noemon wrote:1] Which is where we almost are today in the west without Versailles but out of our own making.
2] We have reached weimar levels of debt & QE anyway.
3] @Steve_American Standard economics are 50-100 years old, controlling inflation through currency manipulation via the money supply is an ancient practice, plenty of centuries old.
1] This sentence is confusing. Weimar Germany had to buy gold to pay reparations under the treaty. How is the US and UK, etc. (not to include developing nations) in any way like Weimar?
2] Do you have any evidence to support this? Also, Weimar kept digging. I strongly assert that Weimar had dug itself very deep very fast, and the the US & UK are nowhere near as deep as Weimar got to.
3] MMTers assert that using interest rates to "control" the economy has not ever worked all that well. Even its supporters admit that it is a blunt tool. Prof. Mitchell has asserted and provided some evidence that there is little correlation between interest rates and falling inflation.
I think you and I have reached the point where further discussion will not do any good. You keep making unsupported assertions based on you 'religion' of MS Econ theory. I keep disagreeing, and I think I have provided more evidence than you have. I have agreed with you that it is possible that developing nations can't use it because a] they all have debts denominated in dollars, and b] even if they didn't have those dollar debts, I have not been convinced by MMTers that such nations can use MMT, but only because they have never provided any argument to support a claim that they can use MMT.
Also, I have provided a short list of nations that MMTers would agree can use MMT. It was: UK, NZ, Aust., Canada, Japan, the US, Russia, and China. You ignored my list.
Finally, as an American I'm mostly interested in what the US Gov. does to help Americans. I don't live there anymore, but I'm retired and don't contribute to the economy anyway. Your simple unsupported assertions that for the US MMT is unworkable have not convinced me. You claim that the current inflation has proven that MMT is wrong when it asserts that the US Gov. can deficit spend more now, and doesn't need to sell bonds to do it. My reason for this is my belief that the current situation is not normal. The pandemic caused shortages of things and diverted demand from services to things at a time when it was hard for corps to ramp up production of things, then came the war in Ukraine, and OPEC+ raising the price of energy, and ACC is damaging crop yields in the US and the world, which should drive up food prices. All of these factors should drive up prices of things, energy, and food; so it isn't surprising that there is inflation. The US is a market dominated by a few corps [the oil giants, Amazon, and Walmart, etc] which can increase their prices because they have monopoly pricing power.
It is very hard to demonstrate that the current inflation is being caused or not by the Gov. spending to support the economy in the pandemic and then after Biden took office. You have not even tried to demonstrate this, and instead just asserted it. Again, your assertions don't convince me. They may and likely do convince many others who basically already agree with you because the media have been supporting this theory for several decades now.
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