kelton and Varoufakis 2020

 

文字起こし another now the song that you just heard was my introduction to recalcitrant toxic barbaric neoliberalism of course is by alan price who is a wonderful man but this is the soundtrack he wrote for um oh lucky man which was a kind of um you know depiction of in back in 1976 if i remember correctly of the near liberalism that maggie thatcher would bring a few years later to britain followed up by ronald reagan in 1980 in the united states so welcome to another now the program that owes its existence to a mindless virus that place that manages to do something that not even the second world war managed to do that is to place capitalism in suspended animation there's no doubt that most people are longing for a return to normality however another now is a program which is asking all of us you know to desist from longing for normality because there was no such thing as normality i shall quote from the wonderful indian writer aranduta roy who was actually writing in of all places the financial times the following words i feel like sharing with those with you before i introduce you to our special guest tonight so roy was writing a few days ago or maybe a week ago in the financial times okay here it is our minds are still racing back and forth longing for a return to normality trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rapture but the rapture exists and in the midst of this terrible despair it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves nothing could be worse than a return to normality historically pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine the world anew this one is no different it is a portal a gateway between one world and the next we can choose to walk through it dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred our avarice our data banks and dead ideas our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us or we can walk through lightly with light luggage ready to imagine another world and ready to fight for it well tonight to help us imagine another world another now and to be ready to fight for it i have a remarkable guest i want to thank her in advance for agreeing to interrupt a very busy zooming schedule to be with us tonight her name is stephanie kelton stephanie is a friend a comrade a fellow economist who also made the rather rash choice that i made a few years ago to enter into the political sphere to join bernie sanders campaign as her economic advisor to continue to write and to fight as we all should do stephanie kelton it is my great honor and joy to have you here tonight welcome to another now .

kelton:

thank you so much it's super fun to have an hour to spend with you giannis 

V :

so stephanie look um we've already received an avalanche of questions for you but i'm not going to start that way because i think it's very important to humanize things this is what we really miss in this world so why don't you begin by you know what were your early influences in life i mean you you you read economics at some point uh in california i believe then you moved to cambridge and when you went uh back to the united states you became a professor a political an economic advisor but you know how did that start i mean what were what was it in your childhood and in your teenage years that created the impetus for all this.

kelton:

honestly it's almost like a series of accidents um you know but for one chance encounter in the right economics class while studying something else i wouldn't have met professor john henry who became so influential in my economic training and the kinds of things that i uh the questions that i asked the things that i read the people that i went on to study with where i went on to study i mean it was um you know i i grew up a military brat my father was in the air force we moved around constantly i had three first grades three eighth grades three high schools we lived all over the place never had time to really form attachments in a lot of ways and college was something that i didn't really give a lot of thought to in advance not in terms of the things that i wanted to study the questions i was interested in everything happened by sort of accident so i think i changed my major seven or eight times and at one point i was studying finance and accounting and you had to take some economics as part of that degree program and that's where i met john henry who is a very serious thinker and he had me begin a reading program outside of the regular classroom lectures having me read things like lewis henry morgan robert burfo i mean i was babbling uh the war essays i mean he was giving me all this kind of heavy stuff and it was really through the history of economic thought that my juices got turned on uh and that's when economics became something that i i had to do and i did it alongside a finance degree but that's sort of the the rough background.

V:

yeah well you were lucky weren't you because most students of economics have to suffer the dry textbook that um you know condenses 5000 years of knowledge into one aphorism you know to be rationalized to maximize utility subject constraints and

kelton:

i i was there yeah i'm sorry i was very lucky even you know ending up at uh cal state sacramento which was itself an accident uh i was going to attend the university of north carolina we had been stationed in north carolina my senior year of high school and then my father decided kind of suddenly that he was done that he was going to retire and the family would be moving back to california for you know to to live and i had to decide whether to stay in north carolina by myself or you know at the age of barely 17 follow them back to california having missed all the application deadlines and all that kind of stuff so um that's how i ended up going through that program and ultimately ending up at cal state sacramento in an economics department while there were conventional neoclassically trained economists there were also institutionalists a long legacy of institutionalist mark toole was there john henry some marxists and post keynesian types so i i got lucky in in a number of ways um from an early stage in my training.

was your family political were you political?

no.

how did that happen?

kelton:8:20

then uh the history of economic thought i mean honestly i think that one of the earliest memories i have that was sort of jarring and just reset my world view in a lot of ways was sitting in that history of economics thought class with john henry and having him ask the simplest question i have ever heard can everyone be a capitalist you're of course that's the american dream right you you work hard and you become your own boss and you and you make your own rules and everybody of course until you realize that capitalists hire workers and so in order for there to be capitalists there also have to be workers and so not everyone can i just remember that having a real impact on the way i thought about outcomes economic outcomes societal outcomes and justice and just a whole variety of things sort of reset in my own mind just by him asking that simple question.

