Paul Krugman—orthodox economist? Heterodox economist? Pragmatic economist? New Keynesian economist? Michael Stephens recently commented on an article in the Economist that discussed MMT, as well as two other non-mainstream schools of macroeconomic thought. The article contrasted the three relatively unfamiliar and unorthodox approaches with “[m]ainstream figures such as Paul Krugman and Greg Mankiw[, who] have commanded large online audiences for years.”

As Michael points out,

If you step back, what’s slightly unsatisfactory about [describing Krugman simply as a mainstream economist] is that Krugman is, right now, more in tune with the policy preferences of two-thirds of these “doctrines on the edge of economics” than he is with the reigning fiscal or monetary policy stance of the US government. 

But as Michael well knows, Krugman is hardly alone among neoclassical scholars in most of his policy views. Micheal’s point is true of quite a few mainstream economists right now—they are far more flexible on the policy issues that dominate the agenda today than they are on many other economic issues. This excerpt from a recent essay written by Marc Lavoie may help to illuminate the very significant differences of opinion that distinguish such forward-thinking neoclassicals from numerous heterodox economists around the world:

Paul Krugman (2009) has also made quite a stir by continue reading…

Robert Skidelsky runs through and corrects five fallacies about debt that one often hears lazily deployed in the public arena.  His third correction:

…the national debt is not a net burden on future generations. Even if it gives rise to future tax liabilities (and some of it will), these will be transfers from taxpayers to bond holders. This may have disagreeable distributional consequences. But trying to reduce it now will be a net burden on future generations: income will be lowered immediately, profits will fall, pension funds will be diminished, investment projects will be canceled or postponed, and houses, hospitals, and schools will not be built. Future generations will be worse off, having been deprived of assets that they might otherwise have had.

Nick Rowe had a post a couple weeks back on this same topic that might be of interest to some MMTers and Abba Lernerites.  Rowe lays out four different positions on the question of whether or in what sense the national debt imposes a burden on future generations, the first of which (it’s labeled “Abba Lerner”) sounds like it’s supposed to represent functional finance.  Rowe is ultimately dismissive of the functional finance approach, but you’ll find quite a bit of lively discussion in comments and a number of links to the ongoing debate.

For some background reading on functional finance, Thorvald Grung Moe recommends this short piece from 1943 by Abba Lerner himself:  “Functional Finance and the Federal Debt.”  It’s tightly argued and written in a reasonably jargon-free style that’s so rare in economics or public policy writing.

For those who want more of the basics and central contrasts, Mathew Forstater’s primer on deficit “doves,” “hawks,” and “owls” (beginning on p. 6 of this working paper) is a helpful place to start.

Update:  Nick Rowe graciously engages in the comments section below.

You may not agree with Alan Blinder when he writes in the Wall Street Journal that the budget deficit should be an issue in the 2012 campaign.  But it certainly will be.  And Blinder deserves kudos for pointing out that there are no immediate or near-term economic problems stemming from US deficit and debt levels:

“Myth No. 2 is that America’s deficit problem is so acute that government spending must be cut right now, despite the struggling economy. And any fiscal stimulus, even the payroll-tax extension, must be “paid for” immediately.

Wrong. Strange as it may seem with trillion-dollar-plus deficits, the U.S. government doesn’t have a short-run borrowing problem at all. On the contrary, investors all over the world are clamoring to lend us money at negative real interest rates. In purchasing-power terms, they are paying the U.S. government to borrow their money!”

Blinder also points out that if you accept the CBO’s long-term budget forecasts (James Galbraith notes some problems with the projections here), then the issue is entirely one of healthcare costs.  Deficit doves and deficit owls (proponents of “functional finance”) will dispute the optimal or sustainable level of long-term deficits, but if you care about the long-term deficit, then you care about government healthcare costs.  And growth of government healthcare costs is largely a function of cost inflation in the private market.  So if you have any interest in the long-term deficit, then you have to have a plan for controlling long-term healthcare costs system-wide.  If you don’t have such a plan, you’re engaged in some other type of project.

