Macro N Cheese

Dr. Daniel Negreiros Conceição developed an interest in economics at a young age, having experienced the consequences of inflationary crises during his formative years. After being entranced by the writings of MMT economists as an undergrad studying economics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, he came to the US to do his graduate studies at UMKC where he became a friend and colleague of so many of our favorite guests on this podcast. He left determined to use what he learned to help his own country achieve its potential. He spoke with us about the recent political and historical context for background into the broader political economic situation and the stances of the major political actors towards it. He pointed out the closely matching parallel track with our own political developments in the US and the economic underpinnings. He also discussed many similarities in the state of the discourse and misinformation in discussions of finance and government budgets. He then explained the mechanics of

Our listeners know that Steve is a perpetual student -- his YouTube show is called The Rogue Scholar. He makes no apologies for past incomplete or erroneous thinking; he just soldiers on, deepening his understanding of the issues and course-correcting his analysis. He is a voracious reader and we can identify at least three books that led to this week’s episode: https://bookshop.org/a/82803/9780393651362 (The Divide), by Jason Hickel, https://bookshop.org/a/82803/9780872863293 (Blackshirts and Reds), by Michael Parenti, and https://bookshop.org/a/82803/9781913026028 (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism), by Vladimir Lenin.* They have all fed into his obsession with neocolonialism and the unholy trinity of the IMF, World Bank, and WTO. The problem predates the modern neoliberal era: “Lenin talks extensively about taking out these loans. Now, mind you, the IMF wasn't around ... But this whole concept of global finance capital was already being talked about at the turn of the century. And what he showed

** Be sure to check out the transcript for each episode of this podcast on our website, where you will also find an “Extras” page with links to related resources. https://realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/ (realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast) ** Robert Hockett drops into the Macro N Cheese clubhouse to talk to Steve about the usual stuff: inflation, monopoly capitalism, the massive scale of global inequality, and the climate crisis barreling down on us at an ever-faster speed. It is our ninth episode with Bob, this one spurred by his recent article, the alliterative “Prices, Preclusive Purchases, and Production: Some Forgotten Solutions to Forgotten Inflation Problems” (Forbes, 13 May 2022), which diagnoses the current inflation as three supply side dysfunctions – short, medium, and long term. Folks like Larry Summers focus on labor costs, in hopes of encouraging a further clampdown on labor, while executives are boasting record profits and chortling about marking up prices under cover of

Real Progressives and Macro N Cheese are committed to bringing MMT to activists and folks with no background in economics. Many of us were only interested in learning how MMT disrupts the concept of taxes funding federal programs, but the more we know, the more we want to understand. MMT is funny that way. If you’re new to MMT, this week’s interview with L. Randall Wray might appear to be wonky and intimidating. But we urge you to listen and promise it will be worth it. We’ve had a few episodes dealing with inflation in recent weeks because that’s where we are at this particular time in history. We believe it can’t be talked about often enough because we’re surrounded by misinformation in the mainstream media and lies from the mouths of so-called experts. Steve invited Randy to talk about the recent paper he co-authored with Yeva Nersisyan, another friend of this podcast. The title speaks volumes: Is It Time for Rate Hikes? The Fed Cannot Engineer a Soft Landing but Risks Stagflation by Trying. To put it bl

A false dawn is a promising situation which comes to nothing. This is how Aqdas Afzal describes the situation in his native Pakistan and India at the end of the Raj. “The point to remember here, Steve, is that the British were in India not to govern. They were in India to extract surplus and to maintain what they called law and order. And so the British left without giving the local people any taste or mechanism for bringing about accountability or democracy. But they did leave behind these two very, almost draconian institutions for keeping law and order. And because of these two institutions - these two state institutions that the British left behind - in the case of Pakistan, the first 25 years of Pakistan's history was complete chaos.” Aqdas talks to Steve about the chaos of partition – a humanitarian crisis. Remember, Pakistan was not only separated from India, but it was also cleaved from its own Eastern wing, now known as Bangladesh. The generation that sacrificed and struggled to gain independence wa

