Facilitator: Dr Steven Hail, author of Economics for Sustainable Prosperity, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is a lens for the analysis of the macroeconomic environment and financial markets which has been developed by policy and academic economists and fund managers over the last 25 years.

It has gradually become widely accepted as a serious challenger to orthodox macroeconomic theory and is now widely discussed and applied by financial market participants, on Wall Street and globally.

According to GMO strategist James Montier, “For me an economic approach must help me understand the world and provide me with some useful insights (preferably about my day job — investing). On those measures, let me assure you that M.M.T. thrashes neoclassical economics, hands down.”

MMT, Daniel Alpert, managing partner of the investment bank Westwood Capital has said, “successfully debunks 40 years of misassumptions of how markets and public credit work.”

The 2020 Visiting Harcourt Professor at the University of Adelaide and former Chief Economist on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, Professor Stephanie Kelton, is one of the world’s leading modern monetary theorists. Dr Steven Hail of Modern Money Lab, an associate of Professor Kelton, is one of the leading modern monetary theorists in Australia.

The course Dr Hail has developed is a six-day intensive grounding in MMT for investment professionals. It is heavily discursive, designed to draw on the experiences of course participants to identify and illustrate the insights MMT can provide, with reference to the work of Professor Kelton and her colleagues, in particular the book Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems by Professor L. Randall Wray.

The following papers were not produced by Modern Money Lab and are listed purely as an indication of our proposed fields of research.

Public finance and public policy

Bell, Stephanie. 2000. “Do Taxes and Bonds Finance Government Spending?” Journal of Economic Issues 34, no 3: 603–620.

Bell, Stephanie. 2001. “The Role of the State and the Hierarchy of Money.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 25, no. 2: 149–163.

Godley, Wynne. 1999. Seven Unsustainable Processes: Medium-Term Prospects for the United States and the World. Special Report. New York: Jerome Levy Institute of Bard College.

Joy, David and Steven Hail. 2020. ‘Federal Debt and Modern Money’. Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. Policy Note No. 121.

Kelton, Stephanie. 2020. The Deficit Myth. New York: Public Affairs

Lavoie, Marc. 2013. “The Monetary and Fiscal Nexus of Neo-Chartalism: A Friendly Critique.” Journal of Economic Issues 47, no. 1: 1–32.

Mazzucato, Mariana. 2021. Mission Economy. London: Allen Lane

Ostrey, Jonathon, Andrew Berg, and Charalambos Tsangarides. 2014.

“Redistribution, Inequality and Growth.” IMF Staff Discussion Note SDN/14/2. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund.

Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wilkinson, Richard. 2006. “The Impact of Inequality.” Social Research 73, no. 2: 711–732.

Monetary policy, financial fragility and the monetary system

Bindseil, Ulrich. 2014. Monetary Policy Operations and the Financial System. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Godley, Wynne, and Gennaro Zezza. 2006. “Debt and Lending: A Cri de Coeur.” Policy Note 4. Annandale-on-Hudson and NewYork: Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.

Fullwiler, Scott. 2017. “Modern Central Bank Operations—The General Principles.” Chapter 2, in Advances in Endogenous Money Analysis, edited by Louis-Phillippe Rochon and Sergio Rossi, 50–87. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Goodhart, Charles. 2009. “The Continuing Muddles of Monetary Theory: A Steadfast Refusal to Face Facts.” Economica 76, S1: 821–830.

Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville House.

Lavoie, Marc. 2010. “Changes in Central Bank Procedures During the Subprime Crisis and Their Repercussions on Monetary Theory.” International Journal of Political Economy 39, no. 3: 3–23.

McLeay, Michael, Amar Radia, and Ryland Thomas. 2014. “Money Creation in the Modern Economy.” Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin 54, no. 1: 1–14.

International finance and public policy

Goodhart, Charles. 1998. “The Two Concepts of Money: Implications for the Analysis of Optimal Currency Areas.” European Journal of Political Economy 14, no. 3: 407–432.

Harvey, John. T. 2010. “Modelling financial crises: A schematic approach.” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. 33. 61-82.

Mathematical modelling and public policy

Burgess, Stephen, Oliver Burrows, Antoine Godin, Stephen Kinsella, and Stephen Millard. 2016. “A Dynamic Model of Financial Balances for the United Kingdom.” Bank of England Working Paper 614.

Godley, Wynne, and Marc Lavoie. 2006. Monetary Economics—An Integrated Approach to Credit, Money, Income, Production and Wealth. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Godley, Wynne, and Marc Lavoie. 2007. “A Simple Model of Three Economies with Two Currencies: The Eurozone and the USA.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 31, no. 1: 1–33.

Keen, Steve. 2013. “A Monetary Minsky Model of the Great Moderation and the Great Recession.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 86: 221–235.

