myPlanetGanja.com

Along that path, the government is expected to pass the following milestones: It will spend more on interest than it spends on Medicaid in 2020; more in 2023 than it spends on national defense; and more in 2025 than it spends on all nondefense discretionary programs combined, from funding for national parks to scientific research, to health care and education, to the court system and infrastructure, according to the CBO.

Jesús Malverde wrote:Look into MMT...

Dick Fein wrote:The GSM is going to make all this moot.

Butcher Bob wrote:

Jesús Malverde wrote:Look into MMT...

Fairy dust....all you have to do is believe.

Jesús Malverde wrote:MMT is the diametric opposite of fairy dust. It describes reality *as it exists* and still nobody believes in it. MMT is how the military and the financial sector get and have got fed for decades with no actual fiscal accounting ever being applied.

Read the following link from the Michigan State University economics department describing in clear and umabiguous language how MMT principles have been used to unaccountably fund the Military Industrial Complex to the tune of 21 *Trillion* USD and then tell me MMT is "fairy dust".

Dick Fein wrote:GSM for Grand Solar Minimum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NI1bQe8I4A&t=28s" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
We are entering a period of cyclic cooling that is going to probably end civilization as we know it.

Butcher Bob wrote: The article never mentions MMT.

The last time I saw a military audit discussed was Sept. 10, 2001.. The military had $2.3 trillion unaccounted for, and Rumsfeld was going to get to the bottom of it. The next day, both the main location and the back-up site containing all relevant information were destroyed. Seven years later the financial sector crashes requiring a massive cash infusion, paid for by citizens. So you can't exactly put these two sectors up as a "good" example of how well MMT works.

MMT has some ludicrous basic tenets...(and these were from an advocating Yale economics professor mind you)...
Deficits don't matter...you can run huge deficits for as long as you want because they just don't matter.
Debt doesn't matter...you can run up as much debt as you want, because it just doesn't matter.
QE doesn't matter...a country is a sovereign entity with the ability to print money, therefore it can print and spend as much as it wants.
It's all just paper (currency and T-bills) that the government is shuffling around.
...as if we live in a fukking vacuum.

We are not the only player on this planet, so in fact all these things DO matter...very much. This is just another tool of the elite to steal from the masses and run up the credit card of future generations.

Wikipedia biographical summary-
Stephanie Kelton
Born October 10, 1969 (age 49)
Institution University of Missouri–Kansas City
School or
tradition Post-Keynesian economics
Alma mater California State University, Sacramento (B.S., B.A., 1995)
University of Cambridge (M.Phil, 1997)
The New School (Ph.D., 2001)
Contributions Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
Stephanie Kelton née Bell (born 1969) is an American economist and Professor of Public Policy and Economics at Stony Brook University.[1] She was formerly Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City,[2] Chief Economist on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee 2015 minority party staff and an Economic Advisor to Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign. She is founder and editor-in-chief of the blog New Economic Perspectives. She is a leading proponent of Modern Monetary Theory[3] and as such was named one of Politico's 50 "thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics in 2016."[4][5]

bentech wrote:certainly the amount Rumsfeld admitted to would have been a serious under report of what was known at the time...

Jesús Malverde wrote:No, but it illustrates the principles in actual use at the remarkable scale of 21T USD.

Is there *any* evidence linking the DoD audit to the financial crisis of 2007-8?

You've obviously never read or studied MMT beyond a few depricatory sound bites by its detractors.

...Stephanie Kelton...



Watch it, it's an hour twenty minutes.

Butcher Bob wrote:

Jesús Malverde wrote:No, but it illustrates the principles in actual use at the remarkable scale of 21T USD.

I certainly did not view the article as supporting MMT...I saw it expressing concern of unaccountability and the effects that could have.

Jesus Malverde wrote:]Is there *any* evidence linking the DoD audit to the financial crisis of 2007-8?

I didn't suggest they were linked. I said they were shitty examples for successful use of MMT.

I can only repeat: largest deliberate financial fraud in known history. You are actually exonerating the malefactors by steering away from the actual cause, in this case criminal fraud. MMT was used to bail out those malefactors. That's not the fault of MMT; that's an illustration (as is the 21T USD unaccountedly lost in the Pentagon) of people with bad intent being the only ones with the knowledge and power to abuse it.

That's the cunt!!

My bad, I thought she was from Yale.
Here's one of the videos I saw her in...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5baKgv7Zl5g" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Alright, I'll pay along and watch the video...but you will not likely like my critique...

In talking aboot spending vs saving, she completely ignores the economics driver that savings is...investment. She equates savings as a drain on the economy, and investment as an input...but they're the same fukking thing. This is one of the most basic tenets of economics and she gets it wrong.

