Odd Lots8 Jul 2024

MMT's Godfather Says the US Government Is Spending Like a Drunken Sailor

Modern Monetary Theory has gained prominence over the last several years by offering an alternative view on the constraints to fiscal policy. The basic gist is that the size of the deficit is not per se problematic. What matters are real resource constraints, and that if government spending gets too high — or is spent in unproductive ways — then inflation can materialize as too much money collides with insufficient supply. Another argument that some MMT adherents make is that the conventional path to fighting inflation (higher interest rates by the Federal Reserve) can actually be inflationary, because the coupon payments made by the government to Treasury holders constitute a form of government spending or fiscal expansion. In this episode of the Odd Lots podcast, we speak with Warren Mosler, the intellectual godfather of MMT, to explain the mechanisms at play and assess the current macro environment. Perhaps surprisingly, Mosler is concerned with the combination of high government debt loads, high deficits (which he characterizes as spending like a drunken sailor), and the orthodox approach the Fed is taking to fighting inflation. With debt as high as it is, the annual interest payments due to these rate hikes has gone up significantly, creating a situation that mainstream economists might call Fiscal Dominance. He explains how this environment is a recipe for consistently higher and sustained inflation in the years ahead.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(1244)

The Creator of Claude Code on The Hottest Piece of Software in the World

2026 has been, in terms of software, the year everyone is talking about Claude Code. Indeed, Anthropic's coding agent incited a market scare — and helped usher in the era of vibe coding — through its ...

20 Jul 1h 6min

Lev Menand and Nathan Tankus on Why Fed Independence Is Now Hanging by a Thread

Last August, President Trump made the unprecedented choice of moving to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook. The administration claimed she was being terminated with cause, citing an ongoing investigation in ...

17 Jul 1h 5min

Why Soccer Analytics Works Like Volatility Arbitrage Trading

American sports fans have long been comfortable talking in the language of stats and analytics. Soccer embraced the 'moneyball' revolution later; the sport was once perceived as too complex to model a...

16 Jul 51min

NY Governor Kathy Hochul on Her One Year Data Center Moratorium

On July 14, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced a one-year moratorium on new large data center projects in the state. It's the nation's first such pause at a time when anti-data center politics i...

15 Jul 42min

Why AI Might Actually Create More Work for Lawyers

It seems obvious that among the many industries that AI might disrupt, the legal profession might face some of the most adverse outcomes. When clerical, research-based tasks like searching through dat...

13 Jul 55min

The Korean Levered ETFs Shaking Markets All Around the World

Retail participation in the stock market is booming. And of course the biggest story in markets is the AI trade, which has created an incredible amount of demand for chips and memory. These two broad ...

10 Jul 43min

One of the World's Largest Hedge Funds on Its 86x Growth in Token Spending

We've gone through a number of a technological revolutions in investing, whether it was the dawn of the high frequency trading era or the introduction of robotraders. When it comes to AI, the big ques...

9 Jul 52min

These Are the Sharps Actually Making Money on Prediction Markets

Here's a couple things about prediction markets. A lot of it is pure gambling and speculation, much of it on things with very little economic relevance. Another fact is that in all likelihood, if you ...

6 Jul 48min