"Modern Money Basics" in Modern Money Theory (M.M.T.)x
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"Modern Money Basics" in Modern Money Theory (M.M.T.)x
1. "governments that issue their own sovereign currencies — like Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. — do not face the same constraints as state or city governments that use the national currency. This has profound implications."
Agreed on not the same constraints and implications. Nevertheless, they are under constraints.
2. They have the power — and indeed, the responsibility — to use their sovereign currency to help develop the nation and improve the living standards of their citizens with the resources made available to them.
Agreed. That is what they are elected for and entrusted to govern. This is how they earn their keep.
3. The sovereign issuer of a nation’s currency can and should behave very differently from users of its currency, like households, businesses, or state and local governments.
Of course. Issuing money is a bid deal, not meant for kids or me.
4. budget rules that apply to a household or business probably shouldn’t be imposed in the same way on the government that creates your nation’s money?
Some rules do; some don't. Overspend, and trouble follows for both, though not in the short run.
5. Sovereign governments can never run out of the currency they issue.
Keep printing until paper and ink run out? The more you print, the more money devalues, until what you print is not worth what pay for ink and paper.
6. Money is created effortlessly every day on computers in large numbers.
Printing machine or computer, it makes no difference. Going paperless may makes you wealthier, but only marginally.
7. Governments spend by crediting bank accounts, creating currency in the process. Governments tax by debiting bank accounts.
Not understood. Government spends on education, social welfare, infrastructure, and so on. Government taxes directly and indirectly. Tax free days begin in June/July. Government must be more than a humble bank clerk.
8. Taxes remove or delete some of the currency they previously created. So taxes cannot “give” the government “money” to spend; rather government spending actually gives us its currency so we can later pay our taxes. We have it backward!
You must be the one to have it backward. Every transaction is taxed (nothing wrong with that) until 100% (not 95%) would be returned to government
who in turn would spend it on you (and give you its currency). You giving government money is what enables it to spend.
9. How are you able to pay your federal taxes with the government’s currency if the government hadn’t first spent its currency into the economy?
Good point. How is government able to spend if not for you?
10. Currency-issuing countries cannot go bankrupt.
It can. if a country owes US$ 1m. but cannot pay back US 1m, because it has not US$ 1m in the pocket, and it cannot buy US$ 1m in the market with whatever amount it prints.
11. The U.S. doesn’t actually “borrow” dollars from China (or anyone else).
China saves dollars because it sells more to the U.S. than the U.S. sells to China. Countries save the currencies of nations that buy their goods.
"Borrow from" is just another word for 'owed'. I have a deposit account with my banker. He does not borrow from me, but he owes me the money (if he does not mind me saying so), and he has an obligation to pay me back on demand, in the currency agreed upon. "I'll be back. It is pay-back time."
Finally, HSBC has the authority to issue HKD. Would HSBC never go bankrupt? Such public fear has happened once upon a time.
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Re: "Modern Money Basics" in Modern Money Theory (M.M.T.)x
1. The difference is the ability to "print" money.
5. Incidental point: Obviously when people talk about "printing" money that doesn't necessarily mean firing up printing presses and creating bank notes. Bank notes are not money. They are simply one possible way of representing the abstract concept of money.
7. If we say that government spending creates money in the economy and taxation deletes money from the economy, this doesn't alter the fact that taxation pays for public services. If I have a quantity of something and I notice that it has vanished (been deleted) from one place and if I notice that the same quantity has appeared somewhere else, then I can reasonably take the position that this quantity has moved from the former place to the latter. Obviously, in the case of money, this is not the same as saying that a physical object has moved, because money is not a physical object. And there is no "law of conservation of money" as there is with matter, unless the government wishes to impose one on itself.
Therefore, in the absence of the creation of new money which is more than the amount which was "deleted", we can say that the government "moves" money from one section of the economy to another, via the mechanism of taxing and spending; cutting and pasting. The notion that this money is deleted in one place and an equal quantity of money is created somewhere else doesn't change this.
If a government wishes to keep the same quantity of money in the economy from an earlier time period to a later one - i.e. it wishes to enforce a conservation principle on the total amount of money in the economy, then it does this thing that we can call moving money. So, in that sense, money collected via taxation is spent on public services. Whether we refer to that process as deleting money from one place and creating money in a different place doesn't alter that.
Obviously government can also choose to delete more money than they create or vice versa.
