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[Music] hi everyone welcome back to salt talks
my name is John Darcy I'm the managing director of salt which is a global thought leadership forum at the
intersection of Finance technology and politics what we're trying to do with these digital salt talks is provide
interviews with leading investors creators and thinkers just like we do at our global salt conferences
we're trying
to provide a platform for big ideas and provide our audience a window into the minds of subject matter experts and
today we're very excited to welcome stephanie kelton to salt talks it couldn't be more topical her book
couldn't be more topical and we'll talk about that book in a second but Stephanie is currently a professor at
Stony Brook University earlier this month she released a new book called the deficit myth modern monetary theory and
the burst birth of the people's economy which is already in New York Times bestseller and congratulations to
Stephanie on that she is a leading authority on modern monetary theory which is a new approach to economics
that has gained increasing popularity in recent years her work is particularly
relevant given the large deficits that have been run by the US government in the wake of the Cova 19 pandemic so again we're very excited to have her on
given the timing in addition to her many academic publications and the book that we mentioned she's been a contributor at
Bloomberg opinion she's written for the New York Times she's written for the LA Times and US News and World Report's contributed to
CNN among many other outlets she has worked both in academia and in politics
as she served as the chief economist on the US Senate Budget Committee as a Democratic staff in 2015 and as a senior
adviser to the Bernie Sanders 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns Politico
called her one of the 50 most influential thinkers in 2016 and Bloomberg listed her as one of the 50
people who defined 2019 Barron's named her one of the 100 most influential
women in finance in 2020 so her work is gaining increasing visibility she was
previously the chair of the Department of Economics at the University of Missouri at Kansas City if you have any
questions for Stephanie during today's talk please enter them in the Q&A box at the bottom of your video screen
and conducting today's interview is going to be Anthony scare Moochie the founder and Managing Partner of skybridge capital capital a global
alternative investment firm Anthony is also the chairman of salt and I'm going to turn it over to Anthony for the interview John thank you and
Stephanie congratulations on the book I understand now it's a New York Times best seller and so fantastic on that and
I I read the book after I read Zacks book and so I think it's interesting and I would encourage everybody to go to the
politics and prose podcast where Zack Carter who we had on last week and Stephanie are together talking about
John Maynard Keynes and deficits and why they do matter but there's some myths
related to deficits but before we get in there Stephanie can you tell us a little bit more about your background what got
you so interested in this and tell us a little bit about what you described to be a Copernican moment where you're
having a Eureka about how economics is actually working sure well first let me just start by
saying thank you for the opportunity come spend some time with you and your
viewers today you know I was studying economics I did undergraduate degrees in
both finance and economics so I picked up a couple of bachelor's degrees and then I really enjoyed economics so I
went off to Cambridge University and started you know a graduate program there and I was mostly learning the
conventional approach to economics you know just conventional macro stuff and I
won a fellowship through Christ's College while I was at Cambridge and that sent me off to the levy economics
Institute which is a think-tank in upstate New York and that's where I
first started to encounter really these sort of ideas and it it actually came to
me through someone named Warren Mosler and Warren is was a Wall Street guy
comes from the finance world he had written a little book and he called it
soft currency economics and he called it that to distinguish it from hard currency right from gold standard or
fixed exchange rate framework's monetary systems and so
Lauren wrote this little book and started circulating it he really wanted to talk with you know economists at top
universities and he was reaching out to people at Harvard and Stanford and Princeton and so forth
nobody really wanted to engage with him and at some point he stumbled on a group
of economists in an online forum and started exchanging ideas and so you know
in 1997 I guess I got this little book and I read it and it it flipped my
worldview upside down I couldn't wrap my head around it didn't it couldn't be right I can't think it can't be right it
can't be right because it went so counter to everything that I had been trained to understand about government
finance and taxes and stuff but here was this really smart guy and he had it all laid out he had the accounting down you
know he had it all in balance sheet form and it's really hard to pull the wool over somebody's eyes when you're dotting
the eyes and crossing the t's and writing about the t-accounts and so I kept looking at it and it just bothered
me that I couldn't kind of shake the idea so I went searching to see if
Warren might be right and I started reading Treasury and Fed manuals and talking to people at the you know debt
management trying to figure out all this stuff and whether it really worked the way Warren believed it did so this is
I'm getting to the end of this story here basically I convinced myself
through a bunch of research that warns ideas were sound and that what I had been trained to understand some of the
models about government budget constraints and that sort of stuff were just not applicable with the monetary
system that we have today no I want you to keep going steady where you feel you
need to I this is interview about you and so you mentioned in the book which I
also found fascinating is that you know we see the government the way we see ourselves or our household or our
business and so but we're not originators of currency we're actually users of currency to use your words and
and and so governments can effectively originate currency and then you mentioned in the book well think about
our debt it's 23 Trillian we could get rid of it with one electronic keystroke but I don't think
you a hundred percent mean that either right so so where should we be as it
relates to deficits you also write in the book that deficits do matter so so
lay out for us what modern monetary theory is and put it into the context of people that had trained like me and
people that got trained like you before you had this sort of Eureka moment okay
so there's a lot there let me see if we can unpack it all in some bite-sized pieces so the the first bit you
mentioned is really kind of at the core of mmt the idea that we have to recognize that the federal government's
budget works differently from a household budget and the thing that distinguishes the federal government
from everybody else is the fact that it's the issuer of our currency in fact it has the sole legal authority to
create the US dollar I mean it's the issuer of our currency I can't do it you can't do it private businesses can't do
it and state and local governments you're thinking Stephanie that some of my relatives have done that in the past but I assure you that that's not true
okay keep keep going well you know a lot of people try and you end up in an orange
jumpsuit because it's illegal to counterfeit the currency and so you know it would be nice if the rest of us could
be currency issuers you wouldn't have 50 governors running around imploring Congress to provide some aid right now
as their budgets are falling apart if governors could take care of this themselves you know because they could
just issue the dollar they'd be fine but they can't so we start with that recognition that the federal government
is the issuer of the currency and therefore a number of things follow one it can never run out of money hey
President Obama when he you know he comes into office he's newly elected and
within a matter of months he sits down for an interview and you remember I mean the economy is falling apart we're
sliding into the great recession he's asked at what point do we run out of money and his response was we're out of
money now I mean those were his words were out of money now you know okay so the federal government can never run out
of money it can't have bills coming to that it can to Ford to pay unlike a household or a
small business or a large business right it can't go broke can't be pushed into bankruptcy so so what about the deficit
what what are the implications for the deficit well look the people get very anxious about the idea of the government
running fiscal deficits they believe that they're inherently irresponsible
it's evidence that you're miss managing your finances you should live within your means where I hear that all the
time the deficit is you know just the difference between two numbers one number is how many dollars the
government spends into the economy and the other number is how many dollars the government subtracts away from people in
the economy right it that's all it is so if the government is spending more dollars in than it is subtracting away
we labeled it a deficit but what we forget and this is something mmt helps
to remind us is that you know if they spend a hundred in and they only tax ninety away somebody gets ten that their
deficits result in financial surpluses in some other part of the economy so
that's at first and key point it really comes from the work of wind-god Lee who was a British economist who developed
all this through sectoral balanced framework and so forth but their red ink is our black ink okay so as I like to
say every deficit is good for someone right the question is for whom and for what are those deficits being run so
then we get to the question of the debt because fiscal deficits result in the
accumulation over time of what we call the national debt and in the book you just mentioned I have a section where I
say look if we couldn't pay it off overnight if we wanted to we could talk about that section here in a minute but
I think it's really a misnomer I don't think we should be calling it the national debt at all I think of this
thing as just a historical record of all of the past instances in our nation's
history where the government made a financial deposit to the economy right
it ran a deficit engaged in deficit spending and it turned those dollars that it put in into Treasuries it turned
the into interest-bearing currency and that's really all that is you know it's an interest-bearing welcome of the US
dollar so let me let me let me ask you this question because I often get asked this question as an investor if you go
back to the gold standard and we we unclipped ourselves on August 15th
Richard Nixon made that decision he then quipped that were all Keynesian now meaning he was going to allow the
currency to float it was gonna become a fiat currency at that time it was $35 an
ounce today gold is trading at $1,700 an ounce and so strict monetarists would
make the case while we devalued that currency by 98 percent in order to
monetize and be able to pay our debt and one of the negative consequences potentially and I'm interested in your
opinion of this is that it hurts middle class people and lower middle class people because assets are tied to the
