Macro N Cheese

Some of us Macro N Cheesers first heard the term “rentier class” from Michael Hudson’s interviews and YouTube talks. In today’s episode, he and Steve discuss the idea of economic rent as a remnant of feudalism. Bankers have replaced the feudal lords as the parasites who extract most of the wealth from the economy. The financial, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector comprise the contemporary kleptocracy. They have manipulated the system to such an extent, it is impossible to get an accurate measure of our society’s economic health or pain.    Michael delves into the history of debt and its role in our ever-changing economic structure. He references classical economists like Smith, Mills, Ricardo, and Marx, with their concept of economic rent as unearned income. They believed that industrial capitalism would eliminate the entire legacy of feudalism and dissolve the landlord class by taxing away rent or nationalizing the land. Since most governments were subsidizing education and health care, it see

Our guest, Cindy Banyai, is exactly the kind of person we want representing us wherever policy is made. She has the life experience of a working woman raising three kids, runs her own consulting business, and has lived and traveled all over the world. Did we forget to mention she knows MMT and supports the Green New Deal, universal health care, and a federal jobs program to ensure a basic minimum wage, worker protections, and benefits?  When Cindy happened upon Modern Monetary Theory, it made sense of much of what she already believed. She had been a longtime proponent of participatory budgeting and says that being freed from economic shackles in policy-making is revolutionary. When people in her district come with complaints, she can truthfully say she knows what to do.  She talks with Steve about the conservatives from both parties who place roadblocks in programs like Social Security and then criticize them for having those very complications. They use terms like “accountability,” “efficiency,”

We here at Macro N Cheese are immersed in the world of MMT, but that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate people who aren’t yet on board. As long as they’re not pushing an austerity agenda, we welcome them. Today’s guest, Margaret Kimberley, of Black Agenda Report, is just such an ally. Her book, Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents, was published earlier this year.  This interview takes place as one region of the US is ablaze in wildfires and the pandemic is no closer to being resolved. Margaret sees the inadequate handling of COVID19 as confirmation that we live in a failed state. Countries that have responded best to the virus are either fully socialist or have robust public funding of their healthcare system. The climate crisis is further proof that capitalism is in crisis and neither of our two major political parties has plans to protect us from the fallout. Barack Obama illustrates the hypocrisy as he tweets dramatic images of the orange fire-lit skies and urges people to “vote like you

Back in 2018, Steve invited Robert Hockett to come on to talk about shadow banking and explain its role in the 2008 financial crisis. We’re bringing back this interview because shadow banks are still around and people still have a hard time grasping exactly what they do. This is partly because many don’t understand what banks themselves actually do. The popular vision is that banks borrow and lend and that they make loans based on what they have in the vault; we MMTers know that they make loans based on profitability.  Banks are policed with a view to their liquidity risk, while shadow banks are behaving the same way, without the policing.    In order for us to unpack this issue, we need to know the meaning of “endogenous” and “exogenous” money. Bob defines endogenous as the credit-money generated by private banks and lending institutions, while exogenous is the sovereign element, created by the Fed or central bank. As in most cases, there’s always an element of public involvement in the p

Our guest this week is long-time friend of the podcast, Fadhel Kaboub. The Macro N Cheese audience will remember when Fadhel and Ndongo Samba Sylla visited with us last October on their way to the conference on African Monetary and Economic Sovereignty in Tunis, Tunisia. In that episode, we learned about the CFA franc, a vestige of colonialism, a symbol of the lack of true sovereignty in the post-colonial world, and a tool of economic oppression by international financial powers.   The conference in Tunis was an unqualified success and plans for a second one were underway until COVID19 interfered. To keep the conversation alive, Fadhel and his colleagues from Senegal, Tunisia, and Germany wrote An Open Letter on African Economic and Monetary Sovereignty. Having it translated into 50 languages and creating audio recordings in each, makes it accessible at the grassroots level. There are more than 500 signatures of scholars, economists, activists, and political figures from developing and former colonial n

This week Brett Scott brings us a report from the war zone. He’s based in the UK but the war on cash serves the same global interests and employs the same sort of weapons in the US. The interview begins with Steve asking about the role of COVID19. Brett tells of the huge British supermarkets, at the start of the pandemic, blasting the message that cash is dangerous; warning that passing cash from hand to hand is likely to carry the virus along with it. The CDC as well as major financial institutions have published that there is evidence to the contrary. They say, in fact, that credit cards and pin pads are far more likely to transmit the coronavirus. But the message persists: cash is dirty.  The mainstream narrative has it that the move to a digital economy is happening organically, from the bottom up. As if people are simply drifting away from cash and migrating towards digital payment systems. In reality the opposite is true. You could say the war on cash is a war on class, from the top down. Working-

