Once again, MMT is only a description of how money works, in the same way that hydrodynamics is a description of how water works. Hydrodynamics can tell you how to build a pump for a well, but not whether you would be violating someone's water rights. MMT can tell you how to utilize money to organize social activity, including the most relevant thing to us, building industrial capital, but it doesn't tell you whether bond markets or anyone else would allow you to.
In fact, half of Hudson's Killing the Host is about exactly how US institutions are completely beholden to finance capital, and would never allow the use of monetary policy to increase industrial production! Hudson uses the MMT framework to explain how the Federal Reserve prints staggering amounts of money to inflate the price of financial instruments (including stocks and bonds) for the benefit of financial capitalists, instead of printing money to inflate the prices of goods and labor which would lead to the formation of a productive economy.
The whole point of MMT is that money is just an organizational tool, like writing or calendars - as a technology it was invented (in the 'western' world at least) in ancient Mesopotamia and has persisted through multiple system of political economy. But in every case, its basic features are the same: it exists only as an IOU issued by a government, which can later be used to pay taxes, and a government with currency sovereignty can issue money at will to order people subject to its taxation (or who, for whatever other reason, need to obtain money denominated in that currency, such as, for instance, repaying IMF loans or making international trades) to hand over goods or perform services for the government.
Whereas this person is saying that the behavior of money depends on "the consensus of the monetary system's stakeholders", and the fact that the federal reserve didn't take action to slow rising treasury yields (i.e. falling global demand for dollar holdings) is proof that you "can't consolidate the central bank and treasury". They seem to go on a lot about "constitutional consensus" as a reason MMT doesn't work, as if the behavior of money in general through all of history is dependent on the specific provisions of a specific state's constitution. They say "it is a constant theme of their literature that the foreign sector can be treated as a non entity that does impose constraints on policy space" when that is literally the opposite of true, and Super Imperialism is primarily about how US interference in other countries' monetary policy prevents them from being able to use their currency sovereignty to develop their own economies.
It's true that by the logic of MMT, a country with all of the resources it needs within its own borders (== within the boundaries of its monopoly on violence == within the region it can enact taxes on) can print however much money it needs to mobilize fallow resources (or until 100% employment is reached) while ignoring the effects on its currency's exchange rate, precisely because it doesn't need to obtain resources through trade - exactly as was seen in the USSR under Stalin and, as a shadow of that, Russia after 2022. The sanctions applied to Russia "should" have collapsed it, because most other countries in the world would have collapsed under this sanctions regime, but unlike those countries Russia is capable of producing all its own food, fuel and raw materials. Indeed, freezing a bunch of the oligarch's money and preventing capital flight from Russia meant rubles had to be invested in productive industries, on top of the state increasing spending on war production, which combined to give a massive boost to Russia's productive economy! However, the Russian central bank did everything in its power to prevent and undo this, because it's controlled by neoliberals, so printing money to develop the economy "doesn't work" because at every turn, neoliberals will sabotage it!
They say "sure would be cool if we had an agency in the government in charge of investigating insider trading", but using their logic the fact that insider trading wasn't investigated proves that it can't be - and in our currently existing political economy, they would be right! Investigating insider trading is specifically against the financial interests of the groups that hold political power over this economy, so it is impossible to investigate insider trading in the same way it's impossible to implement the recommendations of MMT for building a productive economy. But that doesn't mean that 'investigating insider trading' as an activity can never occur, the same way it doesn't mean that MMT is incorrect.
...rather than understanding that "green dollars" - the kind of money you keep in your pocket in real life - and "yellow dollars" - US treasury bills - are called that because of the color of the paper they're printed on?? That seems like a pretty important feature of the dollar economy to be completely unaware of!
In addition to needing to pay interest on IMF and World Bank loans, these countries need dollars for two things:
buying oil, which can only be sold in US dollars. Trying to sell oil in other currencies is actually the primary reason the US destroyed Saddam's Iraq, as he tried to sell oil to Europe in exchange for euros, and Gaddafi's Libya (the details of which I can't remember off the top of my head). The 'petrodollar' was agreed with OPEC by Nixon in 1971 after the US had gone off the gold standard, essentially by the implication of the US's military prowess.
buying food, because most of their food agriculture was destroyed during colonialism and replaced with cash crops, and since then the IMF has refused to issue a single loan that would enable food security - indeed, destroying the last vestiges of food crop production is usually a condition of IMF loans. Meanwhile, the US is one of the largest producers and exporters of grain in the world, and uses the threat of cutting off this supply to keep its subjects in line. In fact, they produce so much that giving away food for free as aid is another key tactic to destroy local agriculture, as the farmers can't sell in a market saturated with free grain and so go out of business. But if the local government tried to counter this by heavily subsidizing food production the way the US does, they would be refused IMF loans or even hit with sanctions that would starve them out before their food production could develop sufficiently.
This means that the US has a total stranglehold on almost every global south country, because at any time they can impose sanctions that will cut off food and fuel to that country. Without oil, modern economies grind to a halt, and without food - well, the results are obvious. So these countries need to export products to the US to get dollars.
(Erk, that does make sense, and there's no way to disprove it...)
(Wait a minute... the burden of proof is on the person making a claim! I don't need to prove anything, they do!)
So you claim to have another account just for commenting, whose posts have been downvoted by communists... if that's the case, then why not show it to the court!
After all, in the words of Chairman Mao, "a criticism is specific, or it is meaningless!"
The whole "Kyiv push was a diversion" narrative falls apart when you look at the forces actually deployed
It was a long shot at ending the war immediately, which was probably worth taking on its own merits, but it also pinned a huge number of Ukrainian soldiers in Kiev and the region beyond, held in reserve in case the Russians tried to attack the city, leaving Ukraine's main field army unsupported in the east while the Russians began setting up fortified positions for an artillery-based war of attrition.
I've always found that taking the odd senator or head of a regulatory body for a trip on your yacht really helps the inspections go smoothly. Never had a problem.
(But then of course I wouldn't, I have "no" health and safety violations 😉 )
Even long ago when I was still a baby leftist his overwrought speech patterns got on my nerves, enunciating these rhetorical devices like he was handing down The Sacred Knowledge.
For him the most important thing a 'leftist' can do seems to be 'win college debates'.
Whoa, that's crazy! I thought changing borders by military force was the absolute worst, most indefensible crime it was ever possible to commit! I thought it got you sanctioned and ejected from the international community, got your bank accounts frozen and your citizens shunned unless they disavow their home nation, got your leaders accused of megalomania, psychopathy, dementia, having brain cancer, etc. etc.
::: spoiler But I guess you're just allowed to do it after all!
![CascadeOfLight [he/him]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/4be38b64-63e3-40a3-8581-0ec11349c485.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=128)