currency the asset if I'm in this home and it was worth a dollar in 1971 it's now worth $10 but if I'm a wage earner
with no assets my wages in fact haven't caught up with that monetization if you
will and so what's your reaction to that well I have a lot of concerns about the
you know median income and average earnings and low wage earners and what
has happened really to the pattern where wages used to keep pace more or less
with productivity growth and then something changed and productivity growth continued its upward trajectory
and the real median wages just flattened out and I don't think that has to do
with the fact that we untethered our currency from gold I think it has to do with a lot of things including overtime
globalization the decline of unionization rates and so forth so I I
don't see it as a byproduct of abandoning a gold standard but we would
make the case though that there has been fairly dramatic inflationary periods in
the United States some class economic theory would suggest that that
is related to things like fiat currency and it's related to things like you know
not adhering to those classical principles that you and I both learned and you would say what about those
periods of time well we haven't actually had very many I mean it depends what kind of an arc of history you want to
look at when we were on the gold standard what we confronted regularly was deflation we had depression after to
print out recessions but actual depressions and we had many of them and those depressions occurred you know in
an environment where prices would collapse and so we deflation is far more serious and was a regular sort of threat
under the gold standard but we haven't had really periods of problematic
inflation post Bretton Woods Proust Nixon let's go let's go to the 70s for a
second where we're running pretty high inflationary rates and we got a long-term bond up to sixteen or seventy
percent so what would you say was the causality of that well a lot of things oil price shocks the Vietnam War
maybe Volcker now this might surprise you to hear me say this but you know
people people assume that when the Fed raises interest rates that that is how
you reduce inflationary pressures but you know in mmt and i have a little bit about this in the book i don't go into
it in any detail but I've written a paper on this as well raising interest rates raises borrowing costs right and
to the extent that firms are leveraged and they're able to pass on to end consumers the increase in interest rates
and form of higher prices it's possible that raising interest rates doesn't
actually quell in fresh inflationary pressures but it actually fuels an acceleration in prices so a lot of
things could be could be happening there and some of them might be counterintuitive so so let's
fast-forward right up to 2020 rates are low we could argue they're at all-time
lows and respects I mean certainly measured by inflation and so forth in some cases you
know the long bond is actually negative now even though Girona pal saying doesn't like negative rates but
but is it even possible to raise rates at this point and I'm talking about over
the next five or ten years do you envision a scenario where we have rate hikes in the United States you know my
answer is I hope so because if we don't see interest rates go up it's going to
be because the economy is in such rotten condition for three or five years so I
mean that that's the answer the question could I see rates staying at zero or roughly zero for three to five years
sure I can't if we screw up the policy badly enough that's exactly what central
bank's gonna do so so professor let's say that you are our economic czar and you could sit there and you could manage
the budget what would be the percentage that you would run of our GDP in a
budget deficit and then more importantly how would you deploy that capital into
the economy what would you spend it on yeah well I think infrastructure has to
be really high on the list now that's a longer term I would say recovery strategy nearer term I think that you
know I do believe Congress had the right idea with the Small Business Association loans and the PPP I think that was the
right idea other countries do it and they execute well we didn't have the
infrastructure up to turn flip the switch and get that thing going and execute well immediately but keeping
workers on payroll and attached to their employers I applaud that I think it was the right move I don't know how much
more can be done now you clawing workers back or building on that program
I think getting money to state local governments immediately is absolutely critical I would crank that up I think the
trillion that the house put in is is a good number I would do it looking longer
term yes I think that you know a massive infrastructure project is
the right way to go we've deferred maintenance on our nation's infrastructure for probably a decade and
the problem just grows bigger and bigger every year there's so much work that needs to be done that's usually a
bipartisan sort of thing both both Republicans and Democrats understand that's a proper place for government to
make investments I would do lots of that and you know I I can imagine a lot of
other things we we've got now 30 million additional people who've lost health care I think you know for me I would I
would tackle health care and then you see what you're left with and you know we're gonna I think we're gonna end up
with situation where millions of people who have lost and have yet to lose jobs
in this downturn are not going to find work again for years if ever and for
them I think it makes sense to explore programs like FDR implemented in the New
Deal era Works Progress Administration a CCC and national youth we can't have millions of young kids walking around
unemployed in an environment where the tensions are high and and people are
desperate you can't have that well I'm certainly in that camp we certainly have to figure that out because that just
that inactivity the the you know my grandmother would say that idle hands is the makes for the devil's work but but
you you deficit spending talking about a percentages so what would you spend I don't think I don't think anybody knows
that because three years now you know three years it's just about the demand leakages Anthony for me for me right so
how much space is opening up that needs to be closed off and some of it will close itself as the government begins to
spend through a multiplier effect you'll get some bang for the buck but then you just have to stand ready to to keep in
place enough fiscal support you know war and Mosler keeps talking with you he'd probably say you just count the bodies
in the unemployment line and then you'll know when to stop I when you get back to fellow you you you do make that case and
I'm gonna let you address that in a second but I and John has some questions for me for the audience so I'm gonna let him interrupt but I have one last
question I was on the phone with one of my clients who had worked in Brazil and
he said that he had experienced rampid inflation there as the government
quote-unquote printed money we know that Argentina had rampant inflation and Greece has had rampant inflation do you
think that were your theories are tied to the US dollar because it's the
reserve currency or do you think your theory is applicable to any sovereign that can print currency and if it is
applicable any sovereign how do you explain those issues that places like Brazil and Argentina have had yeah so
you know Argentina and Brazil have a lot of external debt they don't constrict
they don't constrain their borrowing to their own currency they borrow in foreign currency and you know you have
countries that are very dependent upon a particular export whether it's soybeans
in Argentina whether it's oil in Venezuela you become really dependent upon revenues from you know one or two
key export industries and then all of a sudden there's a collapse in the price
of that thing and you're in real trouble because your budget is built around being able to finance spending based on
that anticipated cash flow when it starts to dry up you're in trouble you got countries like you know in Zimbabwe
for example people often raise in Bob ley or Germany or something you know Milton Friedman of course famously
quipped that inflation was always in everywhere a monetary phenomenon and people have said it's always because
you've got too much money chasing too few goods but what usually happens in these hyperinflationary episodes is that
you end up with the too few goods piece something happens on the supply side there's a shock in the case of Zimbabwe
you know Mugabe comes to power he wants to reward the freedom fighters he takes
land away from white farmers redistributes it to the blacks the freedom fighters and they don't know how
to farm the land and so you end up initially with huge food shortages in an agricultural economy and they're forced
to import food to feed the population and they're printing money to do that and you get hyperinflation so my answer
is that look to the supply side and look to countries that are borrowing in foreign currency
you know you don't have to look far to see Japan right Japan's not the US Japan's got the largest debt to GDP
ratio in the entire world they still are battling deflationary pressures they got
you know haven't been able to get inflation up to 2% in three decades or so is that a demographic phenomena
exclusive to Japan or there are other factors there meaning that aging population and the upside-down pyramid
of that is causing that or are there other things look I think I think there
are probably other things but I think demographics make matter a lot in terms of what's happening there I think it
when you have an aging society it makes sense that as people age and downsize
they consume less and so you know you're trying to engineer you know rapid
economic growth in a society where people are just trying to consume less as they age it's not gonna work out all
that well I also think that they may have the brake pedal and the gas pedal mixed up in terms of what they've done
with interest rates and QE that a lot of what they think is monetary stimulus might actually be working the other way
around and then they get very anxious when the deficit increases so they keep hiking the consumption tax and so you get these
fits and starts in Japan so okay makes
sense John do you have you have any questions yeah well I want to go to reform before we end I want to go to
that employment thing because I I thought that was the more fast at any aspect of the book I want to give professor kellton an opportunity to talk
about that but go ahead fire it some questions from our own yeah we've talked a little bit about government spending but we haven't talked about the other
side of the ledger in terms of how to think about taxes within the MMT framework in your book you talk about if
taxes are removed and demand for a government currency will fall and people might stop working you know do we cut
taxes in an mmt framework do we raise taxes on the wealthy how do you think about how we should change tax policy in
the United States well it depends where where we are in terms of you know the
economic outlook what would I do with taxes right now I sure wouldn't be raising them you know you know so I
think that I'm not certainly I'm a Democrat but I'm not allergic to tax cuts I think tax cuts are perfectly
reasonable fiscal policy provided that they are designed to aim that benefit on
the other side that the windfall goes to people who are going to turn around and spend that money back into the economy so can you just eliminate all taxes and
