which they usually estimate as 5% involuntary unemployment
I.e. to a neoliberal full employment still has an awful lot of unemployment
New RBA governor appointment extends the Groupthink that has undermined prosperity in this nation. The belief that unemployment must rise and that the most disadvantaged workers should be fodder to fight inflation while profit-gouging corporations get off free will thus continue.
The modern in MMT refers to the period since the Jamaica Accords 1976 which marked the beginning of the fiat currency era and end of the the vestiges for fiscal policy that arose under the Bretton Woods system. The term Modern differentiated the two systems. It was not a joke!
Thanks David. Sad times for progressives as all those faux progressives who love the E.U. (neoliberal central) look the other way and refuse to take responsibility.
The unhappy results of last night were a vindication of
@billy_blog
and
@battleforeurope
's 'Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post- Neoliberal World'. Here is both analysis of what is going wrong plus left economic policy for Brexit Britain.
What would one expect to happen if a party guarantees they will respect the result of the 2016 referendum and the majority of its MPs are from leave voting areas and then it turns its back on them and takes advice from middle class urban remainers?
@DeborahMeaden
@jeremycorbyn
No, it’s
@johnmcdonnellMP
and his hopeless team of dinosaur economics advisers. Corbyn should have stood his ground and stuck with the Brexit result, got in some economists that know what they’re doing and kept it simple. Let them walk the plank, not Corbyn.
@billy_blog
An enemy of Australian workers (Peter Reith) who as Federal Minister of Industrial Relations in 1988 oversaw the waterfront dispute and allowed a rogue employer to hire blacklegs and turn vicious guard dogs on striking workers died today. His legacy has been disastrous. No loss.
The Australian government admitted today it had made an error in their wage subsidy program estimate of $A60 billion out of a program of $A130 billion. That the biggest estimates error in our history. It is akin to the terrible IMF errors during the Greek bailout. 1/n
Wednesday's blog post (17/01) is now posted (16:54 EAST) - Japan inflation now falling fast - monetary and fiscal policy settings have been vindicated -
Serious help = education. I am an educator. People who make ridiculous statements about things they haven’t read need education. No mention of mental illness. That is your paranoia. But, at least you are reading my work - it will sink in eventually.
@Billy_blog
saying someone "needs serious help" because they say something you don't like is disgraceful. By all means correct them if they are wrong, but It is absolutely NOT ok to imply that they have mental health problems.
2/2 So after all the British Labour lackies have abused me for years, accusing me of not understanding their ridiculous rule and being wrong about it, they have finally conceded (without humility) that the original rule was unworkable and had to be changed. I said that all along.
Merkel sides with German BVerfG over ECB. That’s the cat among the pigeons. Southern states should leave Euro immediately they can only deteriorate further by staying.
Thursday's blog post (07/09) is now posted (13:25 EAT) - The tax extreme wealth to increase funds for government spending narrative just reinforces neoliberal framing -
Thanks very much for the words. It is amazing though that everyone went along with the ridiculous numbers. And - the Treasury nor Treasurer’s office never responded to my request at the end of April for their analysis and estimates. Groupthink always suppresses the uncomfortable.
The rise in government bond yields is a big issue.
With the budget a couple of weeks away, some fiscal repair is needed.
That or the govt will be spending more & yet more on interest payments which means less for roads, health, age care, education...
My Two Minute Take