If you haven’t seen it already, this is a great utility that’s been linked to over the years, allowing you to see what the US budget deficit would look like if we spent the same amount per capita as other nations.  For the owls, this won’t be a matter of long-term debt and deficits, but of efficiency:  what exactly are we getting by spending more than twice as much, per capita, as other wealthy nations?

Randall Wray and Marshall Auerback put out a Levy Institute policy brief in 2010 on their vision for healthcare reform that featured giving people under 65 the option to “buy in” to Medicare (you will recall that at one point during the health reform battle this provision looked like it might be included in the final bill.  It was ultimately dumped by Joe Lieberman).  Read the policy brief here.

First The Economist, now CNBC.  CNBC’s Senior Editor John Carney has put together a series of posts on Modern Monetary Theory at his blog.  One of Carney’s objections to MMT is this:

…my biggest point of departure with the MMTers is they display a political and economic naivete when it comes to the effects of government spending. When they talk about spending it is almost always in terms of abstract aggregates, which is weird for a school of economics so focused on the specifics of monetary operations. What this means is that they miss the distortions of crony capitalism the accompanies so much government spending.

I’m not sure this is a problem for MMT in particular, but you might put the point a little differently.  Fully MMT-inspired public policy would require a particular set of political and policy-making institutions.  If inflation is going to be fought through raising taxes, for example, we will need a policy-making process that is able to pull this off, and with the right timing.

But having said that, after observing the process since the outbreak of the Great Recession it’s pretty clear that we don’t even have the right policy apparatus for carrying out conventional aggregate demand management.  Having a robust set of automatic stabilizers in place during the crisis would have been far more preferable to forming fiscal policy according to the whims of Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe (or catering to Congress’ anxiety about a thirteenth digit).

Carney’s latest entries:

Monetary Theory, Crony Capitalism and the Tea Party

Modern Monetary Theory and Austrian Economics

Can the Government Guarantee Everyone a Job?

MMT Monetary Theory vs. Austrian Monetary Theory

The Trouble with a Job Guarantee

The Wall Street Firm That Uses Modern Monetary Theory

Over the break an article appeared in The Economist spotlighting three “schools of macroeconomic thought”:  Scott Sumner’s market monetarism, Austrian free banking, and neo-chartalism (MMT).  In addition to noting the role of the blogosphere in refining and promoting these heterodoxies, the article elects to use Paul Krugman as a stand-in for the “mainstream” opponent.

If you step back, what’s slightly unsatisfactory about this choice is that Krugman is, right now, more in tune with the policy preferences of two-thirds of these “doctrines on the edge of economics” than he is with the reigning fiscal or monetary policy stance of the US government.  Krugman has written extensively about the fact that our current debt and deficit levels present no serious current economic problem.  (The dispute between Krugman and MMTers stems from disagreements about the long-term debt.)  And as The Economist points out, Krugman is fine with nominal GDP targeting.

Figuring out where to draw the boundaries of “the mainstream” in the economics profession is one thing, but when it comes to the range of politically acceptable policy options (a different kind of mainstream, admittedly) Krugman stands shivering in the cold side-by-side with a lot of heterodox thinkers.  With respect to both policy outcomes and policy rhetoric, our institutions seem to pay a great deal more attention to deficits, debt, and inflation than they do to unemployment and the threat of deflation (though one might argue that, at least with respect to fiscal stimulus, this has more to do with the fact that in the US political system the “opposition” party has the ability to see the government fail.  Resistance to fiscal stimulus may all but disappear from Congress in the event of a Romney presidency.  Explaining the preferences of the FOMC is a more complicated affair.)  The mainstream policy space since 2010 excludes neo-chartalism, market monetarism, and Paul Krugman.

A handful of the Levy Institute’s working papers and policy briefs related to the neo-chartalist approach can be read here:  “Money,” “Deficit Hysteria Redux?“, “Money and Taxes,” “Modern Money.”