**Transcripts and extras for this episode can be found at realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast.** Iceland’s economy is an example of MMT working the way MMT economists say it works. It is the second smallest free-floating currency in the world. However, despite its size, conditions are dramatically different than in a country like Greece, shackled to a currency outside its control. For better or worse, Iceland has a bit of monetary sovereignty. “When you have your own currency, you can develop your economy by very smart economic decisions, domestic investments that build up the production capacity of the economy. Or you can use that currency to basically create a credit bubble, which then runs the economy to the ground.” Steve’s guest, Ólafur Margeirsson, has written more than 250 articles on the Icelandic economy over the past decade and, until recently, had a unique vantage point as an alternate member of the Central Bank of Iceland’s Supervisory Board. Despite Icelandic society’s Nordic influenc

Welcome to the third and final chapter in our series with Carl Zha on Mao and the Chinese Revolution. This one covers the sticky wicket of the Cultural Revolution, and the most controversial part of Mao’s legacy. It exposes the danger of a leader being out of touch with the base. The episode also looks at the complex political history of Tibet, an issue of concern to a few American celebrity Buddhists. (Spoiler alert: the story was rife with class conflict. Isn’t that always the case? What history books and media present as religious persecution turns out to be about money and power.) Tibetan monasteries wanted to maintain their serfs while the communists were into abolishing feudal relations of production. (Second spoiler alert: if you put your money on CIA involvement, you made a wise wager.) Carl brings the series to life with anecdotes from his own family. This episode is jam-packed with stories of his parents who grew up in the thick of these events. Some of their experiences were specific to their cla

**Every episode of Macro N Cheese has a full transcript at https://realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/ (realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast). While you’re there, check out the extras page, with links to further information related to the week’s topic. The first part of this three-part series talked about China from Mao’s birth in 1893 through the Sino-Japanese war to the eve of the Chinese Civil War in 1945. This week, Carl discusses the civil war and the ultimate success of the Chinese Communist forces, despite being vastly outnumbered – 1.2 million against the KMT’s 4.5 million. The US looked to China to be its junior partner in East Asia, much like Japan is today. They backed Chiang Kai-shek with military training, weapons, and other resources. A government led by the KMT would preclude a strong China-Soviet alliance. Most leftists are familiar with the historic revolutionary form of warfare developed by Mao and the People’s Liberation Army. Lacking the numbers and equipment for a trad

In the first of a three-part series about Mao Zedong and the Chinese revolution, Carl Zha sets the stage with its pre-revolutionary history. Carl, host of the Silk and Steel podcast, was born in China in 1976, one month after the death of Mao, placing him squarely in the first post-cultural, post-Mao generation. The episode opens with Japan’s imperial expansion into China. After its defeat by Japan, there was a scramble to carve up China among the major world powers – France, Britain, Russia, Japan, and Germany. The US was a latecomer to the imperialist game. Fearing there would be nothing left... “The US actually proposed a so-called open-door policy, which means all the imperialist powers should enjoy equal access to the Chinese market. And in the US textbooks, that is presented as some kind of heroic effort on the US side to save China's territorial integrity.” This is the China Mao Zedong was born into, around 50 years after the first opium war, when Britain forced China to legalize opium in order to c

“In one sense, it's a state initiative, but in the other sense it's actually preserving rights of individuals against the state.”Rohan Grey is back with us for the seventh time. In this episode, he talks to Steve about the ECASH Act, which he helped craft as a step toward creating public digital dollars with the privacy and anonymity of physical cash. To explain the features this future currency requires, and the problems to be solved, Rohan takes us on a tour of the history of money, early record-keeping devices for the tax collector, and the development of banking. Tally sticks, which were broken in half (to be matched later) were primitive encryption keys. Further noteworthy events include the invention of the telegraph in the mid-1800s, the codebreaking and Navajo language speakers during World War II, and the cyberpunks of the 1980s. Rohan is an evocative storyteller, piquing our imagination with vivid references. By the end of the episode, he has mentioned five movies, plus Scrooge McDuck, Seinfeld,