No, savings and investment aren't the same thing. That's why we have two different words. I can hide C-notes in my mattress or I can get a cash advance on my credit card to buy BitCoin.

Her reason why the US can NEVER be insolvent, is that they can just print more money to stay solvent. Once again, she completely ignores the whole reason ANY currency has value...trust. If lenders start to believe the debtor is going to diminish the real value of their investment by increasing the money supply, they will lose faith in that currency, causing it to then lose even more value by decreasing demand.

No, if that were anywhere close to being true, we'd see runaway inflation proportional to public debt. We don't.

She claims T-bills are a risk free investment, but they are not. They are listed on all markets and their prices fluctuate up and down according to their value as perceived by the market. So there is risk.

No. T-Bills are the lowest possible risk investment, nobody who has ever bought them at face value has ever lost a penny on their investment.

You are correct...I am just 29 minutes in and I'm having a hard times listening to all this bullshit, but I shall continue.

She states the USD will always have value because the government has a monopoly in creating them. Are you really buying this crap? She acts like there is nothing better for investors to invest in...like the USD is their ONLY option.

What in the end actually gives the USD value is the fact that nothing else can be used to pay taxes with. The act of paying those taxes actually destroys the dollars paid. And she never once says that other, potentially higher (or lower) yield alternatives to investing in USD don't exist. Ever hear of the FX markets?

She even acknowledges that a sovereign entity, Greece, can go broke. But noo, that will NEVER happen to US. Says who? Why is it exactly that we are immune to an economic catastrophe like Greece had/has?

News flash: Greece does not have or control its own currency. Like other countries that use the Euro, they are not fiscally independent. This is an artifact of the flawed construction of the Eurozone which was a monetary union without a fiscal union. The ECB can dictate the fiscal policies of every participating member and veto budgets they don't approve--as happened in Greece and is happening in Italy right now.

In discussing the creation of money, instead of referencing the actual history of banking, where investors put their "money" in the bank (goldsmith) to start things out, she uses the board game Monopoly as her example that banks provided the money. A board game?...this is what she builds her economic principles from?...really?!? She even goes so far as to read the game's instructions..."the bank collects taxes, fines, loans, and interest. The bank NEVER goes broke. If the bank runs out of money, the bank may issue as much more is needed by writing on any ordinary paper." OMG!!...throw away the textbooks, we can learn economics by playing a board game.

It's an analogy, and post-Breton Woods, it's a good one for economic laypeople. Fiat currency has far more in common with Monopoly money than it does to currency backed by hard metal reserves, the pre-Breton Woods model we still intuitively think in terms of. There are no physical assets backstopping the USD post-Breton woods. The goldsmith analogy died on the day that agreement was put into force.

Fuk...only 32 minutes in now....pushing on...

Next she uses Greenspan in supporting her pretense that the government can always just print money if they need it. The same guy under whose watch the whole derivative market was born and crashed the financial system. Previous chair, Volcker, has criticized Greenspan's opinions many times as being erroneous.

Again, you are misattributing the blame for the 2007 collapse. The problem had nothing to do with profligate currency issuing. It was fraud-- a criminal conspiracy-- that caused that. Quit making excuses for the criminals responsible, they don't deserve having the blame shifted away from them. They should all have been locked up using existing fraud statutes.

She also uses his pretense that the real problem long term for economics is not the ability of Social Security benefits being paid, but rather that the shrinkage in a working populous will not be able to provide all the goods the retired folks want...completely ignoring technological improvements in production that are already reducing the need for such a work force.

Social security is funded by FICA contributions being put into a pool to finance the payouts that was supposed to be firewalled from being misappropriated to general funding. Politicians have broached this firewall to intermix the SS fund with general revenue. This is, again, probably criminal malfeasance and expressly contrary to the laws creating the SS funding mechanism. There's no solvency problem with SS that isn't tied to the illegal misappropriation.

Technology hasn't so much replaced labor as made it more productive. The gains in labor productivity have not been distributed to the workers, instead (surprise, surprise!) having been skimmed off as profits for rich owners and investors. That's what happens when labor unions are supressed by laws like right-to-work, and the abolition of card check. Thus far the recent automation of labor has largely been more hype than reality-- it turns out that robots are horrifically expensive, aren't readily adaptable to changing production circumtances on a timely as-needed basis, and they break down and need maintanence--by humans.

And again she harps on that the thing we really need to focus on is to work hard and stockpile more 'stuff' so that we have it to consume later...so that we can drive the economy. As if investments don't dive the economy as well. Anyone want a 10 year old brand new car?...how aboot a 10 year old brand new house? How's this 'stockpiling' supposed to work?

