Today, inflation has reached a 40-year high, in response to fiscal profligacy and accommodative monetary policy. Direct cash payments to individuals and businesses in 2020 and 2021, which totaled more than $5 trillion, along with the rapid growth of base money—under the Fed’s large-scale asset purchase program…
(As the Fed is once again planning to unwind its balance sheet, the size of which doubled as a result of its COVID-19-crisis Quantitative Easing, we think it worthwhile to draw your attention to a 2017 exchange, on the fiscal implications of such an unwind, between two…
"[The COVID-19 crisis] wouldn't be the first time America has resorted to large-scale fiscal stimulus in a peacetime emergency. The New Deal of the 1930s, a response to the Great Depression, is probably the most far-reaching example." (Katia Dmitrieva, "The Times America Went Big and Flooded Economy…
This morning, upon logging in to my Twitter account, I found it brimming with reports that the Hong Kong government was about to embark upon an unprecedented experiment with helicopter money. "Helicopter Money is Here," blurts an FT Alphaville headline. "Hong Kong Embraces Helicopter Money," says Zero…
Modern Monetary Theory has been accused, not always fairly, of more serious shortcomings than you can shake a stick at. Among other things, critics have faulted it for not being all that modern, for passing-off tautologies as profundities, for wrongly assuming that the value of fiat money…