Macro N Cheese

This week we welcome back our favorite Cowboy Economist, who immediately tells us what a great job Real Progressives and Macro & Cheese are doing. Smart guy! John Harvey and Steve have much to discuss. The coronavirus pandemic is showing no signs of abating. It underscores or exacerbates all the other monumental problems we’re facing. There’s the high stakes presidential election asking us to choose between a deficit hawk neoliberal and a lunatic, while a large portion of the public have no faith that the electoral process is anything but rigged, especially after the primaries. Police brutality and injustice have reached critical mass, sending people into the streets in numbers we haven’t seen in our lifetimes. The climate crisis is being ignored, but the IPCC predictions hang over us like a doomsday clock, ticking away. Steve and John share the frustration of everyone who understands MMT: we know things don’t have to be this way. John holds the current economics discipline in particular disdain. Politicians

An alternate title for this episode could be “Back to Basics.” It reminds us why Randall Wray’s MMT Primer continues to be a definitive resource for the Macro & Cheese community. This 2017 interview came about when the American Monetary Institute (AMI) published an article critiquing MMT. Randy Wray was mentioned and quoted throughout, so Steve invited him on to set the record straight — and maybe shed some light on AMI and its theory of “positive money.” If you don’t come away with a clear understanding of it, it’s because Randy himself can’t always get to the bottom of AMIs logic. It turns out they have some less than pristine methodology. It’s hard to assess the strength of their theory when you can’t pin down the theory. They don’t even produce balance sheets. AMI wants the Treasury to print greenbacks because they posit that the Federal Reserve is private and independent, with full control over the US dollar. Randy explains that we do, indeed, have a sovereign currency, and suggests that we read the Fe

If any of our listeners aren’t following The Funky Academic on his website, YouTube, or Twitter, this episode will change all that. Macro n Cheese usually leans heavily towards economics, but Irami Osei-Frimpong arrives at many of the same conclusions that we do, yet gets there by a different route. That helps make this such an interesting interview. In these disturbing times, his strong sense of humor and irony are a welcome respite. Irami is a PhD student in philosophy, which he chose to study because, as an undergraduate, he realized that people are confused about what justice looks like. In a liberal democracy, there’s no need for a minister of propaganda; our thinking is controlled by what is omitted from our education. He says we must know what we’re fighting for because if we’re merely guided by emotions or compassion, we can be easily confused and swayed. “You need actual arguments to ground you so you're not buffeted about when your latest crush is a Republican.” This is how we end up accepting that

The coronavirus epidemic has brought about an unprecedented level of unemployment and destitution in the US. Without significant structural change, it could affect people’s lives for decades to come. In this interview, Pavlina Tcherneva talks about the roots of the problem and lays out the kind of imaginative yet practical solutions that we need. Pavlina’s new book, The Case for a Job Guarantee, will be published later this month. It is a call to rethink the assumption that unemployment is unavoidable and that there’s little we can do about it. As a primer on the Job Guarantee, it documents all the benefits of the proposal. It confronts the narratives on competition, the market, and personal responsibility. The book exposes what Pavlina calls a major failure of her profession of economics. Economists have validated unemployment, structuring our thinking about the economy, markets, and their behavior, around the fallacious concept of a “natural rate of unemployment.” This validation brings massive failure at

Tschaff Reisberg is not only an early proponent of MMT, but is also a union representative with extensive experience in real-world struggles between workers and employers. His story - and that of the flight attendants union - is instructional for anyone fighting for fundamental change. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the airline industry was booming. Flight attendants’ jobs were secure, with expectations of growth and more hiring. When the virus hit, the entire industry shut down. They lost 95% of their passengers. Like many industries during the crisis, there were talks of bankruptcy and furloughs. Tschaff and Steve discuss the impact of the virus on the working class as a whole. When people lose their jobs, they stop spending; when they stop spending, others lose their jobs and it snowballs across the country, as we’ve seen in the record-breaking unemployment figures. In past financial crises, government bailouts served to enrich corporate CEOs and shareholders, while allowing the working class to suffer