expect the economy to continue to function and government to be able to provision itself with resources nuts oh
yeah you're right in the book I talked about if you want to start a currency from scratch historically one of the
ways the governments have done this is to impose a tax on a population of
people they say you are now subject to this tax and what mmt points out is the government can't collect the tax until
it first spends that which is necessary to pay the taxes you've got to spend the currency first so that somebody can have
it and turn around and use it to pay the tax so taxes are important they can help you start up a currency maintain the value
of the currency they allow you to make adjustments to the tax code so you can impact distribution if you want to do
that they allow you to create incentives and disincentives so lots of reasons and
they mitigate inflationary pressure which is obviously an important one if the government only spent its currency
into existence you know every time the government spends a dollar it gives birth to a new dollar and that dollar
travels around the economy until it is removed by government only the government can can take it back up so
you write your check to the IRS that is the death sentence for the dollar that is where the dollar goes to die so it
has a life cycle and the government regulates inflationary pressure by
avoiding spending too many of its dollars in and allowing them to travel around so it subtracts some from our
hands over time thank you the next question we have a couple questions
about universal basic income versus of federal jobs guarantees so you talked a lot about federal jobs guarantee as
being a prescription for solving a lot of the ills that we have in our society and you talked about how Warren Mosler
believes that you should just continue to spend until you get that unemployment rate down to zero in what scenarios do
you think you know basic income is the most effective prescription and what scenarios do you think a federal jobs guarantee is most
effective and and right now what would be your solution yeah well for me it
comes down to what problem are we trying to solve so I've engaged in a lot of conversations with people who are
advocates of ubi and very often they say the reason they like the ubi is because
they want to fix poverty right they want to address poverty I am an advocate of
the job guarantee because I want to fix involuntary unemployment I want to eliminate involuntary unemployment but
this is an environment where ok things have changed since 2019 right now we
have millions and millions of people who need to pay their rent and eat some food
and you know stay current on their bills so they don't wreck their credit score
and and so forth so what do we do for those people we there are jobs for them
and we don't have a federal job guarantee in place so am i supportive of providing you know disbursements monthly
income support absolutely I am but in more normal times I think that some kind
of a basic income working alongside the job guarantee is the better way so that
for people who want to work but can't find a job anywhere else in the economy let's create a job for them there's
plenty of work that needs to be done for those who can't or shouldn't be working let's provide the basic income support
and that's how I that's how I look at it great we have one more question then
I'll kick it back over to Anthony can you envision a scenario in which inflation did become problematic so
let's say that we adopted a modern monetary theory framework and things went awry what would that scenario look
like well let me tell you this because I think it's so important for people to
understand that and I'm saying this is someone who worked as the chief
economist on the United States Senate Budget Committee for a period of time I listened to Republicans I listened to
Democrats I a lot of legislation get introduced I saw amendments proposed never once in my
time in the Senate did I hear a single staffer or a single member of the Senate
raised concerns about inflation not once it's not even an afterthought it's just
not a consideration at all so what I'm saying is that mmt centers inflation
risk that is the relevant constraint right there and you have to identify and
respect the economy's real productive capacity or you will run into a situation where you push things too far
so what I'm proposing has to be an improvement on what we have today because what we have today is nobody at
all connecting proposed new spending to concerns about inflation so the best way
to fight inflation is before it happens right not to start up an inflation problem so what I'd like to see is for
Congress to change the federal budgeting process right now somebody writes a bill
and the legislation goes to the Congressional Budget Office and CBO
scores that bill with one primary consideration does it add to the deficit
yes or no and if so how much that for me is the least important question we can ask CBO the least important let's ask
CBO and other agencies to help Congress figure out whether the proposed spending
carries inflation risk and if so how can they mitigate that inflation risk if
they propose money to be one quick example I know you priced a wrapper somebody else wants in but one quick
example suppose that we were back in December of 2019 and we were looking at
an economy that a lot of people would have said this is basically a full employment economy right unemployment's
three and a half percent or so and Congress said we want to do infrastructure you remember that Trump
met with Pelosi and Schumer they went to the White House sat down everybody they
had a meeting of the minds on this two trillion dollars said let's do two trillion dollars of infrastructure
spending everybody said great let's do it and then came the how are we gonna pay for it stuff right but suppose suppose that you ended
up with Democrats in the House and Senate and in the White House in the same economic environment and somebody
put an infrastructure bill together for a couple of trillion dollars or more and
attach the wealth tax to it and said this is our pay for and it's gonna raise
all the revenue we need to cover the cost of the infrastructure they send the bill to CBO CBO looks at it they say it's beautiful
it's gorgeous bill doesn't add to the deficit wonderful a plus send it back now Congress can vote to pass that
spending what I'm saying is Kelton would go oh my god crazy right are you crazy
because you've just authorized trillions of dollars of spending where you're
offset your so-called pay for is a tax that falls exclusively on the tiniest
sliver of people what is it like seventy eight thousand people or whatever would be subject to if it were senator
Warren's well tax you're taking the dollars away from people let's face it they weren't going to spend them chasing
real goods and services in the economy anyway right so you haven't mitigated
the inflation risk with that particular offset so I think that we are more
vulnerable to inflation risk under the current budgeting practice than we would
be if we move to as you say an mmt model
over to you to continue your in election discussion I appreciate John I'm
fascinated by this I was just talk a little bit more about the employment phenomenon so let's let's go to the
three-and-a-half percent unemployment doctor Bernanke or chairman Powell would say that that's full employment it felt
like for employment to me you would say what that that's not quite full employment and we both are going to
stipulate that there's going to be frictional activity in the economy leads to some level of unemployment but what's
full full unemployment in your mind well here's what I'll say if we announced
that the federal government was prepared to provide a job to anybody who wanted one
but couldn't find one anywhere else in the economy now frictional unemployment somebody who's between jobs they're not going to take that job they know they're
gonna quickly find another private-sector job so they're not going to show up but if you made the announcement walk in to your nearest
American Job Center being old unemployment offices if you don't have a job and you want one walk in you can
walk out with a job if you make that announcement and nobody shows up I will stipulate that we were at full
employment on the other hand if 10 or 15 million people show up then I think we
have just revealed the true extent of the unemployment problem so you know in
other words you don't know unless you have an option but I think we also want to see you you're gonna want to get a
job that is paying you more than say your unemployment benefits right or you
want to get a job as paying you more than a workers comp that you may be getting from some other job that you can
no longer do but that be still say well probably so but your unemployment right now unemployment insurance I wouldn't
eliminate that by the way yeah we let people who you know you lose a job you've got unemployment and you continue
and look for work and maybe you know you get lucky and you're reemployed in a short period of time but when employ an
employment runs out and then people don't have another option this would be an option for folks like that so so you
brought up something that I think is brilliant and so I want to re-emphasize it because if I were a central banker
thank God I'm not but if I were that would be the number one thing I'm worried about is deflation and I just
want to remind everybody on the call why are central bankers worried about deflation they they're worried because
you can't pay them the debt back with dollars that are worth more than the ones that you borrowed you include the
society and that's clearly what happened in the 1930s it wasn't until and léa
quad Ahmed from the Lords of Finance the book I know you're familiar with he points out it was Franklin Roosevelt and
his common sense in 1933 that unclipped us from that gold standard and perhaps
Benjamin strong if he didn't die the first Federal Reserve Chairman would have been able to have figured that out and then the liquidity started entering
the market and the on employment numbers went down and now it's 1933 to two thousands or let's call
that 87 years we've had reasonably high to very high deficit spending since in
1969 we've only had two surpluses it was the 1969 surplus and the fiscal year
2000 surplus and yet we've had unbelievable economic progress professor
kellton so so III want you to tell the naysayers out there that are looking at
this framework and saying well our grandchildren are gonna pay for it our great-grandchildren are gonna pay for it
it's all gonna come home to roost or it's a house of cards about the collapse on us what would your response be to
them well my response is just stop thinking of it as debt that's the route
that's that's the response and that's why I titled chapter three the national
debt parentheses that isn't because I think that's the problem when once we
start calling it debt and thinking of it in those terms we kind of personalize it it's like corporate debt or it's like
household debt or whatever eventually you have to pay it back that's when things go awry so that's why I keep
saying just think of it as part of the net money supply of the US so yeah so not to interrupt but let me just ask you
this so we we do the budget together we come up with what we want to spend on and we have infrastructure and we're
taking in three point seven to four trillion dollars of tax revenues but we really need to spend six or seven