** If you haven’t checked out the transcripts and extra resources for all 166 episodes of Macro N Cheese, what are you waiting for? Go to realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast ** Steve opens this episode with the MMT observation of the government’s ability to purchase anything for sale in US dollars if the real sources are available – and if we have the political will. When it comes to getting things done, this is of fundamental importance. Steve's guest, Paul Herman, agrees and looks beyond the government: “...because we have five crises of our time, and those crises are going to require a multi-sector approach. So, the five crises include a health crisis: COVID and its lingering effects ... and the impacts on our existing health care system and healthcare workers. We have a wealth crisis with inequality among many different geographies and income levels. We have an Earth crisis requiring climate action as fast as possible. That also requires equitable climate action because we have gaps in equality

What a pleasure hearing Phil Armstrong tell us how MMT makes him feel supremely confident. He’s not afraid of going toe-to-toe with “experts” despite their credentials, because he has the right model. He has MMT. Phil was teaching high school economics in Iowa before going back to the UK to get his Masters and, much later, his PhD. An interest in post-Keynesianism eventually led him to Mosler and the world of MMT. He has recently published his first book, Can Heterodox Economics Make a Difference? Conversations with Key Thinkers. He tells Steve that when he started working on the interviews, in 2018, most of the mainstream hadn't heard of MMT. By 2020, when it was published, the profile of MMT had increased. Now everyone knows of it. The episode revisits the many criticisms of MMT – we've heard them all – and demolishes them. As for Weimar, Germany: “If you think about it, plausibly, if you imagine intelligent German bankers in the Weimar Republic -- and these are bankers, they don't like inflation. You t

It's hard to imagine ever having been unaware of the concept of bullshit jobs, but David Graeber made it official and helped us understand their role in our economy. Bullshit jobs are not necessarily shit jobs, nor are they low wage jobs, or dirty jobs. Bullshit jobs are those that are meaningless. The person doing the bullshit job doesn’t believe the work actually needs to get done. This week’s guest, Erik Dean, has studied the nature of modern jobs within money manager capitalism. He points out that bullshit jobs aren’t just a product of neoliberalism: “Speculative business and these labor hierarchies of the people with secure jobs versus the precariat … those things have been around. and it's not even necessarily part of capitalism. This is one reason it's good to read Thorstein Veblen, because in an anthropological sense, he takes it back to prior to capitalism. It's not like we didn't have hierarchies before capitalism. It's not like we didn't have power and it's not like we didn't have bullshit jobs.

Here’s an episode for those Marxists curious about MMT and MMTers curious about Marxism. Steve’s guest is comfortable identifying as both. Tony, better known as 1Dime on social media, believes MMT is not a threat to Marxism because it’s like comparing apples to oranges. They are designed to explain two different things. “Modern Monetary Theory is about understanding monetary operations in a fiat currency world – how things are financed. It's a narrow theory.” He’s careful about labeling himself, but in the marketplace of ideas, Tony says: “I find myself leaning the closest to Marxism in terms of its method because it sees things through the lens of class struggle and puts forth a first and foremost materialist view of history. I think that's very important because typically a lot of people will look at history as an evolution of ideas and will look at the individual as isolated from society. Marxism looks at things as an interconnected reality filled with contradictions.“ The ontology of Marxism is only pa

**There’s a transcript accompanying every episode of Macro N Cheese. You'll also find links to other resources on the Extras page. Go to https://realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/ (realprogressives.org.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/ )** Alexander Valchyshen brings special knowledge of both economics and conditions in Ukraine. He’s a PhD student under Scott Fullwiler and has more than twenty years of experience in Ukraine’s banking and financial markets, so he has a point of view that the US public rarely hears. Given the current geopolitical conflict, Steve wanted to fill the gaps in his knowledge of Alexander’s homeland. It’s no surprise that social media and the major news organizations are unreliable. “As I said, it's a pretty difficult time. But at the same moment, this is a very crucial moment not only for Ukraine itself, for its existence, because we have to understand Ukraine as a sovereign country in every possible sense of that word, not only in the political terms, but also in the economic