8. See 7.
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Re: "Modern Money Basics" in Modern Money Theory (M.M.T.)x
All this one says is that the money you pay in taxes to the government is money that was originally created by the government. Since the goverment created all the money, that shouldn't really be a surprise.9. How are you able to pay your federal taxes with the government’s currency if the government hadn’t first spent its currency into the economy?
Good point. How is government able to spend if not for you?
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Re: "Modern Money Basics" in Modern Money Theory (M.M.T.)x
My two penn'orth:
1. Agreed.
2. Agreed
3. Agreed
4. Agreed
5. Money is devalued by inflation. This can occur if more money is chasing a fixed supply of goods. If spending increases the supply of goods it need not be inflationary. Grow a healthy economy and money should not devalue.
6. Agreed
7. There is more to government than running fiscal policy. But broadly that is how it works. It’s credits and debits.
8. We can’t give the government money in tax unless it has given us the money first. We can’t make money. It is spend and tax not tax and spend. And in practice most but not all the money is returned. What is not is the deficit. No deficit then no-one has any money (we can’t make it).
9. See 8
10. They cannot be insolvent if their debts are in their own currency (and this currency is not pegged to another currency). Only the US can issue US$ and it can always pay debts denominated in US$.
11. China may have bought US goods. This is not the same as lending the US money, and the US doesn’t need it to. The US can create all the US$ it likes. China can’t make any.
Don’t really know about if there are any particular rules concerning HSBC but all commercial banks create money when making loans. Make lots of bad loans and you can go bust. They can create money for commercial purposes, but not just to enrich themselves. Well that’s the theory. In practice the government is lender of last resort to its banking system and doesn’t like to see its licenced banks go bust. So they have been getting away with some very dubious practices to say the least.
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Re: "Modern Money Basics" in Modern Money Theory (M.M.T.)x
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Re: "Modern Money Basics" in Modern Money Theory (M.M.T.)x
There seems to be a strange misconception that the above implies that taxation doesn't pay for public services. Obviously taxation does pay for public services. Clearly governments can also create new money (just as they created all the existing money) but that doesn't alter the fact that taxation pays for public services. i.e. the government moves money from taxpayers to public sector wages.7. Governments spend by crediting bank accounts, creating currency in the process. Governments tax by debiting bank accounts.
I think the misconception arises because of the mistaken idea that debiting/deleting/cutting X amount from account A and crediting/pasting X amount to account B doesn't constitute moving X amount from account A to account B. Of course it does.
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Re: "Modern Money Basics" in Modern Money Theory (M.M.T.)x
gad-fly wrote: ↑April 27th, 2020, 2:06 pm gad-fly » 11 minutes ago
7. must be the weakest link in M.M.T. argument. Money in circulation is neither created nor deleted. The private and the public sector receive and spend in the circulation process. Only new money can be created. How? When public spending exceeds what is in the coffer, government can either print more, or borrow. In the former case, new money is definitely created. To deal with the latter, government can later print more and hence create more, or it can spend less later to make up.
Money in circulation moves around.
But if the government wants to pay for something (a teacher, a builder, or whatever) the relevant account is credited and new money is created.
There are no coffers of money being used up. Have you seen the size of the US debt?
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Re: "Modern Money Basics" in Modern Money Theory (M.M.T.)x
The misconception is with you.Steve3007 wrote: ↑April 27th, 2020, 2:10 pm On this point again:
There seems to be a strange misconception that the above implies that taxation doesn't pay for public services. Obviously taxation does pay for public services. Clearly governments can also create new money (just as they created all the existing money) but that doesn't alter the fact that taxation pays for public services. i.e. the government moves money from taxpayers to public sector wages.7. Governments spend by crediting bank accounts, creating currency in the process. Governments tax by debiting bank accounts.
I think the misconception arises because of the mistaken idea that debiting/deleting/cutting X amount from account A and crediting/pasting X amount to account B doesn't constitute moving X amount from account A to account B. Of course it does.
You can tax and not spend; you can spend and not tax.
The only stipulation is that no taxation is EVER possible unless the government has created the money in the first place.
You've only to reflect what is happening all over the world right now. Governments are paying wages for people to stay at home and do nothing; exactly at the same time tax receipts are falling off the cliff.
The government has a choice - they can either QE, or borrow to spend. This is always their choice since money is fiat and the government is sovereign.
