American Affairs Vol, IV No 4, Winter 2020 edition, 1st December 2020
In the past, as governments have “funded” deficits (rather than monetizing them), much of their debt took the form of long- and medium-dated bonds. Since the yield curve usually slopes upward, this was an expensive policy and one that must be seen as foolish if the funding brought no discernible benefit. Beginning with the introduction of “quantitative easing” in 2008, however, the United States has reversed direction by having the Federal Reserve buy long-dated government bonds. “To fund or not to fund” is thus an important and immediately relevant question, one which economists not only have no agreed answer to but seem reluctant to even ask.
Unasked questions are unanswered ones, and a virtue of Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth is that it forces attention on why governments ever go to the expense of issuing bonds in the first place. Her critique of the weaknesses of conventional economic policy should receive—and to some degree already has received—wide acceptance. Things become more complicated, however, when Kelton begins to propound solutions to the various problems that her critique has revealed. Dramatic changes in economic management, such as those Kelton proposes, must be based on relative risks, and the known risks in our current system will likely (and correctly) remain preferable to unknown ones. The Deficit Myth nonetheless raises important points about why our conventional economic policy approaches need to be improved and how this might be done.
Full article: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/11/savings-glut-or-investment-dearth-rethinking-monetary-policy/
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