Friday, July 18, 2014

NPR is the problem

Not literally of course. But they do represent the responsible, sober, official position on matters economic and thus it's good to remind oneself of exactly what that is after spending some time in the vapors of the Internets. From Richard Fisher of the Dallas Fed:
First, I believe we are experiencing financial excess that is of our own making. When money is dirt cheap and ubiquitous, it is in the nature of financial operators to reach for yield. There is a lot of talk about “macroprudential supervision” as a way to prevent financial excess from creating financial instability. My view is that it has significant utility but is not a sufficient  preventative.

Quite possibly.
When we buy a Treasury note or bond or an MBS, we pay for it with reserves we create. This injects liquidity into the economy. This liquidity can be used by financial intermediaries to lend to businesses to invest in job-creating capital expansion or by investors to finance the repairing of balance sheets at cheaper cost or on better terms, or for myriad other uses, including feeding speculative flows into financial markets.
Nonsense.

When the Fed pay for something by creating a reserve, that reserve does not enable lending by a financial intermediary nor does to repair a balance sheet. In the interview itself, Fisher said that the Fed had done it's job by creating reserves, and now it's Congress' job to get Americans to spend them.

But you don't spend reserves.

Instead the Fed should tell Congress that Americans cannot spend reserves, and that Congress needs to run higher deficits to encourage spending.

This is essentially why I see MMT and MMR as differences without a distinction, as this consensus view is, in my opinion, the core problem to solve.

1 Comments:

Blogger geerussell said...

"This is essentially why I see MMT and MMR as differences without a distinction, as this consensus view is, in my opinion, the core problem to solve."

I think you hit the mark there. To view them as irreconcilable probably reflects a failure to achieve an honest reading of one or both.

8:51 AM  

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