V:

and of course the answer to that question is really that the answer is yes only in the kind of models that economists teach where everybody is a little robinson crusoe um selling something whether it is labor tokens or fish or you know hooks or whatever only in that kind of economic model where there's no capital really and there's no labor can you have a situation where you can pretend that there is a kind of capital terrorism which of course is not capitalism it's just an exchange this is why you know when i did when i tried to uh impress upon students about the um the total unrealism and yet beauty of what they were being taught i would teach them the the 1945 article by radford uh on the prisoners of world camp where you know they're all sitting around they're all prisoners of war somewhere in in germany you know um areas pilots america usa air force pilots and so on and you know they're just they just trade between themselves a little bit of tea and a little bit of chocolate and a few cigarettes that they get from their red cross passes you know that is the kind of economy that students are taught in university right but there's no capitalism there's no production there's no labor oops you muted yourself suddenly you muted yourself ah there you are uh.

kelton:

that's exactly right if everyone is their own petty producer individually uh capable of subsisting on their own output then it's not the kind of capitalism we talk about but it it holds in that stylized framework so yeah it doesn't work.

V：

and the the thing that the the thing about this prisoners of war camp i think it's also important because you have a theory of money in there because cigarettes emerge as money but that money has nothing to do with the money that we are familiar with so this confusion of cigarettes for the money that you know we have in our pockets or on a credit card or debit card that is a confusion that is so easy to fall for and yet so detrimental to our understanding of what the hell is going on around us and you've been exemplary in pointing this out.

kelton:12:00

 yeah i mean so many stories as you well know in economics are taught as if we're teaching fairy tales to young children it's like once upon a time once upon a time man conducted his affairs through barter exchange once upon a time you know this sort of story this stylized abstracting from anything that's historical ignoring the work of anthropologists of sociologists of numismatists the people who really study these questions economists simply wave their hands around say matt you know it's it's the can opener imagine uh two people rob and senator crusoe imagine that they're trying to solve a problem uh through barter now imagine that over a period of time that they can handle these uh problems more efficiently if they invent something to serve as an intermediary in the exchange process so you know shells and beads and feathers and all these things that were supposed to be primitive money things and then over time they get really wise and they discover that precious metals can work because they have these very nice characteristics they're portable they're durable they're divisible so they make a very nice token money item.

but all along ignoring private for the role of private property the role of the state in developing markets the role of the state in making and shaping the monetary system.

and telling students that this all comes about through some spontaneous order as agents look for more efficient ways to carry out exchange so that we get money as an outgrowth of a barter economy through people just seeking greater efficiencies.

V：

yeah one commodity emerging as the unit of account when did you start understanding money because money is is such an a quite quasi um spiritual kind of um commodity or item or entity uh marx referred to it as the alienated capacity of humans i think that's the the the most poetic for me at least depiction of what it is it's power it's a it's a abstracted alienated capacity but it's very difficult especially for a young person to wrap their mind around it you know what is really money i mean not so much the techniques of housing produced by overdraft facilities by the private banks by the fed but how when did you start wrapping your mind around the concept of money feeling that you were getting a you know a handle on its meaning.

Kelton：

well i guess i probably would say i started in 1996 while studying with randy wray at the university of denver just before heading over to cambridge you know randy had written a book called money and credit in capitalist economies so i was introduced to the sort of post keynesian way of thinking about money as credit as a credit instrument and then i got to cambridge and gosh i mean i started reading things like jeff ingham who's a sociology professor at cambridge university and he had a paper that was very influential on me way back in the day called uh money as money is a social relation money is a social relation so a relationship between debtors and creditors uh rather than defining money as a thing or defining money by the way it works or functions treating money as a relationship as a social relationship um.

 and i sort of started thinking about money that way keynes in the treatise on money has some treatment along these lines where he starts to talk about a specific type of money state money and and saying that the state has the power to write and rewrite the dictionary to name the unit in which debts will be denominated prices will be written contracts will be written the state has the power to define the unit and he says to rewrite the dictionary at will over time which of course maybe no one better than you knows about the state's power to rewrite the dictionary because the greek dictionary was rewritten of course from the drachma to the euro that's a perfect example of the authority exercising its power to rewrite the dictionary to change the unit in which payments will be made collected obligations debts contracts and so forth so i guess.