That's a clumsy strawman of her argument. If you can--using actual quotes from her-- make a case that she is asserting that 10-year old cars are the same and interchangeable with new cars, I'd like to see it.

At 42 minutes in, all I've heard so far is..."...believe...basic economic principles do not apply..." <sigh>...onward...

She states private and government surpluses/deficits are separate but inversely correlative. If that were true, there would be no need for personal income tax. But personal income tax is necessary, because it came aboot due to the need to have something to use as collateral for federal borrowing....the ability to tax citizens in the future. Without that, our country's ability to borrow would be substantially harder than it is.

No, post-Breton Woods, taxes aren't necessary to fund government spending, they are instead a tool for managing the economy using incentives and disincentives to steer economic activity in desired ways and to redistribute income to meet policy goals. Taxes do not fund government spending, that is a complete misconception that happens to be widely believed--nothing more.

Now on to deficit spending is 'good', because the private sector is in a surplus while the government is in the red. Just who the fuk does she think that money is going to? It goes to rich fuks that save that money rather than spend it, thus stifling the economy she claims it grows. Happy talk...to make you feel better aboot getting fuk'd.

Where the money is spent by the government is down to political decisions, it can be used to help the poor, to educate our young, to build and maintain necessary infrastructure etc. etc., or conversely it can be directed towards feeding the wealthy in a thousand different ways related to government corruption. That's not Kelton's fault or her model's, it's on the political processes that make those decisions either wisely or unwisely.

At 52 minutes in she's referring to Bernenke saying they don't spend taxes for costs, they simply add money to the system. But she leaves out the follow-up to that (I've seen that interview) where Bernenke later admits that they do spend taxes and that taxes will be needed in the future to cover those debts.

Bernanke is a regressive conventional economic thinker. Of course he preaches conventional economic reasoning. He is also wrong. Tax collections do not fund government expenditures, they destroy currency units in ways that can be used to accomplish policy goals, both for good and bad.

"The government is not like a household." Except that it is. while not on the same scale, tens of millions of households in this country, it is in a world with many other currency issuers, all of which are 'households' in the world market of currency issuers.

Show me households that can print legal tender and I'll concede your point.

She claims national debt is good, because now we have those assets in the hands of the private sector. But I guess she's just forgotten the huge drag to the economy that corporations expatriating money has caused...the huge tax incentives given to encourage a return of that money back into the economy, which never happened even after the incentive was given.

She claims nothing of the sort. Public debt is the reciprocal of private savings, setting the balance between the two is a tool directed by policy and and nothing more. It can be used for the greater public good or to misappropriate wealth. the tool doesn't care either way. It's the policy that directs the tool that decides its outcomes.

Next she says we need to increase deficit spending SO THAT GDP will rise. Using government spending to drive the economy is ok occasionally...always doing it creates an economic bubble that actual commerce should be filling. And in that instance, a collapse of the bubble doesn't only affect the economy, it causes the collapse of the country as well.

No, she says that in some circumstances deficit spending is appropriate (when the economy is underperforming vs. its available resources) and sometimes deficit spending is contraindicated (when the economy is overheated and the risk of inflation looms).

All the things we could be doing additional spending on...and I do agree that all the things she mentioned, we should be spending on...could/should be done by reducing spending on other things that do not move society forward, i.e. interest payments and wars...not by deficit spending.

She is correct that the student debt is an anchor on the economy. But how exactly did that come aboot?...and what were the effects? It was government spending to boost the economy and provide for the future. We now see how that worked out...inflated education costs, and graduates that start life out under huge debt amounts removing them from the real economy.

Student debt balooned because of deliberate policy decisions such as increasing tuitions by lowering public subsidies and balooning administartive costs, tied to out-and-out corruption of the sort Joe Biden made famous making the student loan "industry" into a giant hugely profitable grift. There is no need for high tuitions to fund post-secondary education, for most of the twentieth century that wasn't the practice at all.

She falsely claims universal income would do nothing to level out financial inequality, because EVERYONE get a check, while she ignores the source of that money which the rich would proportionately pay more of.

No, she doesn't say that. Funding a universal basic income (whether you like the concept or not) using proportional taxation (which she supports making more proportional) would obviously redistribute wealth and income downward. It's one possible approach among many. Indeed maybe the best use for taxation is to counter the inevitable upward flowing accumulation of wealth that is baked into the capitalist economic system. Tax the rich massively more and distribute the wealth to low-wage earners and the poor who will pump the money into the economy through spending (high velocity money) vs. the rich who use hide it, hoard it, and spend far less per dollar (low velocity money). That high velocity money is far more economically stimulative than rich people's low velocity money--it's better for the economy.

Fuk, still got 17 minutes...come on, wrap it up...