trillion dollars hypothetically why wouldn't we just print that money and just pay it right there and then balance
the budget every single year but won't be your economic policy answer to not
doing that so there's only one way for the government to pay for anything already today it pay every single
payment that is made by government is carried out by the Federal Reserve changing numbers in the appropriate bank
account so Congress authorizes the spending and that effectively orders up new dollars from the Federal Reserve and
the Fed fills the order by using the computer keyboard to make payments right to clear the payments on
behalf of Treasury that's the way it works now you're saying I think why do we bother messing around with the bond
sale piece why not just let the Fed mark the numbers up and be done with it and
then you could have deficit spending without an increase in the national debt and to which I say good good idea good
question I mean the bond piece is optional this is the thing people don't get they don't understand what the people that are on
this call that have to balance their checkbook every day and they're balancing their corporate jet books as
well you would say well because the federal government can issue the currency they're able to do that you
don't issue currency you use currency so you're not able to do that and you don't think there would be inflationary
consequences to us doing no there in fact selling bonds is almost certainly
more inflationary than not selling the bonds why because you're putting trillions of interest bearing dollars
out there right those are dollars that pay extra dollars on top of those dollars versus just leaving the dollars
in the system right where you're multiplying them up by turning them into interest-bearing dollars okay so you're
basically saying that the national debt for a modern monetary theorist is a little bit of a mirage it does have that
hangover effect of the interest bearing that you're suggesting but if we just printed it and replaced it sovereigns
from around the world people that invest in the US they wouldn't lose confidence in us they wouldn't lose confidence in
the m1 or m2 production of our money supply they'd be okay with that they
would say okay anytime the US government needs to spend money they're just printing it and the rest of the world
would be okay with that and still accept us as the reserve currency yeah yeah if
they haven't figured out that that's how it works already then they're being a little bit duped because we are already
creating new digital collars that was the most fascinating part of your book and that's the reason why I'm
encouraging everybody on this call to read it because we are in fact already doing that and so it has worked and it
sort of worked for the 87 years since Franklin Roosevelt began that more aggressive process of
doing it so what do you say to the deficit hawks out there which there are many on this
call trust me because I'm getting text messages and all kinds of nonsense coming into my phone so so what do you
say to those people I just say you know there is some ironclad logic behind this
and the ironclad logic is in the balance sheet entries it is simply the case that on the other side of the government's
deficit lie is somebody else's surplus there are no two ways around that we we are going to debate that or we can
debate it but whoever's taking the opposite position is gonna lose because I'm right about this so you you know
saying I want the government to eliminate its deficit is exactly the
same as saying I want the government to eliminate the surplus in the non-government sector they are identical
statements so you might believe that you might you know be somebody who wants the
government to siphon dollars out of the rest of the economy a surplus works like a vacuum it Hoover's dollars off of
balance sheets because the government's taxing more away from us than its spending back in you if you believe
that's a great idea that's your prerogative I would say the time and place for the government's
budget to move to surplus is when the economy is has reached its capacity constraint you want to withdraw more
than you spend back in it's reasonable to see the government budget move into surplus at that point um Stephanie you
have a couple of detractors right so you know that and I know that's a Larry Summers Paul Krugman I don't even know
what Calvin ball is by the way but let me just describe it to you it is changing your theory every time someone
offers up tough questions I guess that's Calvin ball I've got to go look that up on my my dictionary but what do you say
to your detractors that printing money isn't the answer that it would cause some type of capital market
destabilization that we're in fact already doing it so it's a duper what is one of us more a granular intellectual
response to that look again I think that Larry understands this actually the
response is that mmm tea has nothing to do with printing money it has never been about
printing money so the way to you know hand wave or dismiss the work that we've done is to caricature it as something
that it's not so that it looks and sounds silly so that you can wave it away and say that's a silly proposal we
are not proposing that the federal government print money we are explaining the monetary operations which reveal how
the government already spends today and how the government already spends today is that like I said every piece of
legislation every spending bill orders up new dollars and the Fed creates them when it carries out the
payments so no assuming your theories are true then there's great reason to be
optimistic right I would think we will be able to solve the problem of the pandemic we'll be able to figure out a
way to produce infrastructure in the society which will hopefully create more
economic output and economic rent and potentially more fairness economically
in the society so there's great reasons to be optimistic basically right I would
hope so look if we are facing problems deep and serious problems in our economy
and in our societies and we can't address them then we're in real trouble
so I'm optimistic that we can address them sure look it if you say I got a
bunch of idle resources lying around I can see tens of millions of people who want to work but don't have any way to
get a job I can see businesses that have a lot of capacity I got you know there's
no construction boom going on so I see all of these you know it's heavy equipment I see companies that can
manufacture this stuff I could do infrastructure I could pay that company and now they have some sales so they
have some revenue and some profit I can hire these workers and they can go build infrastructure and fix things and I can
pay them and the economy ends up with a bunch of people who are employed who
have income who you know become spenders into the economy who then support other
jobs and we get a new bridge or better infrastructure or whatever that sounds that stuff makes sense let me ask you
one more question and I'm gonna kick back to John because he's he's got just one or two more from our audience and
then we'll hopefully you'll give me the chance to reconvene with you before the election because I'm curious to see how
this all plays itself out but why not just have no taxes that why not just say
okay listen ears we're gonna do this is what the government's gonna spend in a year we're gonna put these entries
computationally into a computer and the government's gonna go out and spend this money and we're just not going to have
any taxes and by the way I'll point out to everybody here because the government delayed the taxes in April we haven't
picked up that income for the government in the last three months so I don't think of taxes as income for the
government I don't think of it that way at all remember I said when you send your check to the IRS that's where the
dollar goes to the graveyard it's just done it's subtracted away it's gone we put it to bed new dollars are born when
the government spends if the question is how many times how many dollars can the government safely spend in without you
know killing off any any of the dollars that it spends in without taxing to take
some of them away from us the answer is up to the point that the economy reaches full employment and then that's it so
right now you know we watched Congress pass four bills the biggest of course is the Care Act 2.2 trillion no offsets
that's pure spending no paired with an increase in taxes the House has passed a
three trillion dollar bill the heroes Act there are no offsets there that's another three trillion that would enter
but over time some of those dollars would come back because people earn a dollar you pay tax so you know some of
that is gonna get sent to the graveyard so the question is I mean the answer is
that at some point the economy god-willing recovers to the point that
we are no longer able to spend without offsets and at that point Congress has
to write bills and they have to care that legislation that proposed spending with some offsets somewhere or we going
to get an inflation problem okay I think it's well said Stephanie you major case brilliantly I have to tell you I loved
your book I and I and I mentioned you before this started that I grew up thinking more about
Austrian economics and on me sis and obviously Milton Friedman but the world
around me was happening in a very Keynesian sort of way which I find fascinating and and listen you know you
can't take away the economic progress that our society has had over the last hundred years but we do have to figure
out how to make that economic progress more fair more you know wider bandwidth
for more and more people John you have any more questions for professor before we sign off yeah a couple more audience
questions I feel like we could go for another two hours but I'll wrap it up with a couple quick audience questions
what's your views on on cryptocurrency and and whether they have a place in modern society well I think they have
found a place in modern society I I don't spend a lot of time I don't I
don't think I've ever written about crypto I don't spend a lot of time and agonizing over its existence or
nonexistence or people want to you know invest in crypto I have no I have no
problem I I don't see it as a you know threat to the existing monetary system
it's not going to replace the US dollar or anything like that all right last question do you think we
could turn us States into quasi M&T sovereigns if we allow the Fed to monetize as the state issuance of US
dollar-denominated debt which sort of seems like what we're doing with the Fed municipal lending facility I think so I
mean in a sense if I understand the question correctly could we effectively
free individual states from their limited capacity to spend by having the
Fed step up and back effectively backstop them with currency issuing capacity yeah all right well that's all
we have thanks for going a little over time with us Stephanie again her book is the deficit myth it's available at all
major booksellers as Anthony said we would highly recommend that you buy it and read it even if you you know maybe
have different preconceptions about economic theory I think Stephanie's book professor Kelton's book will open your
mind to possibilities and as Anthony said we hope that you're right and it would
allow us to spend more and solve a lot of problems in society so professor Callum thanks so much for joining us and
and good luck you're on the New York Times bestseller list now we hope you continue to climb that list thank you
both very much thank you congratulations professor we hope to see you soon thanks Anthony take care.