V:16:30

when you mentioned cambridge and having been exposed to the idea of money as a social relation you brought memories of two things that were completely at odds with one another in my own uh experience or history one was i was introduced at a very young age in 1415 to the concept of capital as a social relationship by marx and i remember that that story which is you know it's not a myth it's a true story of an englishman who um had some money he made a mint out of some kind of um stock exchange upheaval and he charted three ships and he filled them with uh proletarians and with equipment and so on took them to australia you know the story and they ended up in western australia and suddenly he realized that his capital was worthless because these workers simply moved on yeah there was so much land and they became farmers of their own so suddenly he had no hold over them he had no power over them there was no social relationship you know his monopoly of tools was not enough uh for a capital labor relationship to exist so suddenly so you know that's the first thing you reminded me of of capital as a social relationship and of course you know if capital is a social relationship is money uh the second thing was when i went to cambridge unfortunately i was stuck with economists unlike you you know i was with economists because i was an economist and i didn't meet a single person that had anything interesting to say about money debt or economics for that matter because i was stuck with economists.

kelton：18:07

so was i i mean my i was there uh in the graduate program in economics um it just so happened that i was stumbling across these papers and that there were conferences organized and people like jeff hodgson uh would come there was tony lawson who was uh in the economics department and still i think is and he's he would hold these uh monday night i think everybody.

V：

 you know tony is only there because he teaches econometrics which he hates so he he he he's you know he he's there teaching something that he doesn't care for in order to do that which he cares for which is really interesting isn't it.

Kelton:

it's funny well i i didn't take the economics uh the econometrics while i was in cambridge but he was not the one teaching it at the time but uh he did hold these monday night um kind of seminars and that was something i always looked forward to it was critical realism is what he he called the right shaping uh philosophy uh but but he was sort of interesting uh that i didn't take a course from him i took a course from michael kaczynski who was very like right he did finance and so i got to think about money and ways that were familiar to me from studying with randy but for the most part it was a very conventional economics department at that time.

V:

so back to the united states after the cambridge cambridge experience uh doing phd at new school i believe which is you know a very unique place of course in the united states um i'm so glad it's still alive and kicking but there aren't that many places like new school where you'd actually where you could actually write a pitch a phd of the sort that you did right.

kelton:

 yeah that's that's definitely true i mean uh i i got to teach there last spring the dean you probably know will millberg uh will reached out to me and said we want you to come teach a phd course on mmt and i thought oh you know i'm a full-time faculty uh member here at stony brook university and i said oh well i have a full load it's just and he just twisted and twisted and i thought it's my alma mater it's an opportunity to teach this you know body of scholarship that i love and help contribute to over the years and so i did it and it was so terrific i mean those students are it's a very special program um it's a special place.

V：20:35

so what was that before you got involved with bernie sanders in the campaign and uh being his economic advisor yeah.

kelton：

this was spring of 2019 so january january of last year i started just one you know i took the train into the city once a week taught my phd class and and came back and taught here but so it was after.

V：

so okay i mentioned bernie sanders that is um an almighty clash for you know minds and souls and hearts and so on and so forth um i'm reading now i'm going to read something from from the financial times that was published a few days ago this is the conclusion of an article written by iran for an financial times reporter or writer and she finishes off her article saying by the way the title i think is going to you know bring shivers down our spines we are entering the new age of american austerity i'll read the concluding paragraph and just ask you to comment on it ultimately debt is a national burden shared by all taxpayers she says policymakers therefore need to think about how to incentivize savings trimming every unproductive debt and leverage loophole from the tax code is a good start a good place to start in time the fed will also have to explain how it would shrink all the debt of its balance sheet and everyone would have to think about thrift enter the new age of american austerity stephanie kelton the floor is yours.

 i mean this one.

yes indeed.