More tax can be used as a rule of thumb to accept less debt but there is no necesssary or dirfect relationship between tax and spend.
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Re: "Modern Money Basics" in Modern Money Theory (M.M.T.)x
Let us agree. Only the NEW can be created. Government paying a teacher is no different from me paying a housemaid. Government's check is as good as mine. It is money in circulation, not new, and not destroyed before reinvention.Wossname wrote: ↑April 27th, 2020, 2:19 pmMoney in circulation moves around.gad-fly wrote: ↑April 27th, 2020, 2:06 pm gad-fly » 11 minutes ago
7. must be the weakest link in M.M.T. argument. Money in circulation is neither created nor deleted. The private and the public sector receive and spend in the circulation process. Only new money can be created. How? When public spending exceeds what is in the coffer, government can either print more, or borrow. In the former case, new money is definitely created. To deal with the latter, government can later print more and hence create more, or it can spend less later to make up.
But if the government wants to pay for something (a teacher, a builder, or whatever) the relevant account is credited and new money is created.
There are no coffers of money being used up. Have you seen the size of the US debt?
Money denotes value. IOU is crypto-money, because it defines whatever value I owe you. Play money is not money because it has no intrinsic value.
New Money is created following the creation of New Value. When government builds a new bridge, new value is created, calling for the creation of new money.
It is known in undergraduate economic textbook that if government prints too much money than is necessary for circulation, that redundant money will do no more than gather dust.
The size of the US debt is colossal, but that is another story, or another thread. The trouble of mounting debt is the same as with credit card overdrawn.
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Re: "Modern Money Basics" in Modern Money Theory (M.M.T.)x
gad-fly wrote: ↑April 27th, 2020, 6:33 pm by gad-fly » 58 minutes ago
Wossname wrote: ↑Yesterday, 7:19 pm
gad-fly wrote: ↑Yesterday, 7:06 pm
gad-fly » 11 minutes ago
7. must be the weakest link in M.M.T. argument. Money in circulation is neither created nor deleted. The private and the public sector receive and spend in the circulation process. Only new money can be created. How? When public spending exceeds what is in the coffer, government can either print more, or borrow. In the former case, new money is definitely created. To deal with the latter, government can later print more and hence create more, or it can spend less later to make up.
Money in circulation moves around.
But if the government wants to pay for something (a teacher, a builder, or whatever) the relevant account is credited and new money is created.
There are no coffers of money being used up. Have you seen the size of the US debt?
Let us agree. Only the NEW can be created. Government paying a teacher is no different from me paying a housemaid. Government's check is as good as mine. It is money in circulation, not new, and not destroyed before reinvention.
Money denotes value. IOU is crypto-money, because it defines whatever value I owe you. Play money is not money because it has no intrinsic value.
New Money is created following the creation of New Value. When government builds a new bridge, new value is created, calling for the creation of new money.
It is known in undergraduate economic textbook that if government prints too much money than is necessary for circulation, that redundant money will do no more than gather dust.
The size of the US debt is colossal, but that is another story, or another thread. The trouble of mounting debt is the same as with credit card overdrawn.
Sorry - don't agree.
This is all wrong.
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Re: "Modern Money Basics" in Modern Money Theory (M.M.T.)x
Once created, Money circulates continually between the public sector and members of the private sector. Each sector may exercise discretion to keep some portion from circulation. If the private sector wants to save 5%, or if government budget has 5% surplus, then circulation amount will be reduced by 5%.Steve3007 wrote: ↑April 27th, 2020, 2:10 pm On this point again:
There seems to be a strange misconception that the above implies that taxation doesn't pay for public services. Obviously taxation does pay for public services. Clearly governments can also create new money (just as they created all the existing money) but that doesn't alter the fact that taxation pays for public services. i.e. the government moves money from taxpayers to public sector wages.7. Governments spend by crediting bank accounts, creating currency in the process. Governments tax by debiting bank accounts.
I think the misconception arises because of the mistaken idea that debiting/deleting/cutting X amount from account A and crediting/pasting X amount to account B doesn't constitute moving X amount from account A to account B. Of course it does.
How did money emerge? Imagine a barter market. One trader wants to trade his pig for chicken, another his two chicken for pig. They agree one pig is worth three chickens. So the second trader writes an IOU to the first before returning home with the pig. This IOU is private crypto-money.