my name is John Darcy I'm the managing director of salt which is a global thought leadership forum at the
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intersection of Finance technology and politics what we're trying to do with these digital salt talks is provide
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interviews with leading investors creators and thinkers just like we do at our global salt conferences we're trying
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to provide a platform for big ideas and provide our audience a window into the minds of subject matter experts and
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today we're very excited to welcome stephanie kelton to salt talks it couldn't be more topical her book
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couldn't be more topical and we'll talk about that book in a second but Stephanie is currently a professor at
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Stony Brook University earlier this month she released a new book called the deficit myth modern monetary theory and
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the burst birth of the people's economy which is already in New York Times bestseller and congratulations to
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Stephanie on that she is a leading authority on modern monetary theory which is a new approach to economics
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that has gained increasing popularity in recent years her work is particularly
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relevant given the large deficits that have been run by the US government in the wake of the Cova 19 pandemic so again we're very excited to have her on
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given the timing in addition to her many academic publications and the book that we mentioned she's been a contributor at
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Bloomberg opinion she's written for the New York Times she's written for the LA Times and US News and World Report's contributed to
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CNN among many other outlets she has worked both in academia and in politics
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as she served as the chief economist on the US Senate Budget Committee as a Democratic staff in 2015 and as a senior
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adviser to the Bernie Sanders 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns Politico
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called her one of the 50 most influential thinkers in 2016 and Bloomberg listed her as one of the 50
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people who defined 2019 Barron's named her one of the 100 most influential
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women in finance in 2020 so her work is gaining increasing visibility she was
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previously the chair of the Department of Economics at the University of Missouri at Kansas City if you have any
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questions for Stephanie during today's talk please enter them in the Q&A box at the bottom of your video screen
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and conducting today's interview is going to be Anthony scare Moochie the founder and Managing Partner of skybridge capital capital a global
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alternative investment firm Anthony is also the chairman of salt and I'm going to turn it over to Anthony for the interview John thank you and
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Stephanie congratulations on the book I understand now it's a New York Times best seller and so fantastic on that and
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I I read the book after I read Zacks book and so I think it's interesting and I would encourage everybody to go to the
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politics and prose podcast where Zack Carter who we had on last week and Stephanie are together talking about
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John Maynard Keynes and deficits and why they do matter but there's some myths
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related to deficits but before we get in there Stephanie can you tell us a little bit more about your background what got
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you so interested in this and tell us a little bit about what you described to be a Copernican moment where you're
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having a Eureka about how economics is actually working sure well first let me just start by
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saying thank you for the opportunity come spend some time with you and your
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viewers today you know I was studying economics I did undergraduate degrees in
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both finance and economics so I picked up a couple of bachelor's degrees and then I really enjoyed economics so I
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went off to Cambridge University and started you know a graduate program there and I was mostly learning the
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conventional approach to economics you know just conventional macro stuff and I
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won a fellowship through Christ's College while I was at Cambridge and that sent me off to the levy economics
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Institute which is a think-tank in upstate New York and that's where I
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first started to encounter really these sort of ideas and it it actually came to
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me through someone named Warren Mosler and Warren is was a Wall Street guy
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comes from the finance world he had written a little book and he called it
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soft currency economics and he called it that to distinguish it from hard currency right from gold standard or
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fixed exchange rate framework's monetary systems and so
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Lauren wrote this little book and started circulating it he really wanted to talk with you know economists at top
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universities and he was reaching out to people at Harvard and Stanford and Princeton and so forth
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nobody really wanted to engage with him and at some point he stumbled on a group
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of economists in an online forum and started exchanging ideas and so you know
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in 1997 I guess I got this little book and I read it and it it flipped my
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worldview upside down I couldn't wrap my head around it didn't it couldn't be right I can't think it can't be right it
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can't be right because it went so counter to everything that I had been trained to understand about government
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finance and taxes and stuff but here was this really smart guy and he had it all laid out he had the accounting down you
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know he had it all in balance sheet form and it's really hard to pull the wool over somebody's eyes when you're dotting
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the eyes and crossing the t's and writing about the t-accounts and so I kept looking at it and it just bothered
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me that I couldn't kind of shake the idea so I went searching to see if
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Warren might be right and I started reading Treasury and Fed manuals and talking to people at the you know debt
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management trying to figure out all this stuff and whether it really worked the way Warren believed it did so this is
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I'm getting to the end of this story here basically I convinced myself
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through a bunch of research that warns ideas were sound and that what I had been trained to understand some of the
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models about government budget constraints and that sort of stuff were just not applicable with the monetary
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system that we have today no I want you to keep going steady where you feel you
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need to I this is interview about you and so you mentioned in the book which I
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also found fascinating is that you know we see the government the way we see ourselves or our household or our
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business and so but we're not originators of currency we're actually users of currency to use your words and
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and and so governments can effectively originate currency and then you mentioned in the book well think about
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our debt it's 23 Trillian we could get rid of it with one electronic keystroke but I don't think
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you a hundred percent mean that either right so so where should we be as it
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relates to deficits you also write in the book that deficits do matter so so
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lay out for us what modern monetary theory is and put it into the context of people that had trained like me and
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people that got trained like you before you had this sort of Eureka moment okay
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so there's a lot there let me see if we can unpack it all in some bite-sized pieces so the the first bit you
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mentioned is really kind of at the core of mmt the idea that we have to recognize that the federal government's
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budget works differently from a household budget and the thing that distinguishes the federal government
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from everybody else is the fact that it's the issuer of our currency in fact it has the sole legal authority to
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create the US dollar I mean it's the issuer of our currency I can't do it you can't do it private businesses can't do
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it and state and local governments you're thinking Stephanie that some of my relatives have done that in the past but I assure you that that's not true
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okay keep keep going well you know a lot of people try and you end up in an orange
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jumpsuit because it's illegal to counterfeit the currency and so you know it would be nice if the rest of us could
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be currency issuers you wouldn't have 50 governors running around imploring Congress to provide some aid right now
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as their budgets are falling apart if governors could take care of this themselves you know because they could
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just issue the dollar they'd be fine but they can't so we start with that recognition that the federal government
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is the issuer of the currency and therefore a number of things follow one it can never run out of money hey
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President Obama when he you know he comes into office he's newly elected and
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within a matter of months he sits down for an interview and you remember I mean the economy is falling apart we're
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sliding into the great recession he's asked at what point do we run out of money and his response was we're out of
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money now I mean those were his words were out of money now you know okay so the federal government can never run out
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of money it can't have bills coming to that it can to Ford to pay unlike a household or a
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small business or a large business right it can't go broke can't be pushed into bankruptcy so so what about the deficit
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what what are the implications for the deficit well look the people get very anxious about the idea of the government
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running fiscal deficits they believe that they're inherently irresponsible
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it's evidence that you're miss managing your finances you should live within your means where I hear that all the
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time the deficit is you know just the difference between two numbers one number is how many dollars the
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government spends into the economy and the other number is how many dollars the government subtracts away from people in
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the economy right it that's all it is so if the government is spending more dollars in than it is subtracting away
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we labeled it a deficit but what we forget and this is something mmt helps
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to remind us is that you know if they spend a hundred in and they only tax ninety away somebody gets ten that their
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deficits result in financial surpluses in some other part of the economy so
