Category Archives: Modern Monetary Theory

Facing Facts: The Ideal Of Constant Value Of The Currency vs. The Fact Of Inflation

    • Ideally, (dummy) money would be constant in exchange value.
    • Scarcity is the normal cause of inflation
    • The maladaptive cause of inflation is maladjustment of incomes as required by the current phase of the pure cycle of expansion
    • The quantity of money infused by the Central Bank must be properly calibrated to serve the normative requirements of the actual magnitudes and frequencies of turnovers in the productive process
      • Economists must carefully consider tiers of basic incomes and propensities to consume:

      I’ = Σwiniyi   (35) [CWL 15, 134]  and

      dI’ = Σ(widni + nidwi)yi (36) [CWL 15, 134]

      • Also, Economists must carefully consider expansion in phases and the interpretation of its effect on the Basic Price-Spread Ratio. (CWL 15, 156-62):

    • P/p = a’ + a”p”Q”/p’Q’   (CWL 15, 156-62) (45)

      i.e.,   J = a’ + a”R   (CWL 15, 156-62) (45)

      so,  dJ = da + a”dR + Rda”   (CWL 15, 156-62) (47)

Note: The treatments of price changes in CWL 15 are mainly in 1) pp.75-80, 2) 128-44, and 3) 156-62.

Sequence of Contents

  • Ideal and practical aspects of the economic process 
  • Ideally, money would be constant in exchange value 
  • The condition of constancy in exchange value 
  • Characteristics of dummy money in an exchange economy 
  • Promise and trust between two parties
  • The dynamic structure of the productive process and classes of monetary flows 
  • But prices do change.  The changes have causes and intelligibilities and the changes must be interpreted.
  • Concomitance and intensity among flows
  • Real analysis and the everyday use of money 
  • Price tendencies (prescinding from excess or deficient money supply) 
    • The first kind of cause of inflation – ordinary scarcity
    • The second kind of cause of inflation – disproportion between monetary and real consumer income
  • Misconceptions of professional economists as to interest rates and responsibilities
  • Adjusting the rate of saving to the phase of the expansion
  • Further re interpretation of price changes 
  • The basic price-spread ratio

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John H. Cochrane’s “The Federal Reserve Deserves a Pat on the Back”

The Wall Street Journal of 12/26/2023 featured an article by John H. Cochrane (Hoover Institution) titled “The Federal Reserve Deserves a Pat on the Back.”   Continue reading

A Greg Mankiw Blog

Introductory

Our concern, as always, is to understand and verify how money should circulate to meet the rectilinear primary process of production and sale.  We seek a normative theory which scientifically explains, rather than merely describes, the current, purely dynamic economic process.  The scientific explanation will be in the form of the objective relations of explanatory velocities and accelerations to one another.  These explanatory conjugates will be abstract correlations defined by their functional relations among themselves – rather than descriptions – no matter how literary and vivid –  of conditions, states, and events as they are related to us and affect us for better or worse.  Our goal is to achieve a scientific explanation yielding norms to which we must adapt. (Continue reading)

Recommended WSJ Interview of Paul Singer

The Saturday-Sunday Wall Street Journal of 4/8-9/ 2023 featured an Interview by James Freeman of Paul Singer, founder of Elliott Management.  P. Singer’s past predictions are notably congruent with the consequences systematically necessitated by the deviations in policy of the executive and legislative branches from the norms of Lonergan’s Scientific Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics.

First, we quote some sections of Freeman’s interview of Singer; then we’ll quote brief sections to preview the treatment to follow.  From the Interview: (Continue reading)

Pointers to the Philosophic, Mathematical, and Scientific Bases of Lonergan’s Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics

Being is the objective of the unrestricted desire to know.  Being is intrinsically intelligible and one. Apart from being there is nothing.

Intelligibility is the very essence of unity.  Intelligibility is intrinsic to being and, at the same time, it is the essence of unity.  Formal intelligibility is form; it is the unity of unification or of correlation.  Correlation is abstract; it constitutes the implicit definition of explanatory terms by their functional relations among themselves.

“Functional” is for Lonergan a technical term pertaining to the realm of explanation, analysis, theory;  … Lonergan (identified) the contemporary notion of a “function” as one of the most basic kinds of explanatory, implicit definition – one that specifies “things in their relations to one another” … [CWL 15, 26-27  ftnt 27]

The economic process is an aspect of being.  The immanent intelligibility of the dynamic economic process is the essence of the process’s unity.  (Continue reading)

Elizabeth Warren’s Advice to Jerome Powell; Sentiment Without Intelligence

The Wall Street Journal of 7/25/2022 featured an article by Senator Elizabeth Warren:  “Jerome Powell’s Fed Pursues a Painful and Ineffective Inflation Cure.” Because she lacks an objectivenormative, abstract, explanatory theory and, thus, fails to understand the functional interdependencies constituting the organic economic process, particular arguments in her article are a) sometimes contaminated by psychopolitical wishful opinions, b) often ignorantly one-sided because she is unaware that some policies have double edges, c) sometimes contradictory of her other arguments, and d) in at least one case, supercilious.

E. Warren suffers from the same plight as Thomas Piketty. To satisfy her responsibility to the public, she needs to achieve a scientific understanding of the organic economic process; she needs to get a “grip.”

We are at the heart of Piketty’s plight: he has no clue of the needed grip on the grounds of the inequality in history.  So, what else can he offer but a centralist solution, taxation, to history’s drunken careening. (McShane, Philip, Picketty’s Plight, 53)

In equity (the basic expansion following the surplus expansion) should be directed to raising the standard of living of the whole society.  It does not.  And the reason why it does not is not the reason on which simple-minded moralists insist.  They blame greed.  But the prime cause is ignorance.  The dynamics of surplus and basic expansion, surplus and basic incomes are not understood, not formulated, not taught….. [CWL 15, 82]

(Continue reading)

Modern Monetary Theory Is Backward; It Creates “Illegal” Superposed Circuits

Preliminary note: In this section we are addressing the proper understanding and management of the economic process in normal, non-pandemic times.  We affirm that the recent pandemic called for extraordinary measures.

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Unwittingly, first out of ignorance, more recently as necessitated by a pandemic, and most recently out of continuing ignorance, some nations, including the U.S., have wandered into the ultimate menace to the financial system, the spending without constraint blessed and recommended by unscientific. so-called Modern Monetary Theory. (Click here and here) The systematic result of MMT’s unconstrained printing of money, unjustified by corresponding, concomitant production of goods and services, is rampant inflation in prices for a) goods and services and/or b) financial assets.  (Continue reading)

Economics Is Economics, Sociology Is Sociology, Politics Is Politics; A Is a Distinct Science; It Is neither B nor C

On Friday, October 8, N. Gregory Mankiw’s Blog featured Nick Romeo’s interesting article entitled “Is It Time For a New Economics Curriculum?”  Greg provided a quote from Romeo’s paragraph re  Jonathan Gruber’s take on CORE.

Jonathan Gruber, who teaches introductory economics at M.I.T., felt that CORE might introduce too much complexity for a foundational course. He worried that so much emphasis on the ethical and political dimensions of economics might make the subject feel like a different discipline altogether. “The question is, do you want the students to feel like they’re coming out of, you know, to be blunt, a sociology class or an economics class?” Gruber said.

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Bootcamp To Educate the House, Senate, Federal Reserve, and Bureau of Economic Analysis, Especially Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell

One Week Bootcamp

Restricted to persons with solid backgrounds in mathematics and the natural sciences

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