kelton:22:50

i didn't i did not use my my professor red ink but you can tell that it's very marked up i have graded this it is an f um it's obviously you know it's obviously very disappointing from my vantage point i think that it is full of um you know tropes and misunderstandings and that um you know it's leaning very heavily into the austerity um direction it is paving the groundwork laying the groundwork for what is inevitable at the end of all of this which is a i think a glance over the shoulder at the accumulated deficits that we will have as a legacy of dealing with the health pandemic and the economic fallout associated with that and people are going to say okay you know we had to do that but now there's a huge price to pay there's a tremendous burden as you said right how are we going to um deal with the debt burden how who's going to pay you know there's going to be pain associated with all of this going forward what are we going to do and so i'm actually working on a piece for the ft right now they want it here in the next couple of days and it's on this question should we worry about the debt and it's a head-to-head debate over this and obviously i've been asked to take the position that no we should not be wrapping ourselves in knots to try to figure out you know how how best to move forward with an austerity program as we come out of out of the other side of this eventually so you know i think that i say this all the time for for most countries we do not have a debt problem we do not have a debt crisis what we have is a communication problem a language problem it is the fact that we use language we describe using words like borrowing and debt and deficits and the fact that we use these words to describe what's really taking place in terms of the government's budget and the ways in which government spending is financed just um triggers for people a response that all of the things that we're doing are inherently dangerous risky ill-advised irresponsible so you know the mmt position flips all of these things around we recognize that when governments sell bonds governments that are issuing their own currency okay the u.s the uk australia canada and so forth um if you're a country that has what we say in mmt is a sovereign currency fiat currency not tied to gold not convertible into anything else borrowing in a currency that you and only you can issue there's never a reason for a government in that position to borrow its own currency to need to borrow its own currency and so what we have are governments that by habit pair their deficit spending by selling bonds so if the government is engaged in deficit spending spend 100 into the economy tax 90 back out we label that a deficit and people think that there's something inherently wrong with that there's nothing inherently wrong with government running a budget deficit fiscal deficit government deficit is nothing more than a financial contribution to some other part of the economy so right now the u.s government is making about three or four trillion dollars in a financial contribution to some other part of the us economy to support the economy when it runs a deficit it matches the deficit spending by auctioning treasuries okay and we do that by custom we don't have to do it but congress chooses to do that and so what happens is as the government engages in deficit spending it holds up these treasury bonds and it says i'm going to match up my deficit spending by selling these bonds and we label it borrowing and because we call it borrowing it sounds risky it sounds like the government is dependent on people savers in that article people who have dollars have to finance the government mmt says no the deficit has already been financed the government is sp is running a trillion dollar deficit the deficit deposits the dollars into the economy that are then available to buy the bonds that the government is selling so i don't look at it as borrowing i look at it as recycling the deficit puts the dollars into the economy and the treasuries recycle the dollars into interest-bearing dollars so when the government sells the treasuries it pulls the non-interest-bearing dollars back out of the economy it replaces them with some interest bearing dollars that we unfortunately call the national debt it's really just part of the net money supply of the us but we use these words like the debt to describe what's happening and then people get very twisted around and agitated by the idea of a government running its finances imprudently they say households don't do that households have to live within their means households can't go on borrowing year after year piling on debt therefore if we see the government behaving that way it is de facto evidence of you know fiscal irresponsibility and i just think the whole entire narrative is getting things backwards essentially.

V：28:30

 it's it's you know what people like tony lawson that you mentioned before but also right-wingers like or libertarians like deirdre matlowski would say that this is a question of the rhetoric that is being used and the metaphors the allegories used so it is really fantastic is it not that when people talk about well when the financial times writers speak of debt what they mean is public debt but they always ignore private debt and they you know when you say to common folk hang on a second you know if the government does not push public debt up imagine how many bankruptcies there are going to be and how much bad private that we're going to end up with so you know how about worrying about the total amount of that private and public and then suddenly it's a question of balancing balancing the two then it's easier to to make them think but allow me to um to ask an impertinent question i'm not going to talk about the eurozone because the eurozone does not fall under your remit as an mm tier because we don't have a sovereign account currency or greece doesn't have germany doesn't it we we have created a monster where we have a central bank without the state to have its back without the treasury and we have 19 treasuries without a central bank i mean you know if you really try to create a gigantic recession creating machine you couldn't do better than that but let's forget the eurozone go to britain that you mentioned as one of your examples uh a critic would say hang on stephanie in 1976 uh britain even though they were borrowing in towns in sterling they had a crunch they they had to to go cap in hand to the international monetary fund because um at that point the deficit had run out of control and there was a run on the pound and interest interest rates at which uh the government was boring were shooting through the roof and the government was lost and they had to go to the imf and spend two years in austerity what do you say to that?

kelton:30:39

well we've actually written about this so whoever is asking the question i'll try not to give a another long-winded uh lecture sort of answer but you can find this in the mmt literature and so what we're very careful i think to do in mmt is to say that we're talking about countries that issue their own floating currency fiat floating currency borrowing their own currency and what you had in that period is uh the british government attempting essentially to circumvent the normal protocol and manage its exchange rate at the same time so you didn't have the situation that mmt describes which is a freely floating currency you had a government that was committed to actively trying to manage the value of the pound the british government did not go to the imf hat in hand because it needed pounds because it needed the british pound clearly it is the source of and the issuer was still the issuer of the currency was something different going on in that moment and it had to do with a desire to continue to try to manage the value of the currency rather than allowing it to float freely which is part of what mmt um requires as part of a definition of monetary sovereignty.