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that's at first and key point it really comes from the work of wind-god Lee who was a British economist who developed
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all this through sectoral balanced framework and so forth but their red ink is our black ink okay so as I like to
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say every deficit is good for someone right the question is for whom and for what are those deficits being run so
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then we get to the question of the debt because fiscal deficits result in the
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accumulation over time of what we call the national debt and in the book you just mentioned I have a section where I
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say look if we couldn't pay it off overnight if we wanted to we could talk about that section here in a minute but
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I think it's really a misnomer I don't think we should be calling it the national debt at all I think of this
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thing as just a historical record of all of the past instances in our nation's
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history where the government made a financial deposit to the economy right
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it ran a deficit engaged in deficit spending and it turned those dollars that it put in into Treasuries it turned
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the into interest-bearing currency and that's really all that is you know it's an interest-bearing welcome of the US
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dollar so let me let me let me ask you this question because I often get asked this question as an investor if you go
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back to the gold standard and we we unclipped ourselves on August 15th
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Richard Nixon made that decision he then quipped that were all Keynesian now meaning he was going to allow the
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currency to float it was gonna become a fiat currency at that time it was $35 an
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ounce today gold is trading at $1,700 an ounce and so strict monetarists would
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make the case while we devalued that currency by 98 percent in order to
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monetize and be able to pay our debt and one of the negative consequences potentially and I'm interested in your
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opinion of this is that it hurts middle class people and lower middle class people because assets are tied to the
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currency the asset if I'm in this home and it was worth a dollar in 1971 it's now worth $10 but if I'm a wage earner
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with no assets my wages in fact haven't caught up with that monetization if you
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will and so what's your reaction to that well I have a lot of concerns about the
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you know median income and average earnings and low wage earners and what
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has happened really to the pattern where wages used to keep pace more or less
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with productivity growth and then something changed and productivity growth continued its upward trajectory
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and the real median wages just flattened out and I don't think that has to do
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with the fact that we untethered our currency from gold I think it has to do with a lot of things including overtime
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globalization the decline of unionization rates and so forth so I I
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don't see it as a byproduct of abandoning a gold standard but we would
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make the case though that there has been fairly dramatic inflationary periods in
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the United States some class economic theory would suggest that that
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is related to things like fiat currency and it's related to things like you know
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not adhering to those classical principles that you and I both learned and you would say what about those
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periods of time well we haven't actually had very many I mean it depends what kind of an arc of history you want to
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look at when we were on the gold standard what we confronted regularly was deflation we had depression after to
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print out recessions but actual depressions and we had many of them and those depressions occurred you know in
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an environment where prices would collapse and so we deflation is far more serious and was a regular sort of threat
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under the gold standard but we haven't had really periods of problematic
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inflation post Bretton Woods Proust Nixon let's go let's go to the 70s for a
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second where we're running pretty high inflationary rates and we got a long-term bond up to sixteen or seventy
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percent so what would you say was the causality of that well a lot of things oil price shocks the Vietnam War
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maybe Volcker now this might surprise you to hear me say this but you know
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people people assume that when the Fed raises interest rates that that is how
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you reduce inflationary pressures but you know in mmt and i have a little bit about this in the book i don't go into
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it in any detail but I've written a paper on this as well raising interest rates raises borrowing costs right and
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to the extent that firms are leveraged and they're able to pass on to end consumers the increase in interest rates
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and form of higher prices it's possible that raising interest rates doesn't
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actually quell in fresh inflationary pressures but it actually fuels an acceleration in prices so a lot of
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things could be could be happening there and some of them might be counterintuitive so so let's
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fast-forward right up to 2020 rates are low we could argue they're at all-time
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lows and respects I mean certainly measured by inflation and so forth in some cases you
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know the long bond is actually negative now even though Girona pal saying doesn't like negative rates but
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but is it even possible to raise rates at this point and I'm talking about over
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the next five or ten years do you envision a scenario where we have rate hikes in the United States you know my
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answer is I hope so because if we don't see interest rates go up it's going to
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be because the economy is in such rotten condition for three or five years so I
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mean that that's the answer the question could I see rates staying at zero or roughly zero for three to five years
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sure I can't if we screw up the policy badly enough that's exactly what central
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bank's gonna do so so professor let's say that you are our economic czar and you could sit there and you could manage
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the budget what would be the percentage that you would run of our GDP in a
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budget deficit and then more importantly how would you deploy that capital into
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the economy what would you spend it on yeah well I think infrastructure has to
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be really high on the list now that's a longer term I would say recovery strategy nearer term I think that you
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know I do believe Congress had the right idea with the Small Business Association loans and the PPP I think that was the
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right idea other countries do it and they execute well we didn't have the
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infrastructure up to turn flip the switch and get that thing going and execute well immediately but keeping
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workers on payroll and attached to their employers I applaud that I think it was the right move I don't know how much
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more can be done now you clawing workers back or building on that program
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I think getting money to state local governments immediately is absolutely critical I would crank that up I think the
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trillion that the house put in is is a good number I would do it looking longer
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term yes I think that you know a massive infrastructure project is
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the right way to go we've deferred maintenance on our nation's infrastructure for probably a decade and
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the problem just grows bigger and bigger every year there's so much work that needs to be done that's usually a
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bipartisan sort of thing both both Republicans and Democrats understand that's a proper place for government to
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make investments I would do lots of that and you know I I can imagine a lot of
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other things we we've got now 30 million additional people who've lost health care I think you know for me I would I
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would tackle health care and then you see what you're left with and you know we're gonna I think we're gonna end up
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with situation where millions of people who have lost and have yet to lose jobs
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in this downturn are not going to find work again for years if ever and for
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them I think it makes sense to explore programs like FDR implemented in the New
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Deal era Works Progress Administration a CCC and national youth we can't have millions of young kids walking around
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unemployed in an environment where the tensions are high and and people are
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desperate you can't have that well I'm certainly in that camp we certainly have to figure that out because that just
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that inactivity the the you know my grandmother would say that idle hands is the makes for the devil's work but but
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you you deficit spending talking about a percentages so what would you spend I don't think I don't think anybody knows
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that because three years now you know three years it's just about the demand leakages Anthony for me for me right so
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how much space is opening up that needs to be closed off and some of it will close itself as the government begins to
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spend through a multiplier effect you'll get some bang for the buck but then you just have to stand ready to to keep in
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place enough fiscal support you know war and Mosler keeps talking with you he'd probably say you just count the bodies
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in the unemployment line and then you'll know when to stop I when you get back to fellow you you you do make that case and
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I'm gonna let you address that in a second but I and John has some questions for me for the audience so I'm gonna let him interrupt but I have one last
19:49
question I was on the phone with one of my clients who had worked in Brazil and
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he said that he had experienced rampid inflation there as the government
20:00
quote-unquote printed money we know that Argentina had rampant inflation and Greece has had rampant inflation do you
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think that were your theories are tied to the US dollar because it's the
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reserve currency or do you think your theory is applicable to any sovereign that can print currency and if it is
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applicable any sovereign how do you explain those issues that places like Brazil and Argentina have had yeah so
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you know Argentina and Brazil have a lot of external debt they don't constrict
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they don't constrain their borrowing to their own currency they borrow in foreign currency and you know you have