How did public money emerge? Imagine public interest demands a road in the village. Some villagers will stop farming and hunting to build it, but others won't. To compensate the first, some certificates or notes will be issued by the village council, such that these certificates or notes will be public legal tender to buy bread and whatever. Money is born.
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Re: "Modern Money Basics" in Modern Money Theory (M.M.T.)x
The main difference is that, legally, the government can create new money and you can't (and the government can also legally take money from other people). So the government can either pay your housemaid by creating new money or by taking money (that it created earlier) from someone else (or a combination of the two). The latter case is called taxation. In that case, the mechanism by which they do this is to "delete" money paid as taxes and create an equal amount of new money for the housemaid. i.e. (in computer terms) cut-and-paste. As with cut-and-paste, this process of deleting money in one place and creating it somewhere else is the same as moving that money from one place to another.gad-fly wrote:Government paying a teacher is no different from me paying a housemaid.
As I said earlier, it seems to me that one cause of misunderstanding in all this is thinking that this "cut-and-paste" operation is not functionally identical to moving money from one place to another. That leads to the peculiar misconception that governments just delete the money taken as taxes and don't raise taxes to pay for public services, when we all know that they do that.
Think of cutting and pasting a file on your computer from one folder on your hard drive to another. The file is deleted in one place and re-created in another. Do you think of that process as moving the file from one place to another? Has some physical object actually been moved? My answers to those questions are yes and no respectively.
I guess part of the cause of misunderstandings is also the difficulty in conceptualizing the notion of moving an abstract concept like money from one place to another, as if it were a physical object, which, of course, it isn't.
People are often wedded to the idea that money is a physical object, perhaps made of paper rectangles or circular pieces of metal. The fact that this isn't true means that one unit of money is literally identical to another of the same size. This is why deleting that unit of money in one place and creating an equal unit somewhere else is identical to moving that unit of money between those two places.
After being created by the government and before being destroyed, yes, it circulates throughout the economy. This consists of numerous acts of cut-and-paste; delete-and-create. For example, when you pay for groceries at the supermarket, when you swipe your card, a database representing your bank account and a database representing the shop's bank account is edited. This process you (quite rightly) think of as "payment" - i.e. the movement of money. In what sense has something moved?Once created, Money circulates continually between the public sector and members of the private sector.
The private sector (as opposed to the government) can't legally remove money from circulation. It can of course refrain from carrying out any transactions with that money. Is that what you mean? If so, how would you say that they might do that? If they do it by leaving that money in a bank account, what happens?Each sector may exercise discretion to keep some portion from circulation. If the private sector wants to save 5%, or if government budget has 5% surplus, then circulation amount will be reduced by 5%.
Yes, money is an abstraction of that process. Its advantage is that it is more flexible and efficient than a barter system. The fact that it's an IOU is made explicit if you consider its cash representation. Where I live, at least, that cash representation explicitly says on it "I promise to pay the bearer the sum of...". In other words "I owe you...".How did money emerge? Imagine a barter market. One trader wants to trade his pig for chicken, another his two chicken for pig. They agree one pig is worth three chickens. So the second trader writes an IOU to the first before returning home with the pig. This IOU is private crypto-money.
For the purposes of a philosophical discussion, I guess the technical details are less important than the broad principles that they embody. But my understanding is that the first money was in the form of coins. Until relatively recently, there was a sense that the value of the coins was directly represented by the intrinsic value of the metal from which the coin was made. Hence the use of rare metals like gold. Hence the concept of a gold standard. When this is not true, and the value comes only from the contractual agreement represented by the metal or paper (IOU), this is called fiat money.How did public money emerge? Imagine public interest demands a road in the village. Some villagers will stop farming and hunting to build it, but others won't. To compensate the first, some certificates or notes will be issued by the village council, such that these certificates or notes will be public legal tender to buy bread and whatever. Money is born.
Although, another question to consider is this: If we decide that gold has "intrinsic value", in a sense that fiat money doesn't, what exactly do we mean by that? This relates in an interesting way to the relatively modern phenomenon of crypto-currencies which algorithmically model the concept of a scarce, expensive to extract, physical resource, like gold.
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Re: "Modern Money Basics" in Modern Money Theory (M.M.T.)x
gad-fly wrote: ↑April 27th, 2020, 11:15 pm y gad-fly » Today, 4:15 am
How did money emerge? Imagine a barter market. One trader wants to trade his pig for chicken, another his two chicken for pig. They agree one pig is worth three chickens. So the second trader writes an IOU to the first before returning home with the pig. This IOU is private crypto-money.
