'MMT and Mainstream Macro'

Simon Wren-Lewis:

MMT and mainstream macro: There were a lot of interesting and useful comments on my last post on MMT, plus helpful (for me) follow-up conversations. Many thanks to everyone concerned for taking the time. Before I say anything more let me make it clear where I am coming from. I’m on the same page as far as policy’s current obsession with debt is concerned. Where I seem to differ from some who comment on my blog, people who say they are following MMT, is whether you need to be concerned about debt when monetary policy is not constrained by the Zero Lower Bound. I say yes, they say no, but for reasons I could not easily understand.

This was the point of the ‘nothing new’ comment. It was not meant to be a put down. It was meant to suggest that a mainstream economist like myself could come to some of the same conclusions as MMT writers, and more to the point, just because I was a mainstream economist does not mean I misunderstood how government financing works. It was because I was getting comments from MMT followers that seemed nonsensical to me, but which should not have been nonsensical because the basics of MMT are understandable using mainstream theory. ...

What mainstream theory says is that some combination of monetary and fiscal policy can always end a recession caused by demand deficiency. Full stop: no ifs or buts. That is why we had fiscal expansion in 2009 in the US, UK, Germany, China and elsewhere. The contribution of some influential mainstream economists to this switch from fiscal stimulus to austerity in 2010 was minor at most, and to imagine otherwise does nobody any favours. The fact that policymakers went against basic macro theory tells us important things about the transmission mechanism of economic knowledge, which all economists have to address.

Brad DeLong:

Yes, Expansionary Fiscal Policy in the North Atlantic Would Solve Many of Our Problems. Why Do You Ask?: ... In my view, the economics of Abba Lerner—what is now called MMT—is not always right: It is not always possible for the government to spend freely to attain full employment, use monetary policy to keep the debt under control, and rely on rising inflation as the only signal needed of whether and when policy needs to be tightened. Why not? Because it is possible that the bond market can get itself into an unsustainable position, in which underlying inflationary pressures are masked until it is too late to rebalance government finances without a financial crisis.

But, in my view, right now the economics of Abba Lerner is 100% correct. The U.S. (and Europe!) should use expansionary fiscal policy to rebalance the economy at full employment and potential output. And interest rates are so low that doing so does not require any additional monetary policy steps to keep the debt under control.

Japan, alas, confronts us with a difficult and much more devilish program of economic policy. Partial and nearly painless debt repudiation via inflation and financial repression seems to me to be the best way forward—if that can be attained. But more on that anon.