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The holiday-shortened week began in predictable fashion, with equities climbing the proverbial “wall of worry” as daunting virus headlines and Donald Trump’s dangerously quixotic efforts to usurp American democracy were brushed aside in favor of “vaccine optimism,” which is now the generic, go-to excuse for anyone who needs to “explain” higher stock prices.

On Monday evening, Emily Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration, formally began the transition to the Joe Biden administration. The move, authorized by Trump, ends a key standoff, even as the president’s legal challenges will likely live on — at least for another couple of weeks.

The initial readout on AstraZeneca’s vaccine was a positive, although average efficacy was lower than shots from Pfizer and Moderna.

This is the worst kind of “knock on wood” statement imaginable, but I’ll put it out there anyway: It’s now a foregone conclusion that COVID-19 will be largely under control by year-end 2021. And not thanks to any bleach injections or to any innovations in “bringing” UV light “inside the body,” as Trump famously suggested. But rather, thanks to real science. Imagine that, right?

But don’t get too excited if you’re the proletariat or labor more generally. After all, the old “normal” wasn’t very kind to you either, so getting “back to normal” will just mean struggling to make ends meet all over again, only you won’t necessarily have to worry about contracting deadly viral pneumonia when you clock in bright and early for an eight-hour day at Walmart after working the night shift at the local laundromat.

Read more: Who’s Looking Forward To ‘Normal’?

Outside of the AstraZeneca readout, the biggest story on Monday was obviously Joe Biden’s selection of Janet Yellen for Treasury Secretary.

The news isn’t surprising. I’d submit it’s a step in the right direction when it comes to ameliorating the widespread societal inequities that characterize what’s become a modern-day Belle Époque, only with grossly overpaid executives subbing for the rentier class, and a kind of ethereal pantheon of centibillionaires presiding over the whole thing from on high.

Yellen will almost surely work hand in hand with the Fed to promote the kind of fiscal-monetary partnerships with the potential to make a real difference for real people. Bloomberg’s Cameron Crise wrote that “it seems about as close as you can get to a guarantee that there will be harmony between the fiscal and monetary policy vectors.”

Don’t expect a full, public recognition that an MMT lens is the proper way to view government finance in America, but Yellen has made it (more than) clear that pretensions to fiscal “responsibility” can take a backseat to more pressing concerns when millions of Americans are suffering from food insecurity.

In August, for example, she penned an Op-Ed for The New York Times called “The Senate Is on Vacation While Americans Starve.”

“Congress… cannot expect the Fed to keep everything together on its own,” Yellen wrote. “When unemployment is exceptionally high and inflation is historically low, as they both are now, the economy needs more fiscal spending to support hiring.” She described monetary power as “set[ting] the table.” It’s up to Congress’s fiscal dollars to “bring in the diners,” she added, for emphasis.

The cynical among you will roll out the usual allegations about the Fed (and specifically Yellen herself) exacerbating inequality in the post-financial crisis era by pursuing monetary policy that was guaranteed to inflate the value of the assets that are overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of the rich. If you’re one of those critics, you’re not wrong.

But at some point (and I’ll say this as many times as I have to say it to make it stick), there has to be a realization among rational people that without a sustained fiscal impulse to complement monetary policy, undesirable outcomes (e.g., the inflation of bubbles in financial assets and the widening of the wealth gap) are both inevitable and not the fault of monetary policy.

If you leave monetary policy on its own and implement austerity or simply refuse to countenance the kind of demand-side measures that have the potential to improve the plight of the everyday people with the highest marginal propensity to consume, then you shouldn’t be surprised when, a decade later, you’re left with bubbles and rampant inequality.

Hopefully, 2020 has ushered in a sea change on that front, given the rather obvious relationship between fiscal stimulus and monetary largesse. But I’m not holding my breath for policymakers in developed economies with high levels of monetary sovereignty to have a come-to-Jesus moment vis-à-vis attitudes towards deficits, debt, and redistributive policies with the potential to effectuate real change.

You can laugh and trot out the same tired, old Yellen jokes that every would-be financial pundit is bound to lean on in the next few weeks, but look at who’s Treasury Secretary right now. If you know anything about Steve Mnuchin’s background, you know he’s hardly a “man of the people,” as it were. (Although I’d be remiss not to at least applaud him for being the only remaining adult in the room at 1600 Penn. — who knows what would have happened to the economy without Steve back in March/April.)

Stephanie Kelton delivered a few short remarks on Sunday that serve to encapsulate everything said above, and seem prescient with the Yellen news now in the market.

“‘Is this the right time to start worrying about the deficit?’ is not a question progressives should lean into,” she said.

“Flip the script. Make it about inflation, not some arbitrary number that falls out of the budget box now or in the future,” Kelton added, before driving it home:

I tune out completely whenever someone attempts to defend fiscal deficits by saying something like, ‘Right now, interest rates are near historic lows, so markets are telling us that they’re willing to finance….’ Don’t do this.

Yellen won’t go that far as Treasury Secretary (i.e., she won’t view the world through an MMT lens), but she at least understands the premise.

As opposed to, I don’t know, Louise Linton.