V:31:55

well let me speak as a greek for a moment because i remember when i was a young person and we didn't have we still had the drachma and i wish we still had it by the way let me make this clear the euro was a catastrophe for everyone but besides that being a small economy that was always deficit problem trade deficit and therefore always relying on the kindness of strangers in other words you know capital flows into the country to stabilize it its trade deficit which was structural especially after we entered the european common market which meant that we couldn't have an industry policy that protected local business local industry by means of tariffs and so on governments were you know running around like headless chicken uh struggling to prevent iran on the dragon uh even though they didn't really care very much about keeping the drachma at a certain level they were not managing the currency but nevertheless the runs of the dragon were quite extraordinary and the country that needed you know to import oil to import you know a dependent country and that was an experience which was significant in convincing even the greek working class of the importance of shifting from the drachma to the euro uh on the basis that you know trades unions would get together and organize a five-month strike they would give a five percent pay rise then the government would collapse then um not because of the of the strike but it would collapse anyway and then within five days they would have lost all the gains from the strike and at some point you know when the bourgeoisie turned around and said to them look let's go to the euro because you know you you can you you can at least be certain that whatever it is that you earn you will keep on earning and uh we will not have to live in this fear of iran on the drachma what do you say to them.

kelton：33:51

well it is true you don't have to live in fear of a run on the drama that's that much is true but you live in fear of other things i live in fear of ending up in a situation where you are forced to borrow uh to run your policy to orient your domestic macroeconomic policies in a way that doesn't best serve your people.

and that you have put yourself in a position where you have to take marching orders from the troika and whomever else is uh responsible for throwing you a lifeline in times of crisis so you're you're you're vulnerable but you are of course correct and and the point of mmt is not to say that every country that keeps its con it keeps its own currency and even floats its currency can always exercise um unilateral authority over its domestic policy agenda.

in the book that i have coming out in june uh i have a chapter on trade and i try really hard to make this point clear that small open economies even those that have a floating currency and and control their own central bank and so forth can be extremely vulnerable and can have to run their policies in a way that is highly restrictive when it comes to fiscal policy for fear of you know sharp movements in the exchange rate um interest rate policy.

 i mean there are um situations where not every country even if it has its own currency can take full advantage of that currency because there are other sort of sticking points and if you are a country that is highly dependent on the rest of the world for critical imports if you need energy if you need food if you need technology and medicine from the rest of the world and you don't produce it domestically and the only way to get it is to import it and you've got to have a currency other than your own in order to be able to acquire those things then yeah you are in a seriously vulnerable position when it comes to your your domestic capabilities.

V：

so what do you would you say to someone who says well mmt is great if you live in a country that has the exorbitant power of the dollar to back it up.

kelton:36:15

well look i think i would say japan okay japan is not the us it is not the global reserve currency neither is australia but these countries these are countries that fit the mold well enough to be able to i'll keep saying orient their domestic policy agenda around achieving full employment let's put that at the most important thing let's say that a government can do manage the inflation rate sustain full employment in other words if if you're japan if you are australia and you say i have all of this unemployment domestically i have people who are seeking paid work in the state's unit of account in yen in australian dollars i can afford to hire all of the idle labor and employ it and put it to work serving the public purpose i can do that domestically and so i'm not the global reserve currency i'm the canadian government i'm the australian government i'm japan i can i can still do that so you don't have to be the global currency hegemon to run a policy oriented toward let's say sustaining full employment domestically.

V:

yeah i have a little quibble on the difference between australia and japan australia is a highly dependent on commodity commodities markets because it's a deficit economy primarily whereas japan is quite different in the sense that it's got a much more stable balance of payments but that's neither here or there i i have a question of for you that this has come from one of our viewers uh regarding social policy now mmts like yourself on the one hand and i understand that entirely especially in the case of countries like the united states or japan you're talking about the importance of not being weighed down by the fear of deficits and so on you know fund a jobs guarantee program and of course you know i would completely um support that and dm25 our movement uh with the help of jamie garbrace you know one of your folks um has adopted the jobs guarantee program but can you tell me why is there a certain aversion to the idea in parallel of something like a universal basic income that is the question that is coming to you.

kelton:

 i don't think that there is and i think that if you read pavlina chernova if you look at what randy Wray has written if you look at some of the things that i've said some of the things that fadel kaboom has written there is enough in the mmt community i think where people have laid out a parallel argument how the two could work together um so i i don't think that we view them as um necessarily antagonistic to one another.

