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MMT ≠ QE
MMT is not and has never been about getting central banks to "print money" for the government
I have to teach a class soon, but I wanted to quickly comment on a media clip that drew some attention yesterday.
The clip is from Bloomberg TV, and it features the host of Bloomberg Surveillance, Tom Keene, talking with Bob Michele, the CIO at JPMorgan Asset Management. Tom starts off the segment by saying:
“Stephanie Kelton at Stony Brook [University] has changed the world. She came out with Modern Monetary Theory. We are in an MMT experiment of some type as well, and the financial media is not talking about this enough because everybody sort of wishes the theory would go away which is unfair to something that has had such an impact.”
The conversation continues with both men suggesting that the MMT “experiment” involves not just an embrace of substantial fiscal support (and large deficits) to fight the pandemic—which I accept—but also monetary support in the form of central bank bond-buying (QE) to keep the spending “affordable.”
While I’m happy to accept credit for helping to shift the terms of the debate in the realm of macroeconomics, especially with respect to the mechanics of government finance and the limits on government spending, it is Warren Mosler who deserves credit for “coming out with” MMT (although the MMT label came many years later).
My first encounter with many of the core tenets of MMT came from reading Mosler’s Soft Currency Economics about 25 years ago. In the years that followed, a small number of economists—myself included—worked to build on Mosler’s early insights. For me, one of the most fascinating arguments in Warren’s book had to do with the sequencing of the government’s taxing, borrowing, and spending.
Like almost everyone, I had been brought up to think of taxes and borrowing as two competing ways for the government to gets its hands on the money it needs to finance its spending. Taxing And Borrowing came first. Spending came last.
In my book, The Deficit Myth, I offered this simple pneumonic to describe the conventional model: (TAB)S
This model is affirmed in all mainstream macro textbooks, where students are presented with the concept of a government budget constraint. It teaches students that, much like a household, the government is financially constrained, so it must find a way to secure financing before it can pay the bills. There’s often a passing reference to a third financing option—”printing money”—but that one gets quickly dismissed as inherently inflationary, leaving students with the idea that the government must rely on either tax revenue or borrowed funds to pay for its spending.
Mosler flipped all of that on its head. He explained that not only did everyone have the sequencing backwards but that we were thinking about taxes and bond sales the wrong way as well. The funds to pay taxes and buy government bonds, he explained, come from the prior act of government spending (or lending). Here’s Mosler:
“The government spends money and then borrows what it does not tax, because deficit spending, not offset by borrowing, would cause the fed funds rate to fall.”
The mental model we should keep in our heads, then, is the one that sequences the spending first: S(TAB)
The point I’m making here is that from the very beginning, MMT has offered a (superior) descriptive framework, one that explains the actual mechanics of government finance. It was never a proposal to “print money” or to encourage central banks to engage in large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs). In fact, MMT scholars were some of the earliest skeptics of Quantitative Easing (QE).
The reality is that when it comes to covering the government’s bills, there is only one way to pay, as I explained in this recent Substack:
Unlike the rest of us, Congress never has to check the balance in its bank account to figure out whether it can afford to spend more. As the issuer of the currency, it doesn’t have to worry about running out of money. It can afford to buy whatever is available and for sale in its own currency. That might involve spending on roads and bridges, a military arsenal, or hospitals and schools. Finding the votes to pass a spending bill can be hard, but finding the money is never a problem. They just create it.
Here’s how it works. Whenever Congress and the president agree to spend more, the government’s bank—the Federal Reserve—works with the rest of the financial system to get that money into our accounts. Everything happens electronically, so there’s no physical “printing” of money involved. If you got a $1,400 check from the federal government earlier this year, or if your company received money to help cover payroll and other expenses, then you got some of the newly-minted digital dollars that were created to support our economy. No taxpayers were involved in the process. It was all done using nothing more than a computer keyboard.
There’s just no other way for it to work. It has nothing to do with QE ! So please, don’t conflate MMT with QE. And raise a red flag whenever you hear anyone present MMT as a proposal to “print money.”