Howie Hawkins is the Green Party’s candidate in the US presidential race. He joins Steve to discuss not only his platform, but the role of third parties in US politics and, of course, economics. Steve opens the episode by pointing out that he and Howie are in about 90% agreement on all the issues. Howie was the first US candidate to campaign for a Green New Deal ten years ago, in 2010. He ran against Andrew Cuomo for Governor of NY state in 2010, 2014, and 2018. With the suspension of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, progressives are confronted with the choice of “Dem-enter,” which nobody is excited about, and supporting a third party, which many think of as a wasted vote. Here Howie makes a good case: a strong third party can force the media and other candidates to deal with our demands and confront issues that they’d prefer to avoid. There are historical precedents: the Liberty Party put slavery on the ballot and the Socialist Party brought social insurance programs into the forefront, some of which

In March, Rohan Grey was the guest speaker on a Real Progressives National Outreach Call. He talked about his forthcoming book, Digitizing the Dollar: The Battle for the Soul of Public Money in the Age of Cryptocurrency. The title says it all.  In the midst of the pandemic, people are living with unprecedented financial insecurity. There’s no real sense of when they’ll be able to return to work or whether there will be jobs awaiting them. Rohan had been working with Representative Rashida Tlaib on her emergency assistance act, which is designed to provide relief funds of $2,000 a month to every man, woman, and child in the US. He explained the thinking that went into drawing up the bill, which is far more generous than any other coronavirus stimulus bill to this day.  Of special interest to proponents of MMT is the fact that the Treasury would finance the program through minting trillion-dollar coins. Rohan told us how this provides a legal workaround to arguments about the debt-ceiling.  The distributi

MMT seems like a natural fit for Marxists so why has there been some resistance to it? MMT explains the monetary system. Period. If we build a post-capitalist society we’ll need to understand how currency works. If we want to discuss getting rid of money altogether, we’ll still need to understand it. In this episode, Steve called upon Nathan Tankus to break it down and explain the objections to MMT among some on the left, particularly Marxists. Along the way, he tries to dispel some of the fears and objections. Marx devoted himself to studying and developing a theory of capitalism. He left a huge body of work and, occasionally, some parts of it contradict other parts. There’s a strand of Marxist tradition that influenced Post-Keynesians, Chartalists, and MMTers, so it’s hard to make the case of incompatibility. A criticism of MMT from the left is that it is only relevant to a monetary sovereign nation, especially one, like the US, that doesn’t hold foreign-denominated debt. MMT is explicit about the perils

This week we’re bringing back a conversation Steve had with journalist and researcher Claire Connelly in 2017, which explores all the best arguments in the job guarantee vs universal basic income debate. Claire says that the American nostalgia for a more prosperous era supports the case for government involvement in employment even beyond the New Deal. The fact that the US had almost full employment during WW2 is largely responsible for much of the prosperity in the postwar era. Even today, it could be said that the military is the closest we have to an employer of last resort. Conservatives object to government involvement in the economy - but Claire points out all the ways in which the government subsidizes large corporations and enriches the lives of those at the top. Since the government creates the currency, a job guarantee wouldn’t require a tax increase that would decrease anyone’s stash of money. We’ve given the government permission to abdicate its responsibility for employment and both sides of t

April was the 33rd anniversary of the Keating 5 Savings & Loan scandal, so we brought back our favorite former bank-regulator, Bill Black, to talk about it. It turns out that Bill has been involved in a documentary series about banking fraud and suggested that we should also hear from the directors, Patrick Lovell and Eric Vaughan. He calls them “the Coen brothers of documentaries.” The Con is a 4-part series that was inspired by Patrick’s own experience during the 2008 Great Financial Crisis. He was a successful producer and entrepreneur who had built a business and owned a home for his young family. The financial crisis wiped him out. Listeners to our podcast will be struck by the similarities to Steve Grumbine’s story. People who were hurt by the crisis say that they were struck by the disconnect between the media portrayal and their own real-life experiences. The victims were said to have been greedy and irresponsible, trying to “use their homes as ATMs.” The perpetrators were dismissed as a few bad app