i think where we have had concerns is where they have become one versus the other people who prefer a universal basic income to a job guarantee.

we think that the job guarantee has a number of advantages one of the more important being that it is counter cyclical so that the spending itself is moderating right with changing conditions in the underlying economy and we think that's a very good feature of the job guarantee whereas the ubi would just layer on the same payment through the business cycle and not have that um counter cyclical stabilizing aspect the other thing is um you know there isn't a ubi proposal every time somebody asked me to comment on the ubi i have to immediately say what is your version what is it you're proposing because you know here in the us probably the version that got the most attention over the last year was the version proposed by presidential candidate andrew yang and that was a version that i personally spoke out very strongly against and maybe this question comes from someone who saw me um you know at times be a very sharp critic of that proposal because the way that it was introduced it would have required people who are already receiving certain forms of public assistance do the math as he put it and to run the numbers and figure out whether you would rather keep what you have or give up certain forms of public assistance in order to take this monthly disbursement and whereas somebody like me who isn't receiving any of those forms of public assistance i don't have to do the math i have the luxury of just saying oh send me the money right so it's the poor who forced into a situation where they have to run the calculation and decide um do i want the ubi payment or do i want to continue to receive the assistance that i'm getting from state federal uh maybe local government so i didn't like that.

V:

 we are on the same page here this is we would completely reject that dm 25's position on universal basic income of sorts uh has been that we do not want this to be tax funded.

number one it is a silly idea to say to a working class blue collar worker i'm going to take some of your money and give it to rich people or to people who are sitting on on a couch by choice to watch television so that would be toxic politically and also unnecessary what's the point of taxing in order to give a universal basic income so point number one so where does the money come from our proposal for europe and we ran on this platform last year in the european parliament elections and we'll keep doing it uh because we like the idea and unless you convince us otherwise um we'll be saying okay firstly um it we are thinking in terms of the universal basic dividend to say to large companies if you want to operate in our country you are going to have to give 10 of your shares to a european equity fund and the dividends that accumulate there are dispersed in the form of universal basic dividend on the basis that your capital is socially produced if you're google if you're amazon and so on uh it or facebook uh.

we are all contributing to your capital and you're only collecting the dividends so this is also a way of redistributing not so much wealth but redistributing property rights over companies whose capital is socially produced of course the money that will trickle down to individuals is very small but as automation increases um we you know that increases as well and also to supplement this with helicopter money with the european central bank um and that is um you know um compatible with your notion of automatic stabilizers puts a certain amount of money adds a certain amount of money to each person's universal basic dividend depending on aggregate demand so for instance during the coronavirus lockdown you know boosted by two three thousand dollars or euros for that matter you know to replace the lost incomes during this time and then when things take off reduce it again so this is the kind of thing we have but okay so um we've covered jobs guarantees and basic incomes or dividends what was it like to be working with bernie sanders during this um brilliant but unsuccessful campaign.

kelton:

uh well it's tough giannis.

 i mean you see someone who in so many ways is this is my personal opinion the the right man for the moment and you just see it slip through your fingers and um you know and only months after uh he makes the decision or or nearly weeks after he makes the decision to um you know step back to endorse uh joe biden vice president biden for president then all of this unfolds with the coronavirus and you have so many people now saying that the coronavirus has revealed all of these vulnerabilities it has laid them bare whether it's our health care system our trade policies which have given rise to the fact that we can't produce a face mask or a ventilator or test kit we have supply chain issues and he's been bernie's been talking about trade for 35 years whether it's um you know minimum wage whether it's discrimination and inequality it's all of these things that formed the core of his um campaign now twice that are so obvious to everyone the the solutions are so obvious and the things that people are looking to in terms of solutions are the very things that he was pushing for all along you know dealing with inequality increases in the minimum wage uh medicare for all renegotia you know redoing trade deals in the interest of the workers and so on and so forth so um it's exhilarating to watch someone like that um you know capture or recapture people's imaginations because that's really what he did he was able to stand in front of thousands and thousands of people and ask them to imagine the world as we could make it together and that was inspiring it was exciting and i'm still inspired by him yeah.

V：45:55

 we all are we are he was the right person to take on trump uh what what next in terms of the political revolution of what we are up against because you know we talked about the financial times article which is heralding the new age of austerity we have a tremendous wave of austerity hitting the eurozone next year because we don't have suffering money as you put it and as you can see the powers that be in europe are effectively loosening up the purse strings in terms of loans so they will be lending money to italy to greece to spain until um you know the deficit goes to minus 15 and the debt to gdp ratio grows above 180 190 200 and then of course next year they will come around and say come here you need to consolidate so the the age of austerity in europe is for certain i have greater hopes for the united states than i have for europe which is not difficult where do we go from here.

kelton:

 well do you mean where do we go from here as in what.