ステファニー・ケルトン「MMT≠QE：量的緩和も『お金を刷れ』もMMTではない」（2021年8月26日)
MMTは、政府のために中央銀行に「お金を刷らせる」という話ではないし、一度もそんな話はしていない。
「ストーニー・ブルック（大学）のステファニー・ケルトンは、世界を変えました。現代貨幣理論（MMT）を世に出したのです。しかも私たちは今ある種のMMTの実験をしているところですが、金融メディアはこのことについて十分に報道していません。誰もが心なしか、この理論がなくなってしまえばいいと願っているからです。これほどの影響を与えているものに対して不公平な扱いです。」
議論の続きでは、MMTの「実験」には、パンデミックに対抗するための大規模な財政支援（と多額の財政赤字）だけではなく（これについては私は同意する）、支出を「可能」にし続けるための中央銀行による債券購入（QE）という形で金融支援も含まれていることを二人とも示唆している。
マクロ経済学の領域で、特に政府財政の仕組みや政府支出の限界について、議論の条件をシフトさせるのに貢献したという称讃は喜んで受け入れるが、MMTを「世に出した」ことで称讃されるべきなのはウォーレン・モズラーだ（もっとも、MMTという呼び名は何年も後に付けられたものだが）。
私がMMTの核となる考え方の多くに初めて出会ったのは、25年ほど前にモズラーの『Soft Currency Economics〔未邦訳〕』を読んだときだった。その後、モズラーの初期の洞察に基づいて、私を含めた少数の経済学者たちが研究に取り組んできた。私にとって、モズラーの本の中で最も魅力的な主張の一つは、政府の課税、借入、支出の順序に関するものだった。
ほとんどの人と同じく、私も課税と借入は、政府が支出を賄うのに必要な資金を手に入れるための2つの競合する手段だという考えを培ってきた。「課税と借入が先、支出が後」だと。
このモデルは、すべての主流派マクロ経済学の教科書で受け入れられていて、そこで学生は政府の予算制約の概念を学ぶ。家計とほぼ同じように、政府は財政上の制約があるから、支払いをする前に資金を確保する方法を見つける必要があると学生に教えている。「お金を刷る」という三つ目の資金調達の方法がよく言及されるが、これは本質的にインフレを引き起こすものだとすぐに却下され、学生は政府が支出するには税収か借金に頼る必要があると考えてしまう。
「政府はお金を支出し、その後に課税しない分を借り入れる。なぜなら、〔課税されない分の〕赤字の支出額が借入で相殺されないと、フェデラル・ファンド（FF）レート〔銀行間の貸出金利の一種〕 [1] が下がってしまうからだ。」
私たちが頭に入れておくべき思考モデルは、支出を最初に並べるものだ〔スペンディング・ファースト〕。
「支出→（課税＋借入）」
ここで私が言っているのは、MMTは議論の一番初めから、政府財政の実際の仕組みを説明する（より優れた）記述の枠組みを提供してきたということだ。MMTは、「お金を刷れ」とか「中央銀行に大規模な資産購入（LSAPs）を勧めろ」といった提案は一度もしていない。実際、MMTの学者たちは、「量的緩和（QE）」に最初から懐疑的だった。
私たち〔家計や企業〕と違って、議会〔政府〕は、支出を増やせるかどうかを判断するのに、銀行口座の残高を確認する必要は一切ない。通貨の発行者である議会は、お金が足りなくなることを心配する必要はない。自国通貨で手に入るもの、売られているものなら何でも買うことができる。道路や橋、軍備、病院や学校などへの支出も含まれるだろう。支出法案を通すための票を手に入れるのは難しいだろうが、お金を手に入れるのは決して問題ではない。議会はただお金を作るだけだ。
仕組みはこうだ。議会と大統領が支出を増やすことに合意すると、政府の銀行であるFRB（連邦準備銀行）がFRB以下の金融システム〔主として他の銀行〕と協力して、私たちの口座にお金を振り込む。すべては電子的に行われるから、物理的にお金を「刷る」ことはない。今年の初めに連邦政府から1,400ドルの小切手を受け取った人や、人件費やその他の経費を賄うためにお金を受け取った会社は、私たちの経済を支えるために新たに創造されたデジタル・ドル [2] を手にしたことになる。このプロセスには納税者は関わっていない。パソコンのキーボード一つですべてが行われたのだ。
それ以外の方法は存在しないし、QEとは何の関係もない！だからどうか、MMTをQEと混同しないでほしい。そして、誰かがMMTを「お金を刷る」という提案として説明しているのを聞いたら、それは違うと必ず警告を促してほしい。
〔raise a red flag（直訳：赤旗を掲げる）＝警告を促す〕
（了）
0:00
bob we're going to spend some serious
0:01
time here
0:03
on the great unspoken and you nail it in
0:06
your research note stephanie kelton at
0:09
stony brook has changed the world she
0:12
came out with modern monetary theory we
0:14
are in an mmt experiment of some type as
0:18
well and the financial media is not
0:20
talking about this enough because
0:22
everybody sort of wishes the theory
0:24
would go away which is unfair to
0:26
something that's had such an impact are
0:28
you a believer in mmt
0:32
good morning tom it's hard not to be a
0:35
believer it seems like the go-to policy
0:39
response now in a crisis where the role
0:41
of governments is to borrow large
0:44
amounts of debts and deploy it through
0:46
fiscal stimulus and try to shortcut to
0:49
recovery and the role of central banks
0:51
is to print lots of money and buy that
0:54
debt and ensure that the cost of the
0:56
recovery is affordable i think it's
0:59
worked it's hard to see where any pain
1:02
has been created or where there will be
1:04
problems down the road i think we all
1:06
sense that there's got to be something
1:09
what i'd like to see out of jackson hold
1:11
is for the central bankers to say this
1:14
is an emergency policy response this
1:16
isn't a normal part of our tool kit they
1:20
need to draw the line somewhere here and
1:23
i'm not sure lisa i think this is really
1:25
important with no criticism of people
1:27
like claudia sam and stephanie kelton
1:29
i'm not even criticizing their cats and
1:31
they have cats at home it's very evident
1:33
on on twitter that they do lisa nobody
1:36
has an exit strategy
1:39
from our pandemic mmt well no one has a
1:42
sense of exactly what the consequences
1:44
will be either bob we talk about the
1:46
potential of uh some deleterious to use
1:49
the same word from the day before
1:51
ramifications of from the mmt types of
1:54
policies that you talk about yet we're
1:56
not seeing them yields are not going up
1:58
inflation to the extent that it is going
1:59
up is recognized as passing and somewhat
2:02
decelerating so when are we going to see
2:04
the negative ramifications from mmt-like