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countries that are very dependent upon a particular export whether it's soybeans
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in Argentina whether it's oil in Venezuela you become really dependent upon revenues from you know one or two
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key export industries and then all of a sudden there's a collapse in the price
20:59
of that thing and you're in real trouble because your budget is built around being able to finance spending based on
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that anticipated cash flow when it starts to dry up you're in trouble you got countries like you know in Zimbabwe
21:13
for example people often raise in Bob ley or Germany or something you know Milton Friedman of course famously
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quipped that inflation was always in everywhere a monetary phenomenon and people have said it's always because
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you've got too much money chasing too few goods but what usually happens in these hyperinflationary episodes is that
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you end up with the too few goods piece something happens on the supply side there's a shock in the case of Zimbabwe
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you know Mugabe comes to power he wants to reward the freedom fighters he takes
21:45
land away from white farmers redistributes it to the blacks the freedom fighters and they don't know how
21:51
to farm the land and so you end up initially with huge food shortages in an agricultural economy and they're forced
21:58
to import food to feed the population and they're printing money to do that and you get hyperinflation so my answer
22:06
is that look to the supply side and look to countries that are borrowing in foreign currency
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you know you don't have to look far to see Japan right Japan's not the US Japan's got the largest debt to GDP
22:18
ratio in the entire world they still are battling deflationary pressures they got
22:23
you know haven't been able to get inflation up to 2% in three decades or so is that a demographic phenomena
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exclusive to Japan or there are other factors there meaning that aging population and the upside-down pyramid
22:38
of that is causing that or are there other things look I think I think there
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are probably other things but I think demographics make matter a lot in terms of what's happening there I think it
22:48
when you have an aging society it makes sense that as people age and downsize
22:54
they consume less and so you know you're trying to engineer you know rapid
22:59
economic growth in a society where people are just trying to consume less as they age it's not gonna work out all
23:06
that well I also think that they may have the brake pedal and the gas pedal mixed up in terms of what they've done
23:12
with interest rates and QE that a lot of what they think is monetary stimulus might actually be working the other way
23:19
around and then they get very anxious when the deficit increases so they keep hiking the consumption tax and so you get these
23:25
fits and starts in Japan so okay makes
23:30
sense John do you have you have any questions yeah well I want to go to reform before we end I want to go to
23:36
that employment thing because I I thought that was the more fast at any aspect of the book I want to give professor kellton an opportunity to talk
23:43
about that but go ahead fire it some questions from our own yeah we've talked a little bit about government spending but we haven't talked about the other
23:49
side of the ledger in terms of how to think about taxes within the MMT framework in your book you talk about if
23:55
taxes are removed and demand for a government currency will fall and people might stop working you know do we cut
24:02
taxes in an mmt framework do we raise taxes on the wealthy how do you think about how we should change tax policy in
24:09
the United States well it depends where where we are in terms of you know the
24:15
economic outlook what would I do with taxes right now I sure wouldn't be raising them you know you know so I
24:22
think that I'm not certainly I'm a Democrat but I'm not allergic to tax cuts I think tax cuts are perfectly
24:29
reasonable fiscal policy provided that they are designed to aim that benefit on
24:36
the other side that the windfall goes to people who are going to turn around and spend that money back into the economy so can you just eliminate all taxes and
24:45
expect the economy to continue to function and government to be able to provision itself with resources nuts oh
24:51
yeah you're right in the book I talked about if you want to start a currency from scratch historically one of the
24:57
ways the governments have done this is to impose a tax on a population of
25:03
people they say you are now subject to this tax and what mmt points out is the government can't collect the tax until
25:09
it first spends that which is necessary to pay the taxes you've got to spend the currency first so that somebody can have
25:16
it and turn around and use it to pay the tax so taxes are important they can help you start up a currency maintain the value
25:23
of the currency they allow you to make adjustments to the tax code so you can impact distribution if you want to do
25:29
that they allow you to create incentives and disincentives so lots of reasons and
25:35
they mitigate inflationary pressure which is obviously an important one if the government only spent its currency
25:41
into existence you know every time the government spends a dollar it gives birth to a new dollar and that dollar
25:47
travels around the economy until it is removed by government only the government can can take it back up so
25:53
you write your check to the IRS that is the death sentence for the dollar that is where the dollar goes to die so it
26:00
has a life cycle and the government regulates inflationary pressure by
26:05
avoiding spending too many of its dollars in and allowing them to travel around so it subtracts some from our
26:13
hands over time thank you the next question we have a couple questions
26:18
about universal basic income versus of federal jobs guarantees so you talked a lot about federal jobs guarantee as
26:25
being a prescription for solving a lot of the ills that we have in our society and you talked about how Warren Mosler
26:31
believes that you should just continue to spend until you get that unemployment rate down to zero in what scenarios do
26:38
you think you know basic income is the most effective prescription and what scenarios do you think a federal jobs guarantee is most
26:45
effective and and right now what would be your solution yeah well for me it
26:50
comes down to what problem are we trying to solve so I've engaged in a lot of conversations with people who are
26:57
advocates of ubi and very often they say the reason they like the ubi is because
27:02
they want to fix poverty right they want to address poverty I am an advocate of
27:09
the job guarantee because I want to fix involuntary unemployment I want to eliminate involuntary unemployment but
27:15
this is an environment where ok things have changed since 2019 right now we
27:22
have millions and millions of people who need to pay their rent and eat some food
27:27
and you know stay current on their bills so they don't wreck their credit score
27:35
and and so forth so what do we do for those people we there are jobs for them
27:41
and we don't have a federal job guarantee in place so am i supportive of providing you know disbursements monthly
27:49
income support absolutely I am but in more normal times I think that some kind
27:56
of a basic income working alongside the job guarantee is the better way so that
28:02
for people who want to work but can't find a job anywhere else in the economy let's create a job for them there's
28:09
plenty of work that needs to be done for those who can't or shouldn't be working let's provide the basic income support
28:17
and that's how I that's how I look at it great we have one more question then
28:22
I'll kick it back over to Anthony can you envision a scenario in which inflation did become problematic so
28:29
let's say that we adopted a modern monetary theory framework and things went awry what would that scenario look
28:35
like well let me tell you this because I think it's so important for people to
28:40
understand that and I'm saying this is someone who worked as the chief
28:45
economist on the United States Senate Budget Committee for a period of time I listened to Republicans I listened to
28:51
Democrats I a lot of legislation get introduced I saw amendments proposed never once in my
28:57
time in the Senate did I hear a single staffer or a single member of the Senate
29:05
raised concerns about inflation not once it's not even an afterthought it's just
29:10
not a consideration at all so what I'm saying is that mmt centers inflation
29:17
risk that is the relevant constraint right there and you have to identify and
29:22
respect the economy's real productive capacity or you will run into a situation where you push things too far
29:29
so what I'm proposing has to be an improvement on what we have today because what we have today is nobody at
29:36
all connecting proposed new spending to concerns about inflation so the best way
29:43
to fight inflation is before it happens right not to start up an inflation problem so what I'd like to see is for
29:51
Congress to change the federal budgeting process right now somebody writes a bill
29:56
and the legislation goes to the Congressional Budget Office and CBO
30:01
scores that bill with one primary consideration does it add to the deficit
30:06
yes or no and if so how much that for me is the least important question we can ask CBO the least important let's ask
30:13
CBO and other agencies to help Congress figure out whether the proposed spending
30:21
carries inflation risk and if so how can they mitigate that inflation risk if
30:27
they propose money to be one quick example I know you priced a wrapper somebody else wants in but one quick
30:33
example suppose that we were back in December of 2019 and we were looking at
30:39
an economy that a lot of people would have said this is basically a full employment economy right unemployment's
30:45
three and a half percent or so and Congress said we want to do infrastructure you remember that Trump
30:51
met with Pelosi and Schumer they went to the White House sat down everybody they
30:56
had a meeting of the minds on this two trillion dollars said let's do two trillion dollars of infrastructure
31:01
spending everybody said great let's do it and then came the how are we gonna pay for it stuff right but suppose suppose that you ended
31:10
up with Democrats in the House and Senate and in the White House in the same economic environment and somebody
31:17
put an infrastructure bill together for a couple of trillion dollars or more and
31:22
attach the wealth tax to it and said this is our pay for and it's gonna raise
31:28
all the revenue we need to cover the cost of the infrastructure they send the bill to CBO CBO looks at it they say it's beautiful
31:34
it's gorgeous bill doesn't add to the deficit wonderful a plus send it back now Congress can vote to pass that
31:41
spending what I'm saying is Kelton would go oh my god crazy right are you crazy
31:49
because you've just authorized trillions of dollars of spending where you're
31:55
offset your so-called pay for is a tax that falls exclusively on the tiniest
32:02
sliver of people what is it like seventy eight thousand people or whatever would be subject to if it were senator
32:07
Warren's well tax you're taking the dollars away from people let's face it they weren't going to spend them chasing
32:13
real goods and services in the economy anyway right so you haven't mitigated
32:18
the inflation risk with that particular offset so I think that we are more
32:25
vulnerable to inflation risk under the current budgeting practice than we would
32:30
be if we move to as you say an mmt model
32:37
over to you to continue your in election discussion I appreciate John I'm
32:43
fascinated by this I was just talk a little bit more about the employment phenomenon so let's let's go to the
32:49
three-and-a-half percent unemployment doctor Bernanke or chairman Powell would say that that's full employment it felt
32:56
like for employment to me you would say what that that's not quite full employment and we both are going to
33:03
stipulate that there's going to be frictional activity in the economy leads to some level of unemployment but what's
33:08
full full unemployment in your mind well here's what I'll say if we announced
33:15
that the federal government was prepared to provide a job to anybody who wanted one
33:22
but couldn't find one anywhere else in the economy now frictional unemployment somebody who's between jobs they're not going to take that job they know they're
33:28
gonna quickly find another private-sector job so they're not going to show up but if you made the announcement walk in to your nearest
33:34
American Job Center being old unemployment offices if you don't have a job and you want one walk in you can
33:40
walk out with a job if you make that announcement and nobody shows up I will stipulate that we were at full
33:46
employment on the other hand if 10 or 15 million people show up then I think we
33:52
have just revealed the true extent of the unemployment problem so you know in
33:57
other words you don't know unless you have an option but I think we also want to see you you're gonna want to get a
34:03
job that is paying you more than say your unemployment benefits right or you
34:08
want to get a job as paying you more than a workers comp that you may be getting from some other job that you can
34:14
no longer do but that be still say well probably so but your unemployment right now unemployment insurance I wouldn't
34:20
eliminate that by the way yeah we let people who you know you lose a job you've got unemployment and you continue
34:27
and look for work and maybe you know you get lucky and you're reemployed in a short period of time but when employ an
34:34
employment runs out and then people don't have another option this would be an option for folks like that so so you
34:41
brought up something that I think is brilliant and so I want to re-emphasize it because if I were a central banker
34:49
thank God I'm not but if I were that would be the number one thing I'm worried about is deflation and I just