The progressive movement is still coming to terms with the suspension of Bernie Sanders’ campaign and his endorsement of Joe Biden. We decided to check in with one of our favorite people in independent media, Jamarl Thomas of Progressive Soapbox.    Steve and Jamarl spend an hour (give or take a few minutes) addressing the two questions that seem to be on everyone’s mind: what went wrong and where do we go from here?    Jamarl’s critique of Sanders is fairly straight-forward -- he went to war against a powerful enemy with no powder in his gun. Would it have helped if Bernie had allowed his team to use opposition research against Joe Biden and others? Jamarl thinks that's part of what the campaign lacked. We’ll never know.    To understand 2020 we have to understand that the Democrats’ number one priority was beating Sanders. His movement was a threat to the oligarchy. When they picked Biden they understood all his defects, but in their calculations, they figured that he could get

If you missed our recent episode with Professor Steve Keen, you’ll want to go back and listen to it soon. In January he spoke of the inevitability of disastrous climate crises. Now here we are, a few months later: different crisis, same chaos, inescapable tragedy. Although there is much agreement between Steve Keen and our friends in the MMT community, there are a couple of areas where the views diverge. At Macro n Cheese, we’re not afraid of a little disagreement. In fact, we welcome it. We’re all on the same side. Keen believes that during a crisis -- climate or pandemic -- we need a centralized authority to take over and maintain civilization. We've been following the advice of neoclassical economists for about half a century. During the stagflation of the 1970s, Milton Friedman vanquished the last remnants of the Keynesian approach. Thus began the unshakable belief in deregulation, privatization, and globalization. Reduce the size of government and let the market take control. This ideology ignores the

As The Intercept’s DC Bureau Chief, Ryan Grim is well-positioned to assess the American political scene. This interview took place a few days before Bernie Sanders suspended his presidential campaign, but the writing was already on the wall. We all know that the movement still has work to do, but we're faced with different possible strategies now that we no longer have Bernie to shine a light and bring media attention to it. Steve and Ryan discuss where to go from here. Between the energy and attention generated by Bernie’s campaign and the coronavirus pandemic, the people have never been more open to progressive policies. For the first time, the idea of public health is taking hold. The US handling of the COVID-19 crisis is worse than anywhere else in the world. There’s an inescapable connection between that and the fact that we don’t have a real public health system in place. The patchwork quilt of private healthcare simply doesn’t work. The mainstream media joined Bernie’s opponents in insisting we can’t

This week’s guest is a bit of a departure for us. We don’t usually interview political candidates but Lauren Ashcraft is a stand-up comedian, a Democratic Socialist, and an ardent proponent of MMT, so how could we resist? She was introduced to us by our friend Andrés Bernal, who must have recognized how well all these attributes would serve her in the US Congress. When someone’s convictions are born of their lived experiences, the roots run deep. Corporate greed literally killed her grandfather who was a victim of a notorious coal mining accident. Her grandmother could not have survived without Social Security. Ironically Lauren became radicalized from working in the belly of the capitalist beast. She worked for one of the huge financial institutions where she received daily messages about profits being down. Staff was constantly being laid off or forced to relocate, at a time when these companies were receiving billions of dollars in incentives. And somehow the compensation to those at the very top continu

Sometimes it seems like economists forget that economics is a social science which is why we’re excited to bring the new generation of MMT to Macro n Cheese. Matthew Robinson is a doctoral student at UMKC, which has been an academic home base to many friends of this podcast, including Mat Forstater who brought Matthew to our attention. Matthew talks to Steve about the personal and academic journey that led to his current work. As an undergrad at Fresno State, he saw a disconnect between what he was being taught and what he was seeing as a volunteer in the community. The west side of Fresno was a segregated neighborhood, with as much as 20% unemployment -- a reality that wasn’t reflected in the textbooks. At UMKC’s Center for Economic information, there’s a group working on health issues, recognizing that minority neighborhoods experience the worst cases of childhood asthma, lead poisoning, and a myriad of other problems, exacerbated by years of poor housing conditions and inadequate healthcare facilities. M