2:07
policies
2:09
well we're at an interesting point right
2:11
now with chair powell and the fed in the
2:14
crosshairs of what's going on in
2:17
washington and he's got jackson hall in
2:19
the september fomc meeting to start
2:21
backing out of this
2:23
but right now
2:25
we're well past the crisis and the
2:27
recovery is underway and we're
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recovering a lot of lost jobs and we're
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going to close the output gap by the end
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of this year
2:36
and if mmt continues with
2:40
half a trillion in an infrastructure
2:43
bill and three and a half trillion in
2:45
various forms of stimulus and the fed
2:48
continues to print money and buy debt i
2:50
think there's a moral hazard there where
2:53
you're looking at the fed underwriting a
2:55
lot of government policies so i think
2:58
it's a very good time for the fed to
3:00
assert its independence draw a line in
3:02
the sand and say that they're bringing
3:04
these things to an end now
3:06
when though and what commentary do you
3:09
need to hear to get them to do that is
3:11
that inflation goes from transitory to
3:14
worrying
3:16
i think that's part of it i i think
3:19
right now they can point to substantial
3:22
further progress hasn't been made on a
3:25
lot of the things that they look at
3:27
when when they look at where policy
3:29
rates are
3:31
they don't need to be at xero for a lot
3:33
longer they don't need the 120 billion
3:36
in in large scale asset purchases every
3:39
month they can move to something that's
3:41
more normal i step back and i look at
3:43
where things are and if this had been a
3:46
normal cycle say going back i don't know
3:49
20 to 40 years ago yeah maybe even 15 or
3:52
so years ago at this point in the cycle
3:55
i'd expect the fed funds rate to be 2
3:57
around the zero real yield and i'd
4:00
expect the ten year treasury to be
4:01
around three percent about a one percent
4:04
real yield so the fact that we're not
4:06
there tells you the amount of distortion
4:08
that the central banks are creating bob
4:11
if the fed were to say at the jackson
4:13
hole meeting they're planning to start
4:15
tapering their bond purchases september
4:18
november december at some point in the
4:20
near future and indicated that it'll be
4:21
faster than expected what would be the
4:23
market response
4:26
well i think the market spot response
4:28
would be
4:29
a gradual rise in rates and i know
4:32
there's some debate out there about
4:34
whether fed tapering leads to a rise in
4:37
rates or not
4:38
i don't get that at all let me tell you
4:42
if if bond prices aren't the very
4:45
definition of asset price inflation
4:48
you've got a central bank printing
4:51
unlimited amounts of its own money and
4:54
going in and buying a specific asset
4:56
class if that's not how you inflate the
4:59
price of an asset class how do you
5:02
you look at the negative one percent
5:04
real yield on 10-year treasuries
5:07
i think the first stop is to get to
5:09
something that looks around a zero
5:12
percent
5:13
and and we'll get there
5:16
bob we're going to run out of time but
5:17
how do you affect
5:20
a 100 basis point move in the real yield
5:23
do you do it off the nominal or do you
5:25
do it with the help of inflation
5:27
expectations
5:29
i think you do it with the combination
5:31
of both but mostly with nominal yields
5:34
mostly with the realization that you
5:38
don't have the 800 pound gorilla of the
5:40
fed sitting on the bond market and maybe
5:42
other central banks will start to dial
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down
5:45
their large scale you know pharaoh
5:47
pharaoh right now is writing on
5:48
manuscript draw down meditation bob it's
5:50
going to be a really important book
5:53
uh you know i think barnes and noble is
5:55
like waiting with boxes and boxes of it
5:57
you got to do a book bob michael on mmt
6:01
that would be that would be just
6:02
wonderful it would really work
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