How did public money emerge? Imagine public interest demands a road in the village. Some villagers will stop farming and hunting to build it, but others won't. To compensate the first, some certificates or notes will be issued by the village council, such that these certificates or notes will be public legal tender to buy bread and whatever. Money is born.
If you are interested to learn about the origins of money then the following is informative:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5JTn7GS4oA
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Re: "Modern Money Basics" in Modern Money Theory (M.M.T.)x
Steve3007 wrote: ↑April 27th, 2020, 1:13 pm y Steve3007 » Yesterday, 6:13 pm
9. How are you able to pay your federal taxes with the government’s currency if the government hadn’t first spent its currency into the economy?
Good point. How is government able to spend if not for you?
All this one says is that the money you pay in taxes to the government is money that was originally created by the government. Since the goverment created all the money, that shouldn't really be a surprise.
I think it will be a surprise to many.
Maybe we can agree this far? Whether the eminent professors who argue for MMT are right, and taxes destroy money simply by virtue of what money is, or you are right, either way taxes do not have to rise to pay for anything. We agree the government can create all the money it needs to fund its spending by keystrokes?
You see, the MSM continually ask what taxes will be put up or what programmes will be cut to pay for things. They say it so often that it is frequently echoed by the man or woman in the street. The notion that all money is made by the government is a surprise to the many who argue that we make money (somehow, by working) and the government takes some of it from us to fund social services. But the choices presented in the MSM are false choices. No taxes need rise and no programmes need be cut. There is not a limited supply of money. And the term government “spending” could more usefully be government “investment”. Whether investment is inflationary is a quite separate issue from whether it can be funded.
We could and should (IMHO) invest in our health service, and all public services and the funding of them is not, should not, be an issue. However you look at it, the swingeing austerity that has been imposed over the past 10 or more years has been deeply damaging and entirely unnecessary. It amounts to an abandonment of government responsibility for fiscal policy. And the mantra that we must “balance the budget” or “eliminate the deficit” is sheer lunacy. Since (you agree), all the money in circulation (bank loans aside) is money the government has created and not had returned in tax, then if you balance the budget we have no money to spend (since we can’t make any).
On the matter of taxes destroying or moving money I am with MMT, you are not and that is, of course, your prerogative. I respectfully disagree with you.
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Re: "Modern Money Basics" in Modern Money Theory (M.M.T.)x
Yes, to somebody who doesn't know that the government creates the money they use, I guess it could be a surprise. But then I'd ask them "so who do you think does make it?". I guess maybe some people have just never considered the question. If they do realize that the government creates the money they use then I honestly don't think it takes much reasoning to realize the truth of number 9, as I said.Wossname wrote:I think it will be a surprise to many.
I'm not setting myself up in opposition to those eminent professors. I'm simply giving my interpretation of things, taking into account what they say, what other people say, and what can be worked out from simple reasoning. If you think there's a fault in that reasoning, by all means point out the fault with reference to specific things that I've actually said, as opposed to just block-quoting large posts in their entirety that make several different points and then tacking a more-or-less irrelevant comment underneath. That's a thing that many posters do and I have to say it annoys me. If you want to see an example of someone who does it a lot, I can recommend the poster called h_k_s.Maybe we can agree this far? Whether the eminent professors who argue for MMT are right, and taxes destroy money simply by virtue of what money is, or you are right, either way taxes do not have to rise to pay for anything. We agree the government can create all the money it needs to fund its spending by keystrokes?
Sorry if this sounds argumentative, but I think a large part of the problem (as I've said before) is writing a post that is ostensibly a reply to my post (because it quotes it) but which doesn't actually reference anything in it. And then making general comments speculating that "people" have a "worldview" that is influenced by something like the "MSM", or that they "cling to myths" (although that one was Sculptor1 and you're not responsible for him) or that they have some particular political view. Those are speculations about others posters' motives, character, beliefs and thoughts that have no basis in what they have actually said. I advise you not to speculate as to what people are thinking but to remember that your only access to what they are thinking is their words.
If you want to critique a particular point I have made, then quote that point and critique that point. Then, if you're interested, read the reply.
I have read the rest of your post but I'll get to it later. One thing at a time.
2023/2024 Philosophy Books of the Month
Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul
by Mitzi Perdue
February 2023
Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness
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