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Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Mark Sadowski's Real Problem With MMT

     Sadowski-Sumner's chief ideologist from the Ministry of Wonkishness- finds MMT 'irriating.'

     They are an irritating source of misinformation much like the vulgar Internet Austrians. The only difference is I’ve largely learned to ignore Internet Austrians because almost everybody thinks they are cookoo. Unfortunately MMT is more plausible right now because of the large aggregate demand shortfall. Thus MMT/MR/PK still manages to get under my skin.

    So the worry is that many people still take MMT seriously. Speaking of vulgar Internet Austrians, Major Freedom-who now calls himself Geoff when he's on the Money Illusion had to get into the act:


   " It is an empirical regularity that monetary changes bring about effects with a time lag. You are setting an arbitrary cut off time limit when you say “soon after.”

   "If we take into account this time lag, then the tremendous increase in the monetary base in 2008, and higher inflation and NGDP, are in fact positively correlated.


"That huge uptick in CPI and NGDP past 2009 is not only positively correlated with a lagged change in the monetary base, but theory suggests that an increase in the money supply should, ceteris paribus, bring about higher prices and spending."

 "A missing link is how much of the shadow banking market experienced credit deflation alongside the increase in the monetary base. In other words, what happened to the total money supply. The Fed no longer tracks it, but by private estimates, the total money supply shrank in 2008, but then significantly grew thereafter. This is consistent with the CPI and NGDP outcomes."  

    I'm honestly not sure what that chart in his link is meant to show-I don't see much correlation. Neither NGDP or inflation have been setting the world on fire since 2009. Maybe with the total failure of his IA, Major is trying to hitch himself to the MM train?   

     No question IA is in a bad way, just check out Bob Murphy's blog:

     "http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/11/bob-murphy-again-shows-theres-nothing.html

     

1 comment:

  1. MF conveniently fails to mention the increase in the government budget deficit and total government spending in 2009-10.

    ReplyDelete