Time for a little fear mongering. According to her, if gov't pulls back on spending, we only have 3 options...bubble-fueled, private debt-fueled, and/or foreign-fueled growth. Other than the bubble-fueled, which gov't usually starts, I had a hard time seeing the downside. We have such a shitty import/export ratio, I think we could use some foreign-fueled growth there...start selling more and buying less. And everybody is always saying for gov't to get out of private sector business, so private debt could fuel the businesses to provide all the stuff we need to be selling those other countries. Foolish for her to imply that we only have three choices.

Here we run into the the upsides and downsides of being the world reserve currency. Upsides are it gives us unprecendented leverage in international finance and global political affairs-- we can by using the fact that international accounts are cleared in USD push around other countries. We can sanction Iran and Venezuela and interfere in their internal economies and political sovereignty because their oil and their foreign account balances are all denominated in USD. Neocons and US-based global corporations make trillions on that leverage. The downside of being the global reserve currency is that you have to maintain enormous trade deficits to assure sufficient global liquidity to make the system work. That means exposing American workers to cross-border labor and regulatory arbitrage--fancy language for pitting American workers against workers in coutries with slave wage rates and essentially no labor or political rights and no environmental regulations. This aspect of having a global reserve currency feeds profits for owners/investors in those essentially stateless transnational corporations-- already wealthy people-- at the expense of the workers and the poor. It also means those corporations can, rather than conform to US environmental and labor rules, simply offshore their production to countries lacking those. This is a classic "race to the bottom".

Oh thank god we're to the Q&A...

"...the group that has been most interested consistently and receptive to this, believe it or not, is the financial community."
No shit....ya don't say.

So let me get this straight, she advocates not only complete, but deficit spending...yet she has chosen a career in investing peoples' savings. How odd.

Her top priority advocacy is for a jobs program, where without regard to your skill set, you must do what you are told to get the minimal wage benefit. so let's say you're an economist, who's field of peers decides to blackball, you could effectively be relegated to ditch digging for a meager life instead. Sounds like a move deeper into societal slavery.

Finally, it's done.
Yeah....lotsa smoke....and a couple mirrors.

smokebreaks wrote:I'm not able to entertain the video at this time but I can assure you that #1. Debt does matter. #2 The belief that the US is insolvency free relies heavily on the premise that the US can just tax its population out of it's economic predicament is rather foolish. Eventually the price for the places to own property becomes unrealistic and the market will correct by squeezing those who can least afford to be squeezed then selling off their assets at pennies on the dollar.

Never build, always buy is the mentality that gets you ahead in the physical wealth world. Though they say building is cheaper, it never turns out to be quite the case. You want to put your money into appreciations and not just sock it away as savings, because that's not investment.

I am sorry, but there is no reward without risk, and the risk has to out perform money sitting idle by while opportunities pass.

The biggest problem is that these governments are spending money that they've already got obligated elsewhere and are hopeful that the public doesn't notice.

I'm of the beliefs that money sitting on the sideline needs to get in the game to be able to play but I'm not so sure that right now that is the correct move to be making.

I think holding cash for now is smart move but I'd be looking for the bottom to drop and be ready to run when it does. These -200 -600 point swings in the DJIA is going to make the next two years very interesting when interest rates continue to rise, we're going to have quite the shakeout between players and pretenders.

Good luck to all players.

Paul Tudor Jones, a hedge-fund luminary, said he’s stress-testing his portfolio of corporate debt because he expects a tumultuous road ahead on the back of the Federal Reserve’s apparent commitment to normalizing interest rates and buttressed by corporate tax cuts from the Trump administration.

Speaking at an economic forum in Greenwich, Conn., a hotbed for hedge funds, Jones said the Fed faces real challenges amid “the end of a 10-year run” of economic growth that many anticipate will soon come to a screeching, cyclical end.

Dick Fein wrote:Why silver could hit 900.00 per ounce and why J.P.Morgan has accumulated so much silver.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brFGOc7rPD0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Jesús Malverde wrote:

Butcher Bob wrote:"...the group that has been most interested consistently and receptive to this, believe it or not, is the financial community."
No shit....ya don't say.

MMT is not embraced by the "financial community"...

smokebreaks wrote: The biggest problem is that these governments are spending money that they've already got obligated elsewhere and are hopeful that the public doesn't notice.

smokebreaks wrote: When oil is trading so low due to decreased demand it shows that the global manufacturing sector is in a world of hurt and “energy” they say is the driver for all industry.

Jesús Malverde wrote:...the US is among the very best positioned countries to ride out the next (inevitable, in a [deliberately] cyclical global economy*) GFC. Every other large country I see in the world has greater exposure to risk....