34:55
want to remind everybody on the call why are central bankers worried about deflation they they're worried because
35:00
you can't pay them the debt back with dollars that are worth more than the ones that you borrowed you include the
35:06
society and that's clearly what happened in the 1930s it wasn't until and léa
35:12
quad Ahmed from the Lords of Finance the book I know you're familiar with he points out it was Franklin Roosevelt and
35:17
his common sense in 1933 that unclipped us from that gold standard and perhaps
35:23
Benjamin strong if he didn't die the first Federal Reserve Chairman would have been able to have figured that out and then the liquidity started entering
35:30
the market and the on employment numbers went down and now it's 1933 to two thousands or let's call
35:38
that 87 years we've had reasonably high to very high deficit spending since in
35:45
1969 we've only had two surpluses it was the 1969 surplus and the fiscal year
35:51
2000 surplus and yet we've had unbelievable economic progress professor
35:57
kellton so so III want you to tell the naysayers out there that are looking at
36:03
this framework and saying well our grandchildren are gonna pay for it our great-grandchildren are gonna pay for it
36:10
it's all gonna come home to roost or it's a house of cards about the collapse on us what would your response be to
36:16
them well my response is just stop thinking of it as debt that's the route
36:24
that's that's the response and that's why I titled chapter three the national
36:30
debt parentheses that isn't because I think that's the problem when once we
36:35
start calling it debt and thinking of it in those terms we kind of personalize it it's like corporate debt or it's like
36:40
household debt or whatever eventually you have to pay it back that's when things go awry so that's why I keep
36:46
saying just think of it as part of the net money supply of the US so yeah so not to interrupt but let me just ask you
36:52
this so we we do the budget together we come up with what we want to spend on and we have infrastructure and we're
36:59
taking in three point seven to four trillion dollars of tax revenues but we really need to spend six or seven
37:05
trillion dollars hypothetically why wouldn't we just print that money and just pay it right there and then balance
37:13
the budget every single year but won't be your economic policy answer to not
37:18
doing that so there's only one way for the government to pay for anything already today it pay every single
37:25
payment that is made by government is carried out by the Federal Reserve changing numbers in the appropriate bank
37:32
account so Congress authorizes the spending and that effectively orders up new dollars from the Federal Reserve and
37:39
the Fed fills the order by using the computer keyboard to make payments right to clear the payments on
37:45
behalf of Treasury that's the way it works now you're saying I think why do we bother messing around with the bond
37:52
sale piece why not just let the Fed mark the numbers up and be done with it and
37:57
then you could have deficit spending without an increase in the national debt and to which I say good good idea good
38:06
question I mean the bond piece is optional this is the thing people don't get they don't understand what the people that are on
38:13
this call that have to balance their checkbook every day and they're balancing their corporate jet books as
38:18
well you would say well because the federal government can issue the currency they're able to do that you
38:24
don't issue currency you use currency so you're not able to do that and you don't think there would be inflationary
38:30
consequences to us doing no there in fact selling bonds is almost certainly
38:36
more inflationary than not selling the bonds why because you're putting trillions of interest bearing dollars
38:43
out there right those are dollars that pay extra dollars on top of those dollars versus just leaving the dollars
38:51
in the system right where you're multiplying them up by turning them into interest-bearing dollars okay so you're
38:57
basically saying that the national debt for a modern monetary theorist is a little bit of a mirage it does have that
39:04
hangover effect of the interest bearing that you're suggesting but if we just printed it and replaced it sovereigns
39:13
from around the world people that invest in the US they wouldn't lose confidence in us they wouldn't lose confidence in
39:20
the m1 or m2 production of our money supply they'd be okay with that they
39:25
would say okay anytime the US government needs to spend money they're just printing it and the rest of the world
39:32
would be okay with that and still accept us as the reserve currency yeah yeah if
39:37
they haven't figured out that that's how it works already then they're being a little bit duped because we are already
39:44
creating new digital collars that was the most fascinating part of your book and that's the reason why I'm
39:49
encouraging everybody on this call to read it because we are in fact already doing that and so it has worked and it
39:56
sort of worked for the 87 years since Franklin Roosevelt began that more aggressive process of
40:03
doing it so what do you say to the deficit hawks out there which there are many on this
40:10
call trust me because I'm getting text messages and all kinds of nonsense coming into my phone so so what do you
40:16
say to those people I just say you know there is some ironclad logic behind this
40:23
and the ironclad logic is in the balance sheet entries it is simply the case that on the other side of the government's
40:30
deficit lie is somebody else's surplus there are no two ways around that we we are going to debate that or we can
40:37
debate it but whoever's taking the opposite position is gonna lose because I'm right about this so you you know
40:42
saying I want the government to eliminate its deficit is exactly the
40:48
same as saying I want the government to eliminate the surplus in the non-government sector they are identical
40:53
statements so you might believe that you might you know be somebody who wants the
40:58
government to siphon dollars out of the rest of the economy a surplus works like a vacuum it Hoover's dollars off of
41:05
balance sheets because the government's taxing more away from us than its spending back in you if you believe
41:11
that's a great idea that's your prerogative I would say the time and place for the government's
41:16
budget to move to surplus is when the economy is has reached its capacity constraint you want to withdraw more
41:23
than you spend back in it's reasonable to see the government budget move into surplus at that point um Stephanie you
41:32
have a couple of detractors right so you know that and I know that's a Larry Summers Paul Krugman I don't even know
41:38
what Calvin ball is by the way but let me just describe it to you it is changing your theory every time someone
41:45
offers up tough questions I guess that's Calvin ball I've got to go look that up on my my dictionary but what do you say
41:52
to your detractors that printing money isn't the answer that it would cause some type of capital market
41:59
destabilization that we're in fact already doing it so it's a duper what is one of us more a granular intellectual
42:06
response to that look again I think that Larry understands this actually the
42:12
response is that mmm tea has nothing to do with printing money it has never been about
42:18
printing money so the way to you know hand wave or dismiss the work that we've done is to caricature it as something
42:25
that it's not so that it looks and sounds silly so that you can wave it away and say that's a silly proposal we
42:31
are not proposing that the federal government print money we are explaining the monetary operations which reveal how
42:39
the government already spends today and how the government already spends today is that like I said every piece of
42:45
legislation every spending bill orders up new dollars and the Fed creates them when it carries out the
42:53
payments so no assuming your theories are true then there's great reason to be
42:59
optimistic right I would think we will be able to solve the problem of the pandemic we'll be able to figure out a
43:05
way to produce infrastructure in the society which will hopefully create more
43:10
economic output and economic rent and potentially more fairness economically
43:15
in the society so there's great reasons to be optimistic basically right I would
43:22
hope so look if we are facing problems deep and serious problems in our economy
43:28
and in our societies and we can't address them then we're in real trouble
43:34
so I'm optimistic that we can address them sure look it if you say I got a
43:39
bunch of idle resources lying around I can see tens of millions of people who want to work but don't have any way to
43:45
get a job I can see businesses that have a lot of capacity I got you know there's
43:51
no construction boom going on so I see all of these you know it's heavy equipment I see companies that can
43:58
manufacture this stuff I could do infrastructure I could pay that company and now they have some sales so they
44:04
have some revenue and some profit I can hire these workers and they can go build infrastructure and fix things and I can
44:09
pay them and the economy ends up with a bunch of people who are employed who
44:14
have income who you know become spenders into the economy who then support other
44:20
jobs and we get a new bridge or better infrastructure or whatever that sounds that stuff makes sense let me ask you
44:27
one more question and I'm gonna kick back to John because he's he's got just one or two more from our audience and
44:33
then we'll hopefully you'll give me the chance to reconvene with you before the election because I'm curious to see how
44:38
this all plays itself out but why not just have no taxes that why not just say
44:46
okay listen ears we're gonna do this is what the government's gonna spend in a year we're gonna put these entries
44:52
computationally into a computer and the government's gonna go out and spend this money and we're just not going to have
44:57
any taxes and by the way I'll point out to everybody here because the government delayed the taxes in April we haven't
45:04
picked up that income for the government in the last three months so I don't think of taxes as income for the
45:10
government I don't think of it that way at all remember I said when you send your check to the IRS that's where the
45:16
dollar goes to the graveyard it's just done it's subtracted away it's gone we put it to bed new dollars are born when
45:23
the government spends if the question is how many times how many dollars can the government safely spend in without you
45:31
know killing off any any of the dollars that it spends in without taxing to take
45:36
some of them away from us the answer is up to the point that the economy reaches full employment and then that's it so
45:42
right now you know we watched Congress pass four bills the biggest of course is the Care Act 2.2 trillion no offsets
45:49
that's pure spending no paired with an increase in taxes the House has passed a
45:55
three trillion dollar bill the heroes Act there are no offsets there that's another three trillion that would enter
46:01
but over time some of those dollars would come back because people earn a dollar you pay tax so you know some of
46:08
that is gonna get sent to the graveyard so the question is I mean the answer is
46:13
that at some point the economy god-willing recovers to the point that
46:18
we are no longer able to spend without offsets and at that point Congress has
46:23
to write bills and they have to care that legislation that proposed spending with some offsets somewhere or we going
46:30
to get an inflation problem okay I think it's well said Stephanie you major case brilliantly I have to tell you I loved
46:37
your book I and I and I mentioned you before this started that I grew up thinking more about
46:43
Austrian economics and on me sis and obviously Milton Friedman but the world
46:49
around me was happening in a very Keynesian sort of way which I find fascinating and and listen you know you
46:56
can't take away the economic progress that our society has had over the last hundred years but we do have to figure
47:03
out how to make that economic progress more fair more you know wider bandwidth
47:09
for more and more people John you have any more questions for professor before we sign off yeah a couple more audience
47:15
questions I feel like we could go for another two hours but I'll wrap it up with a couple quick audience questions
47:20
what's your views on on cryptocurrency and and whether they have a place in modern society well I think they have
47:30
found a place in modern society I I don't spend a lot of time I don't I
47:36
don't think I've ever written about crypto I don't spend a lot of time and agonizing over its existence or
47:42
nonexistence or people want to you know invest in crypto I have no I have no
47:48
problem I I don't see it as a you know threat to the existing monetary system
47:54
it's not going to replace the US dollar or anything like that all right last question do you think we
48:01
could turn us States into quasi M&T sovereigns if we allow the Fed to monetize as the state issuance of US
48:07
dollar-denominated debt which sort of seems like what we're doing with the Fed municipal lending facility I think so I
48:15
mean in a sense if I understand the question correctly could we effectively
48:21
free individual states from their limited capacity to spend by having the
48:29
Fed step up and back effectively backstop them with currency issuing capacity yeah all right well that's all
48:37
we have thanks for going a little over time with us Stephanie again her book is the deficit myth it's available at all
48:44
major booksellers as Anthony said we would highly recommend that you buy it and read it even if you you know maybe
48:50
have different preconceptions about economic theory I think Stephanie's book professor Kelton's book will open your
48:56
mind to possibilities and as Anthony said we hope that you're right and it would
49:01
allow us to spend more and solve a lot of problems in society so professor Callum thanks so much for joining us and
49:06
and good luck you're on the New York Times bestseller list now we hope you continue to climb that list thank you
49:13
both very much thank you congratulations professor we hope to see you soon thanks Anthony take care
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