Harley Bassman On QE, Demographics, MMT And Flying Pigs
Late last month, in a lengthy piece, I asked if printing press-financed stimulus could break the back of the four-decade bond bull.
It was a fairly in-depth discussion, as far as ad hoc market musings go, but the overarching point was to ponder what the future might hold for long-end yields in the event the political tide continues to turn in favor of MMT-esque policy partnerships, whereby monetary policy coordinates directly with fiscal policy in order to, for example, ensure full employment a
That certainly seems reasonable. I do wonder though if the MMT implementation manages to deliver say 99% of the benefits to oligarchs, UBI allowing wages and benefits to crash or Infrastructure spending being overpriced boondoggles… that would keep inflation in check? I mean what’s a billionaire going to do with an extra billion dollars or trillion for that matter? This scenario scares me more that rising rates tanking stocks and bonds… that stagnation of political and economic systems in dysfunctional states is a metastable plateau.
The pundits also claimed QE1 would generate ungodly inflation and screw up the entire system. The only difference with MMT is instead of the gov’t buying bonds and transferring wealth to the wealthy, we’ll de facto transfer wealth to the masses through spending on social programs and infrastructure. It still wouldn’t really feed into the money supply and even if it did, it wouldn’t be subject to M2 money multiplier. This is just fear mongering from the rich who see their golden ticket drying up. Drawing comparisons between prior instances of money printing is a biased assumption with no real basis in historical record (or history). Show me a historical case of gov’t increasing money supply for altruistic purposes designed to benefit society as a whole, set in a globalized world. It doesn’t exist. Spare us the historical comparisons, because just like QE, those pleas aren’t worth the (newspaper ad) paper they’re printed on.