How did you first come to MMT, everyone?

Scott Ferguson

21 hrs

How did you first come to MMT, everyone?

I’ll start: I heard Wray interviewed on a Marxish podcast called “From Alpha to Omega.” It unmoored me in the best possible way and I’ve been hooked ever since.

Like ·

• 5 people like this.
• 

  Ankur Patel Was a Marxist – Leninist until junior year of high school when I began reading about Keynesian economics and catholic social teaching. Found my way to MMT after reading about different Keynesian schools.

  20 hrs · Like · 3
• 

  Peter Gogol Dr. Kelton spoke at my old church one Sunday a few years ago. I had been reading Paul Krugman’s columns and blogs for years before that and the term Kansas City School economics would bubble up from time to time in the comments, but that talk was the first time MMT was really laid out for me.A key step to improving our collective lot is to get the financial community and political leaders to understand MMT. However, they’ll continue to be gun-shy to actually legislate and budget based upon MMT until more of the public is vaccinated against federal debt hysteria which has been pervasive for the last few decades. One way to help with that might be widespread standardized talks. The effort could be modeled on Al Gore’s climate change lecture. This time around, for MMT it could be titled “A Convenient Truth.”

  16 hrs · Like · 3
• 

  Kar Nels Reading that the Fed bought treasuries and paid us interest and it occurred to my simple brain – why not have Fed buy all the debt? Reading that banks got near zero percent loans for Fed printed money and also bought treasuries and we had to pay bank interest really infuriated me.

  16 hrs · Like · 1
• 

  Timothy J Leahy I saw Warren Mosler’s name mentioned in a comment on a Huffington Post article, and only saying it was a ‘paradigm shift’, but no link provided. I Googled him and skeptically began reading 7DIF (which was brand new!). Pretty early on in the book I realized it made more sense than what I previously thought. Was addicted for a while, reading everything and everyone I could find on the subject. I figured the policy proposals were basically no-brainers, that is until I came up against the resistance, the Borg. That was disheartening, and that’s been the last few years with very few exceptions.

  16 hrs · Edited · Like · 5
• 

  Kyle Preece Mike Norman interview by Lauren Lyster at Capital Account (Russia Today).

  13 hrs · Like · 1
• 

  Jan Zemánek Marshall Auerbeck at the former New Deal 2.0 blog back in 2009
  http://www.nextnewdeal.net/marshall-auerbackFiscal Sustainability Teach-In and Counter-Conference in 2010
  http://www.netrootsmass.net/fiscal-sustainability-teach…/

  7 hrs · Edited · Like · 2
• 

  Robert Kelly Scott FergusonThat Alpha to Omega episode with Randy Wray was excellent by the way. That’s when it finally hit me about why so much “risk free” financial assets were required to collateralize all the derivative deals that ended up causing the 2008 GFC.

  8 hrs · Like · 1
• 

  Robert Kelly I met Warren thru a friend back in the 90’s. So I got to read 7DIF when it first came out. Then I tried Soft Currency Economics, which I had to re-read about 5 times. I have to admit it took quite a while to sink in.

  8 hrs · Like · 2
• 

  Rodney Rondeau I was searching articles to learn about inflation and I came across Bill Mitchells website. It just made sense.

  7 hrs · Like · 1
• 

  Lachlan Riley When I was at university I was tasked with writing a paper about the financial crisis and macroeconomic means of addressing it. I stumbled upon ‘The Full Employment Imperative’ in doing so.I did not properly understand MMT properly until later, after seeing Keen’s reasoning about private debt and endogenous money somehow lead to MMT people showing me.

  7 hrs · Like · 1
• 

  Jason Bessey I’ve been scratching my head over the nature of money for a few years now. I could never really wrap my head around a satisfactory way of conceptualizing it.Then, starting a few months ago, I had been reading a few mentions here and there on Facebook about something called, “Modern Monetary Theory”. One day, I decided to look it up.

  I ended up on some website called, “firedoglake.com“.

  And two things jumped out at me:

  (1). The government issues its own currency. Thus, it can’t run out. So why taxes? To create a demand for it because it’s intrinsically worthless.

  I was like, “Duh. Why didn’t I think of that?!?!”

  (2) He took two GDP equations and derived this thing called, “The Sectoral Balances Equation”. Three sectors, Public, Private, and Foreign. All (logically) mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. A deficit in one sector is a surplus in another.

  The logic was inescapable. It was necessarily true. No way around it.