When asked to talk about public health needs during the current coronavirus pandemic, Fadhel Kaboub immediately brings up climate change and expands the concept of public health to a degree that some will find surprising. After giving it a moment’s thought you can’t help but agree. Even if COVID-19 isn’t related to climate change, the effects of the climate crisis will accelerate in the coming years and we’ll see more pandemics and other disasters. We were caught flat-footed this time, but our inexcusable lack of preparedness cannot happen again. As Fadhel warns, there can be no “return to normal.” This pandemic illustrates why it’s impossible to think of public health needs in narrow medical terms. This kind of crisis requires massive intervention early on. Clearly we need the infrastructure and medical capabilities to handle screening, testing, treatment, and hospitalization of huge numbers of patients all over the world. To slow the spread of the virus requires decreasing the intensity of human contact

Recent presidential primary results have been disappointing for supporters of Bernie Sanders. The corporate media and mainstream pundits say that Bernie’s weakness is his failure to attract Black voters. Steve’s guest, Glen Ford, executive editor of Black Agenda Report, tells us that, in fact, Bernie’s agenda is quite popular among blacks, especially the younger generation. The problem lies elsewhere. Our two-party system of governing reflects the realities of our capitalist and racist nation. One side of the duopoly is always the party of white supremacists -- the white man’s party -- which must be kept out of power. In the past the Democrats had been the white man’s party, switching roles in 1968. For Black voters, the presidential primaries are about choosing the candidate who can defeat the Republican. Most Blacks understand Joe Biden’s culpability in the murder and mayhem caused by police in their communities. They know the part he played in the passing of the crime bill. Many would prefer a Sanders pr

Our guest is the OG of MMT. Listeners always appreciate Warren Mosler’s ability to slice through to the clear and practical fiscal implication of any policy consideration. Today he talks to Steve about the deflationary bias of Medicare for All, the countercyclical effects of a federal job guarantee, how to apportion the resources that will be freed up by M4A, and why it makes sense to replace the income tax with some kind of asset tax.     You don’t need a degree in economics to understand why expanding Medicare’s coverage from age 65 to age zero will result in an immediate reduction in overall spending on healthcare. Warren estimates $600 billion in savings. Meanwhile at least 5 million jobs will be lost. Economists call it a massive “positive productivity shock.” Whenever you can produce the same amount of goods or services for less money, it’s good for the economy, despite the job loss. Now those people can be deployed for something more useful than the advertising, marketing, and administrative tasks of p

It’s always a treat to welcome L. Randall Wray, one of our favorite economists and guests, to Macro n Cheese. This episode is an added treat because, in a bit of a departure, Randy talks to Steve about politics and policy, looking through the lens of MMT while putting today’s issues in a historical context. Who better to bring that perspective than someone who lived through it? Maybe he wasn’t around for the Great Depression or World War II, but as a baby boomer, he witnessed first hand much of the massive growth and expansion of the postwar years and talks about what made America great and not-so-great during that period.   Randy states the only reason the policies proposed by Bernie Sanders seem so far outside the mainstream is because the mainstream has become so regressive. The ideas aren’t radical -- the Democratic Party is conservative.   Steve asks him why our society is so regressive. Much of the answer lies in the rise of finance capital -- the financialization of the economy. Wall Street has its fin

Our guest, Alexandra Scaggs, is a senior writer at Barron’s, where she covers markets and fixed income. The episode begins as an interview about financial journalism and dealing head-on with the neoliberal economic narrative, but evolves into a conversation that is both personal and political in which she and Steve share their experiences with everything from sobriety to learning about MMT. As Alexandra tells it, news organizations maintain the mainstream narrative through ways both subtle and direct. In her career, she hasn’t faced overt censorship. Financial publications often hire young journalists who don’t yet have a sophisticated understanding of functional finance or economics. They tend to respect credentials and positions of authority, thus are likely to accept the word of those in positions of power. Reporters are also dealing with deadlines, leaving them no time to investigate other explanations. Austerity begets austerity; the publication doesn’t hire enough journalists, so each of them are doing