Whenever Steve's guest is a lawyer, we know we're going to learn something new. Rohan Grey told us it's like the saying: “when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” When you're a lawyer, you look at any issue and see a network of laws. This is why we're so grateful for the lawyers on Macro & Cheese - they teach us about that underlying legal framework. Camille Walsh isn't just a lawyer, she's a historian. We've been hearing about her book, Racial Taxation: Schools, Segregation, and Taxpayer Citizenship, 1869-1973, for a long time. Interestingly, she never intended to write about taxation, but her research led her there, and decided it for her. The notion of identifying as “taxpayer” is entwined with presumptions of entitlement which, in the US, date back to the founding principles, determining who has the right to be a citizen, who's qualified to vote, claim property, or own other human beings. The bottom line: it was a privileged group of white males back then and little has changed. Ultimately a

World-renowned economics professor and accomplished author/podcaster/speaker Mark Blyth joins us this week to discuss MMT, the variants of capitalism, and the current culmination of the populist anger outlined in his new book Angrynomics, co-authored by Eric Lonergan. The book, in brief, is a revolutionary, yet practical solution for an economically unjust world brought into clear focus by the Covid19 pandemic. Mark has been a consistent ally to the progressive movement over the years, using his broad reach to advocate for economic literacy and justice. Although he hasn't fully embraced MMT as his lord and savior, he calls himself a fellow traveler with no doubt that when they round up the MMTers, he'll be thrown in the back of the van with them all. His sharp wit and finely honed sense of the absurd make his social and political observations as interesting as his economic ones. An underlying theme the authors encountered consistently throughout the research for Angrynomics was - you guessed it - anger. It

The Covid19 pandemic is much more than a public health catastrophe; it has highlighted and exacerbated economic, social, and environmental crises on an unprecedented scale. While Congress sits on their hands, a learning-by-doing experiment is already underway at the Federal Reserve. With more than 40 million Americans out of work, the Fed appears ready to fulfill its congressional mandate to both maximize employment and promote stable prices. Indeed, the strongest signal that this time things can be different is the opening of the Fed’s new Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF), which promises to buy both existing and future state and municipal debt. -- from “Overcoming Covid19 Requires Rethinking University Finance” (see article link below) Our guests, Ben Wilson and Scott Ferguson, are working with others in the MMT community to develop the plan for a new university-issued currency, the Uni, with backing by the Federal Reserve. Universities are not unlike small states or municipalities. They provide jobs an

This week we welcome Richard Dien Winfield, a rare candidate for national office who is running on the Federal Job Guarantee and Medicare for All. It’s no surprise, then, that Richard is fully onboard with Modern Monetary Theory and spoke at the MMT Conference in Stonybrook last September. Steve talks with him about his new book, Democracy Unchained: How We Should Fulfill Our Social Rights and Save Self-Government, and the platform for his current campaign. Richard is running in Georgia’s special election for the US Senate. His campaign is founded on correcting the failure to recognize and enforce our social rights, which he sees as the key to remedy blockages of opportunity that hobble our democracy. Throughout this interview, he frequently returns to the concept of social rights as the rights that are not in our constitution but should be. These include the right to a decent livelihood, healthcare, education at all levels, the right to balance work and family, and to level the playing field between employe

J.D. ALT is an architect who has spent much of his career researching, inventing, and visualizing things that he hoped might improve the quality-of-life and prosperity of collective society. Gradually, he came to two realizations: first, the kinds of things he was envisioning (free-to-ride downtown people-movers and affordable housing strategies) would never be undertaken by a profit-oriented corporate business model and, second, the only other possible financier--the federal government--was "broke" and hopelessly in debt. Alarmed and discouraged by these realizations, he stopped thinking about new things to build and started investigating how--and why--it could possibly be true that collective society was, "for lack of money," so helplessly unable to build things it both needed and could dramatically benefit from. So begins J.D. Alt’s biography on Amazon. This week he joins Steve to talk about his new book, Paying Ourselves to Save the Planet: A Layman's Explanation of Modern Monetary Theory. The interview

A discussion of racial taxation and private digital currency may seem like two disparate subjects. Raúl Carrillo’s genius is his ability to explain these things in such a way that their intrinsic connections are unmistakable. Just as there is racialized taxation, we also have racialized surveillance, and private digital currency is definitely in the surveillance business. Previous episodes have spoken of the effects of racial taxation, creating a disparity in public schools due to the inequities in local property tax funding schemes that pay for education. The same kind of taxpayer pressures that have defunded the schools have combined with the starving of federal support for the states, making it hard for local governments to provision themselves. States and municipalities resort to collecting fines and fees through petty crime designation, using the courts and incarceration as a funding source. The burden falls heavily on poor and oppressed minorities. These problems come from neoliberalism’s core embrace

Our guest is Jengis Osman, an activist and labor organizer who was led to Modern Monetary Theory through his life experiences and those of his family and the people he works with. After graduating from university, he struggled to find work and questioned why it had been easier for his grandparents who had immigrated to Australia from wartorn Cyprus in the 1970s. When he taught English to new immigrants, they asked the same question: why aren’t there enough jobs? Jengis now lives in the Northern Territory, a remote section of Australia. The effects of austerity are always harshest on the most vulnerable groups, but the living conditions of Australia’s indigenous population also reflect that country’s unique history of brutal colonial oppression. Before colonization the people had an abundance of food and water; their kinship systems worked for them. The colonizers tore communities apart with forced relocation to different regions with different customs and a foreign language. Children were uprooted and sent t

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