Japan is the champion nation in terms of budget deficits and government debt relative to GDP. Many have long argued (wrongly) that this is because holders happen to have addresses in Japan. Nonsense. A sovereign government that issues its own currency makes interest payments on its debt in exactly the same manner whether the holder has an address at the South Pole or on Mars: a keystroke to a savings deposit at the central bank. What matters is whether the country issues its own currency.

That is why the little spat between the UK and France—with France insisting that credit agencies ought to down-grade the UK before they downgrade France—is so silly. France can have a debt ratio under 15% of GDP and still be forced to default. The UK can have a debt ratio above Japan’s 200% and still face no chance of involuntary default. That is the beauty and utility of issuing your own currency. France is a currency user and its fate depends on Germany—which is busy sucking up every spare Euro it can lay its greedy hands on. France is no better off than the panhandler on the street corner begging for pocket change—a user of currency, not an issuer.

Read the rest here.

This is one of the questions Marshall Auerback tackles in a piece at Counterpunch.  His answer, as you might expect, is “no.”  He also addresses the concern that the ECB risks an impaired balance sheet if it steps up and plays a larger role in buying member-state debt:

… if the ECB bought the bonds then, by definition, the “profligates” do not default. In fact, as the monopoly provider of the euro, the ECB could easily set the rate at which it buys the bonds (say, 4% for Italy) and eventually it would replenish its capital via the profits it would receive from buying the distressed debt (not that the ECB requires capital in an operational sense; as usual with the euro zone, this is a political issue). At some point, Professor Paul de Grauwe is right :  convinced that the ECB was serious about resolving the solvency issue, the markets would begin to buy the bonds again and effectively do the ECB’s heavy lifting for them. The bonds would not be trading at these distressed levels if not for the solvency issue, which the ECB can easily address if it chooses to do so.  But this is a question of political will, not operational “sustainability.”

So the grand irony of the day remains this: while there is nothing the ECB can do to cause monetary inflation, even if it wanted to, the ECB, fearing inflation, holds back on the bond buying that would eliminate the national [government] solvency risk but not halt the deflationary monetary forces currently in place.

Yanis Varoufakis has an interesting exchange with Warren Mosler and Philip Pilkington, responding to their thoughts on the ideal path for a nation intending on breaking away from the euro.  The Mosler-Pilkington “plan” (clearly gunning for the Wolfson Prize) is basically this:  (1) the government in question starts using the new national currency as a means of payment (paying public salaries, etc.); (2) the government announces that tax payments must be made in that currency.  The merit of this approach, they say, is that it is “hands off”:

Should the government of a given country announce an exit from the Eurozone and then freeze bank accounts and force conversion there would be chaos. The citizens of the country would run on the banks and desperately try to hold as many euro cash notes as possible in anticipation that they would be more valuable than the new currency. Under the above plan, however, citizens’ bank accounts would be left alone. It would be up to them to convert their euros into the new currency at a floating exchange rate set by the market. They would, of course, have to seek out the currency any time they have to pay taxes and so would sell goods and services denominated in the new currency. This ‘monetises’ the economy in the new currency while at the same time helping to establish the market value of said currency.

Varoufakis, with a nod to his Levy Institute policy note “A Modest Proposal,” suggests that it’s not too late to save the eurozone project.  Although jumping ship in the manner they describe might end up being necessary at some point, says Varoufakis, Mosler and Pilkington are underestimating the severity of the fallout from a euro exit (for the country jumping ship, and for the countries remaining in the boat).  Here’s a taste, from Varoufakis:  continue reading…

(cross posted at EconoMonitor)

For more than a decade, I’ve been arguing that the EMU was designed to fail. It was based on the pious hope that markets would not notice that member states had abandoned their currencies when they adopted the euro, thereby surrendering fiscal and monetary policy to the center. The problem was that while the center was quite happy to centralize monetary policy through the august auspices of the Bundesbank (with the ECB playing the role of the hapless dummy whose strings were pulled in Germany), the center never wanted to offer fiscal policy capable of funding essential spending. (See also Nouriel Roubini’s Eurozone Crisis: Here Are the Options, Now Choose and  Marshall Auerback’s piece: The Road to Serfdom.)