**Every episode of Macro N Cheese has a full transcript and an “extras” page with links to additional resources. Find them at https://realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast (realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/) Fadhel Kaboub introduces us to the best people, including Yeva Nersisyan, a Research Scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity who joined Steve to talk about a paper she recently co-authored with Randall Wray, "Are We All MMTers Now? Not So Fast." The COVID pandemic has put MMT in the news, with plenty of critics mistaking stimulus spending with “MMT policy.” This absurdity creates a convenient narrative for detractors: MMT is a failure! Our argument was that MMT-inspired fiscal policy is targeted fiscal spending and in particular spending on jobs. Job creation, the job guarantee that Pavlina Tcherneva has been talking a lot about... a jobs policy rather than just indiscriminate stimulus kind of policy. MMT economists were not at the table when COVID stimulus policy

Steve’s guest is Dr. Ruchira Sen who got her PhD at UMKC where she studied with a number of friends of this podcast. Herresearch areas are in feminist economics, informed by institutional economics, MMT, and Marxian economics. She describes an economy built on the backs of women, that exists outside the normal parameters of capitalism while making it possible for capitalism to thrive. We've had neoliberal reforms since the 1990s, which has meant a gradual withdrawal of the state from almost everything. And that has specifically impacted the lives of women. Because when the state withdraws from providing you basic services like water, electricity, then it's usually the women who become additionally burdened...The participation of women in the (paid) labor force is declining, their contribution to unpaid work is phenomenal. In a country as massive as India, with a population of around a billion, any change in government policy can have far-reaching and unexpected consequences. Ruchira describes the effects of

This week’s episode is another chapter in our mission to educate ourselves about modern China. Yan Liang specializes in Modern Money Theory, international trade and finance, and economic development, with a special regional focus on China. She is also the wife of friend-of-the-podcast Eric Tymoigne. Steve and Yan discuss the truth and misconceptions about the ongoing competition between the US and China. It has created winners and losers, with the working class in both countries affected by globalization. Trade war is class war. The explanation for China’s growth is sometimes attributed to market reform and opening itself to trade, but Yan points to the role of the state in financing development, formulating industrial policies, and building infrastructure, both hard and soft. Policymakers are beginning to tighten the grip on private enterprise as they plan to grow China in a more sustainable way, unlike in the past, where extensive growth was a major driving force. US officials pay lip service to job cre

What do you know about modern China? Is it capitalist? Socialist? What do those terms mean in today’s global economies? According to Steve’s guest Vincent Huang, China considers itself “a socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics.” In this episode, Vincent tells Steve how this socialist market economy plays out in Chinese society, and how it compares to the world we know in the US – and just about everywhere else. There’s a stark difference in the power wielded by corporations, for example. In China... The state is the representative, it's the agent that mediates the conflicts between the corporations and the working class. So that actually is quite important because for China's socialist market economy, the goal is to elevate the well-being of people. And the means could be marketization, could be liberalization, could be market-oriented reforms, but it doesn't have to be. American listeners may be surprised by the people’s faith in government. When comparing public versus private, whether in sc

**Have you seen the Rogue Scholar, Steve Grumbine’s new brown bag lunch show on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at noon EST? For interviews, commentary, and, of course, MMT, go to Real Progress in Action on YouTube. Newcomers to MMT tend to draw a blank when they are told that taxes drive the currency or taxes created the first unemployed person. After all, none of that seems to track with the way they personally experience taxes. Warren Mosler makes sense of it by starting with the money story, using the example of colonial currency. The British wanted workers on African coffee plantations, but people were not clamoring to be hired. So, they created a coin or scrip and levied a hut tax payable in the new currency. The public purpose behind what the British were doing was to grow coffee. They levied a tax. They put a tax liability on everyone's house. That caused lots of people to be looking for work or look for some way to earn scrip so they could pay the tax so their house wouldn't be burned down ... It'