Thomas Palley

ELR Comes to the UK

The following story, which appeared in The Guardian on Sunday 29 July, was forwarded to me by Malcolm Sawyer:

“Million jobless may face six months’ unpaid work or have unemployment benefits stopped”

In a sense, the UK, under Conservative Prime Minister Cameron, is looking to adopt a quasi-employer of last resort (ELR) scheme in which the ELR wage is set equal to existing unemployment benefits (Note: the Conservative scheme involves compulsory labor for benefits). (more…)

Randy Wray and Mat Forstater, two leading contributors to the MMT School, have replied to my recent blog on the MMT controversy. Their replies warrant a brief response.

I agree that it does not matter very much who first identified the euro’s potential for failure. Along with other Keynesians, MMT-ers were early to identify the euro’s structural flaw – namely, its conversion of the financial status of national government into provincial government status via removal of government’s power to access money creation through a government controlled central bank. In many ways Warren Mosler (1995) is the godfather of interest in this issue. (more…)

Led by Randy Wray (see this and this), supporters of so-called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) are declaring that they were the first to identify the problems of the euro and that MMT has now proved itself to be the correct approach to monetary theory.

As regards these two claims, permit me to quote the following:

“5.3 Will capital still be able to veto policy?
…First, financial capital may still be able to discipline governments through the bond market. Thus, if financial capital dislikes the stance of national fiscal policy, there could be a sell-off of government bonds and a shift into bonds of other countries. This would drive up the cost of government borrowing, thereby putting a break on fiscal policy (Palley, 1997, p.155-156).” (more…)