Member states became much like US states, but with two key differences. First, while US states can and do rely on fiscal transfers from Washington—which controls a budget equal to more than a fifth of US GDP—EMU member states got an underfunded European Parliament with a total budget of less than 1% of Europe’s GDP. This meant that member states were responsible for dealing not only with the routine expenditures on social welfare (health care, retirement, poverty relief) but also had to rise to the challenge of economic and financial crises.

The second difference is that Maastricht criteria were far too lax—permitting outrageously high budget deficits and government debt ratios.

What? Before readers accuse me of going over to the neoliberal side, let me explain. Most of the critics on the left had always argued that the Maastricht criteria were too tight—prohibiting member states from adding enough aggregate demand to keep their economies humming along at full employment. OK, it is true that government spending was chronically too low across Europe as evidenced by chronically high unemployment and rotten growth in most places. But since these states were essentially spending and borrowing a foreign currency—the euro—the Maastricht criteria permitted deficits and debts that were inappropriate.

Let us take a look at US states. All but two have balanced budget requirements—written into state constitutions—and all of them are disciplined by markets to submit balanced budgets. When a state finishes the year with a deficit, it faces a credit downgrade by our good friends the credit ratings agencies. (Yes, the same folks who thought that bundles of trash mortgages ought to be rated AAA—but that is not the topic today.) That would cause interest rates paid by states on their bonds to rise, raising budget deficits and fueling a vicious cycle of downgrades, rate hikes and burgeoning deficits. So a mixture of austerity, default on debt, and Federal government fiscal transfers keeps US state budget deficits low.

(Yes, I know that right now many states are facing Armageddon—especially California—as the global crisis has crashed revenues and caused deficits to explode. This is not an exception but rather demonstrates my argument.)

The following table shows the debt ratios of a selection of US states. Note that none of them even reaches 20% of GDP, less than a third of the Maastricht criteria. continue reading…

At Pragmatic Capitalist, Cullen Roche writes about the “eerily prescient” predictions regarding the euro made by Modern Money Theorists and economists looking at sectoral balances.  Roche quotes from Randall Wray’s Understanding Modern Money (see in particular p. 91ff), a paper by Stephanie Kelton (Bell), and a Wynne Godley article written in 1997 (“Curried Emu — the meal that fails to nourish,” Observer, Aug. 31).  From Godley:

If a government does not have its own central bank on which it can draw cheques freely, its expenditures can be financed only by borrowing in the open market in competition with businesses, and this may prove excessively expensive or even impossible, particularly under ‘conditions of extreme emergency.’ … The danger, then, is that the budgetary restraint to which governments are individually committed will impart a disinflationary bias that locks Europe as a whole into a depression it is powerless to lift.

See also Godley’s earlier piece (1992) in the London Review of Books, “Maastricht and All That“:

I recite all this to suggest, not that sovereignty should not be given up in the noble cause of European integration, but that if all these functions are renounced by individual governments they simply have to be taken on by some other authority. The incredible lacuna in the Maastricht programme is that, while it contains a blueprint for the establishment and modus operandi of an independent central bank, there is no blueprint whatever of the analogue, in Community terms, of a central government. Yet there would simply have to be a system of institutions which fulfils all those functions at a Community level which are at present exercised by the central governments of individual member countries.

With regard to Godley’s prescience, take a look at this policy note from 2000 on the US economy (“Drowning in Debt“) that discusses the eye-popping rise in private indebtedness (“…it is certainly entirely different from anything that has ever happened before–at least in the United States”).  It’s really worth reading the whole thing (only five pages).