V:

because you know intellectually we know what the arguments are you know you will write your article in the financial times uh i have no doubt you will win the argument uh but can we win the war the war pertaining to the australian policies that will come through regardless of our intellectual victories because we had many intellectual victories before you know as economists with the capital controversies back in the 1970s you know jeff harcourt whom you mentioned before and so on so what we won the argument we lost the war how can we not lose this war because you know we keep letting good crisis go to waste whereas the fascists on the one hand and the bankers on the other never let a good crisis go to waste.

kelton:48:00

yeah you're um you're depressing me in a lot of different ways because i mean it's it's the people who are in power it's our political leaders right how are we going to change who the decision makers are so that different decisions get made i don't know that all of the organizing and convincing and um collective action in the world is going to get us where we all want to go where you and i want to go if we don't have if we have a boris johnson in the uk if we have you know the brazilian president we have trump uh for four more years here so we it's it just seems to me you know this stuff better than i do uh you know what needs to be done and and the various layers with which we have to fight this because i don't think that there's one clear path i think that there are many people pushing on many fronts from different angles on many paths that ultimately bring the pressure to bear and i can't see how it happens without electing inspiring leaders who are willing to take things in a new direction and to break with old shibboleths and i i don't know. how i don't know how else to answer your question except to admit that i don't know.

V:49:25

well that is a good way to start you know those people who actually have all the answers are usually dangerous so uh but you know the the simple start of a process leading to an answer it must surely be you know to to to band together and to you know to copy what the bank is in the fascist to to to know to not to concentrate on our own turf because once we do that they divide and rule over us um we remember when we met in vermont in when was it november december 2018 with bernie and you and many others we put together we started something we call the progressive international we're meeting in iceland in september with under the india you know given the wonderful auspices of catherine jacob's daughter the prime minister of iceland uh with people from africa from india i believe that we we must turn this into a transnational political rebellion against this because you know it's a common faith really the more you look at what's happening in the united states in greece in india in brazil today the more you realize that this is a common faith and the the only ones who have not joined forces are the progressives and it's about time you know we change that so a question from a greek guy here judging by his name vasilis is there any vision of a utopian post-capitalist global society where capital could serve the citizens needs and is it possible for it to be fought for so that it becomes true there.

kelton:51:00

yes yes i hope the answer is yes you know i i end my book um with a series of just asking the reader to imagine imagine and it's a refrain and i do it again and again and again and that's what i think that this question is about and that's what my hope is in you know in writing this book i just wanted to be able to empower people to empower the reader to fight back against all of the kinds of things that stand in our way of building a better future building a better world and the the things that i'm trying to knock down are the deficit myths are all of the arguments that the economists and the people at the financial times and others are going to put up as uh as rationales for why we can't get where we're trying to go these obstacles stand in your way china you know borrowing from china the grandchildren the bond vigilantes this that crowding out so i try to clear all of that away help the reader get empowered and then the subtitle of the book is building an economy for the people.

and i don't attempt to say what that should look like i have my own opinions and ideas of what kind of world i want to live in my thinking was if i could help people to see that a different world is possible and that many of the reasons that we've been told we can't build what we would like to build are not legitimate obstacles that they're artificial and that they and that we can safely ignore them and um focus on different and real constraints then we can begin to imagine the kind of world that we could build together so i think the answer is absolutely yes to the question um it is a matter of building power and um and then being able to transform the world in the way that we want to live.

V：

well the the the one of the viewers has made a point which i think is pertinent it's not just the question of language and it's not just a question of metaphors and allegories they're very powerful vested interests that use those metaphors in order to conceal the extent to which their vested interests are best served by general confusion over the meaning of debt deficit money and so on and i think it's it's really important you know it's not just a question of failure telling people here in europe the german government for instance uh they're not silly they realize that the vast ma the majority of germans would benefit from a different monetary regime except the oligarchy that's behind them is not going to benefit.

so this is always something that is important to remind ourselves.

kelton:54:00

absolutely i did not mean to suggest that changing the world is as simple as changing language and using different framing and that sort of thing no in fact my last response was it was about building power that you've got to build power because you have to take from those who benefit from the current usages and the current myths and reinforcing i mean my you know in the book i talk a lot about peter.G.peterson the billionaire hedge fund guy who spent literally a lifetime decades building out an entire infrastructure right of think tanks of ways to popularize and reinforce these myths and the pages of the washington post at conferences with politicians bringing people in you know giving them the talking points reinforcing these myths around the government's finances the idea that the government you know the debt crisis and so forth being driven by entitlements it's social security it is medicare it is medicaid it is it is the programs that we have designed to care for one another that are fundamentally the problem and so they want to knock down the last vestiges of the new deal the great society sweeping reform of all the social welfare um safety net such as it is remaining and so those are the people it is a power uh it is a power play and i fully recognize that you have to do more than just change the way that we talk about things in order to win that fight.