  Up until that point, I thought Geogism was one of the coolest ideas I had ever read. MMT — at that moment — almost instantly hit that same level of coolness in my mind. (And coming from me, that’s high praise.) It just clicked!

  And then I realized what tax should drive should drive that currency. In my mind, MMT complemented Georgism in a wonderfully simple and elegant manner. It was like the micro and macro, supply side and demand side just together for me like pieces of a puzzle.

  Not long after that, I even started a Facebook group I called, “Geo-Chartalism” to explore the possibility of synthesis between the two schools of thought.

  6 hrs · Like · 1
• 

  Chris Hanley I became friends with Warren Mosler. After about 30 lunches dinners and boat trips, it finally sunk in.

  5 hrs · Edited · Like · 1
• 

  Scott Ferguson Maybe that’s the key to the MMT revolution in the United States: Warren Mosler has to take each and every one of us on a tropical sea cruise. Sure beats storming the Bastille.

  4 hrs · Edited · Like · 7
• 

  Vernon Etzel of all things, I was into Bill Still at the time, did a youtube video, and got a contact from Sweden who asked me to look into Mosler and MMT. Saw a Kelton/Mosler academic video and it completely changed my perspective.

  5 hrs · Like · 2
• 

  Joe Crisi I never understood how cutting debt led to anything good. I kept asking the conservatives and received the standard answers of “It frees up the private sector”. Someone, I don’t who, sent me a link on the MMT. That was a quite a while ago. I was very skeptical at first.

  4 hrs · Like · 2
• 

  Chris Hanley Joe Crisi, MMT is just as confusing to liberals as it is to conservatives in my experience.

  4 hrs · Like · 3
• 

  Scott Ferguson For one thing, MMT destroys the liberal’s sense of self-righteous on issues of taxation. At a deeply emotional level, it’s difficult for folks to give up the pride they feel in donating “their” money to help the less fortunate, not to mention the moral superiority they also feel in relation to those “greedy” and “selfish” right-wingers who want to keep all their income for themselves.

  4 hrs · Edited · Like · 3
• 

  Bryan Walsh Steve Keen write-up about the wrongness of Krugman, to the part of his book talking about Post-Keynesian econ, to Michael Hudson, and his UMKC crew. Tried reading MMT primer, but had to put it down and learn a bit more econ/finance vocab, but stumbled on Mosler’s “7DIF”, and it sank in. That book has changed everything.

  3 hrs · Like · 2
• 

  Bryan Walsh So many lay-discussions of economic “schools”, sound eerily similar to discussions by martial artists debating styles. What I’ve grasped of MMT so far reminds me of discovering Bruce Lee’s philosophy for the first time. Lifting the veil of b.s.. It was overt partisanship that made me look for counters to Krugman, and I’m grateful I did. I am still a massive Dean Baker fan, though.

  3 hrs · Like
• 

  Stavros Karageorgis I’ve actually forgotten, but I think it was indirectly, through John Harvey and Steve Keen. It helped that I was already ‘converted’ to endogenous money in the late 1980s. But it hadn’t really sunk in. I am ashamed to say that I did not GET the importance of the euro, the Eurozone, the implications . . . I remained as mired in the mainstream, in one very important sense, as my mentor (B.J. Moore) was. I underestimated the continuing importance of fiat money in the contemporary world. The final ‘nail-in-the-coffin’ was Scott Fullwiler’s and Bell/Kelton’s presentation of the actual, full, operational details in a formal format (Warren Mosler had obviously already prepared me for that). Then the anthropoligists’ and economic historians’ accounts of money. Suddenly, my entire previous education made sense in a different light. It was a true ‘paradigm-shift’, or an ‘alternation’ (to put it with Berger and Luckmann)

  2 hrs · Like · 2
• 

  David Glotzer I’m still an undergraduate, I was always interested in financial crisis because this conundrum of ours started when I was still in high school, but was not getting much out of the mainstream view, got put off by the lack of explanatory power in orthodox theory by people who I otherwise admire such as joe stiglitz and went on to study other things. I was studying physics a the time before making the switch to math and Econ and I came across a an interview with Dr. Galbraith at umkc talking about the sociology of Economics. This peeked my interest and videos on MMT were easy to find from there. My economics education has been extracurricular ever since.

  2 hrs · Like · 2
• 

  John O’Connell From a discussion at SeekingAlpha

  59 mins · Like · 2

  See Randall Wray Alpha to Omega intervjuu on siin