V：55:40

 i've got one question and one um comment coming from our viewers the question is from willem i believe it's from germany do you think the euro will implode that's the question and the comment comes from mirna i don't know where she's from but she says and i think you'll appreciate that uh and we got so many messages of that sort like mirnas thanks so much janice for bringing stephanie kelton on and introducing her to us we really need people like stephanie uh opening our eyes and advising governments like the us government that will result in november in the meantime raising profile of women economists like that is the best contribution you could make so there i just wanted to read this out for you do you think the euro will implode because you know i keep predicting it well but it doesn't.

kelton:

you know randy randy and i randy ray and i wrote that paper oh i think a decade ago the title of it was can euroland survive and our answer was yes if yes if and i that's still the answer uh do i think if,if if if the currency issuer the ecb does what is necessary to hold it together do i think it will implode yeah i do because um it is it is obviously not sustainable under the current um way in which the ecb and the countries all view themselves vis-a-vis one another as a union um no it you cannot stress these countries and these people you cannot do to the greeks to the italians to the spaniards over a period of years stretching into decades the misery the high rates of poverty the the austerity it's not sustainable it will something will snap and i think when one country breaks free that will unleash the whole project will.

V :

or to paraphrase keynes uh the eurozone can stay alive longer than i i can speak stay sane not solvent but one last question because we're coming to the close um what do you do to find some solace in during these hard times what do you read listen to you know how do you take your mind off the you know the the nasty reality that we're really engulfed in.

kelton:

i'll tell you i have two beautiful children who now are home 24 hours a day my son my son plays piano and that's beautiful because periodically several times a day usually he will go down and uh that's a very enjoyable part of my my day um yeah i read all day so reading doesn't really serve as any form of escape for me but um family movies we we cuddle up at the end of the night as much as possible i i twist their arms last night i convinced the whole family to watch in time uh fantastic movie so all of us currency being time right how much time is left in you that's right that's right i love that movie and then we've got you know we we live on long island and we can pop the kayaks into the water and come on out and and just sort of try to forget all all of the things.

V：

that we'll do that sounds too idyllic for these miserable times but then again where am i to speak you know that i and i and our dog live in a fantastic house overlooking the aegean stephanie uh i will thank you in a minute but let me first while you're still here uh introduce the guest for another now next week enrico giovannini is an italian economist he's a professor in rome he was minister of labor and social policies between 2013 and 2014. he's a statistician as well he was president of the italian statistical institute and he's currently an advisor of the present prime minister mr conte so enrique and i are going to have a right old hustle because i think we're going to disagree quite a lot while maybe agreeing on some things as well um i don't have to agree with everyone that comes on my program um unlike tonight stephanie and it was a great pleasure to have you you know there is always a silver lining if we were not uh locked down we would not even have thought of having these chats um i benefited enormously from seeing you i haven't seen you for a while it's always good to see you i hope to see you again soon maybe in person but um you know you can have the final word by which today's another now will finish.

kelton：

well thank you yanis thanks for spending an hour with me and letting me join you on the program and thank you for all of the work that you do because i have to say that what you're trying to pull off is not easy and at the same time i think it is just really critical that we begin to build the kind of movement that you're trying to build to help point us in a direction where we as a world can survive and thrive together so i want to thank you for that.

V：

well folks goodbye and good night from this mutual appreciation society of stephanie and me see you soon 

thank you 英語 (自動生成) Stephanie Kelton and Yanis Varoufakis: Another Now #3 | DiEM25 TV 限定公開 6 回視聴•2021/01/15 0 0 共有 保存 me com チャンネル登録者数 74人 アナリティクス 動画の編集 Stephanie Kelton and Yanis Varoufakis: Another Now #3 | DiEM25 TV https://youtu.be/7mt1SXqiXKQ 2020/04/28 もっと見る 10:53 再生中 櫻井よしこさんの日本のワイドショーに苦言！100%同意します。ここしばらくワイドショーを真面目に見てて感じたこと。 │上念司チャンネル ニュースの虎側 上念司チャンネル ニュースの虎側 14万 回視聴 2 日前 新着