Lavoie, Marc, and Wynne Godley. 2001. “Kaleckian Models of Growth in a Coherent Stock-Flow Monetary Framework: A Kaldorian View.” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 24, no. 2: 277–312.

Nikiforos, Michalis, and Gennaro Zezza. 2017. “Stock-Flow Consistent Macroeconomic Models: A Survey.” Working Paper 891 (May, 2017). Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, New York.

Statistical analysis of public policy

Fullwiler, Scott. 2013. “The Costs and Benefts of a Job Guarantee: Estimates from a Multi-country Econometric Model.” In The Job Guarantee: Towards True Full Employment, edited by Michael Murray and Mathew Forstater, 73–94. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Fullwiler, Scott, Stephanie Kelton, Catherine Ruetschlin and Marshall Steinbaum. 2018. The Macroeconomic Effects of Student Debt Cancellation. Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson and New York

Nersisyan, Y and L.R.Wray. 2019. ‘How to Pay for a Green New Deal’. Working Paper No. 931. Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. May 2019.

Wray, L Randall, F. Dantas, S Fullwiler, P Therneva and S Kelton. 2018. Public Service Employment: A Path to Full Employment. Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson and New York

Employment policy and behavioural science

Cook, Beth, William Mitchell, Victor Quirk, and Martin Watts. 2008. “Creating Effective Local Labour Markets: A New Framework for Regional Economic Policy.” CofFEE Final Report. Newcastle, NSW: Centre of Full Employment and Equity.

Kaboub, Fadhel. 2013. “The Low Cost of Full Employment in the United States.” In The Job Guarantee: Towards True Full Employment, edited by Michael Murray and Mathew Forstater, 59–71. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lucas, Richard, Andrew Clark, Yiannis Georgellis, and Ed Diener. 2004. “Unemployment Alters the Set Point for Life Satisfaction.” Psychological Science 15, no. 1: 8–13.

Mitchell, William. 1998. “The Buffer-Stock Employment Model and the NAIRU: The Path to Full Employment.” Journal of Economic Issues 32, no. 2: 547–555.

Murray, Michael, and Mathew Forstater (eds.). 2013. The Job Guarantee: Towards True Full Employment. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Nordt, Carlos, Ingeborg Warnke, Erich Seifritz, and Wolfram Kawohl. 2015. “Modelling Suicide and Unemployment: A Longitudinal Analysis Covering 63 Countries, 2000–11.” The Lancet, Psychiatry 2, no. 3: 239–245.

Quattrone, George, and Amos Tversky. 1988. “Contrasting Rational and Psychological Analyses of Political Choice.” American Political Science Review 82, no. 3: 719–736.

Quirk, Victor, and Others. 2006. “The Job Guarantee in Practice.” Working Paper 06:15. Centre of Full Employment and Equity, Newcastle, NSW.

Stanovich, Keith, and Richard West. 2000. “Individual Differences in Reasoning: Implications for the Rationality Debate.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23, no. 5: 645–665.

Tcherneva, Pavlina. 2012. “Beyond Full Employment: What Argentina’s Plan Jefes Can Teach Us About the Employer of Last Resort.” In Employment Guarantee Schemes Job Creation and Policy in Developing Countries and Emerging Markets, edited by Michael Murray and Mathew Forstater, 79–102. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tcherneva, Pavlina. 2014. “The Social Enterprise Model for a Job Guarantee in the United States.” Policy Note 2014/1, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson and New York.

Tcherneva, Pavlina. 2015. “Completing the Roosevelt Revolution: Why the Time for a Job Guarantee Has Come.” Policy Note 108. Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity

Van der Meer, Peter, and Rudi Weilers. 2013. “What Makes Workers Happy?” Applied Economics 45, no. 3: 357–368

Young, Cristobal. 2012. “The Nonpecuniary Cost of Unemployment in the United States.” Social Forces 91, no. 2: 609–634

Ecological sustainability and public policy

Forstater, Mathew. 2003. “Public Employment and Environmental Sustainability.” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 25, no. 3: 385–406.cott. 2006. 

Hail, Steven. 2018. Economics for Sustainable Prosperity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Keen, Steve. 2020. “The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change.” Globalizations. September 2020: 1-29.

Kubiszewski I, R Costanza, C Franco, P Lawn, J Talberth, and T Jackson. 2013. “Beyond GDP: Measuring and achieving global genuine progress”. Ecological economics 93: 57-68.

Lawn, Philip. 2000. Toward Sustainable Development: An Ecological Economics Approach. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Lawn, Philip. 2007. “A stock take of green national accounting initiatives.” Social Indicators Research 80 (2): 427-60.

Lawn, Philip. 2011. “Is steady-state capitalism viable? A review of the issues and an answer in the affirmative”. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1219 (1): 1-25.

Lawn, Philip. 2016. Resolving the Climate Change Crisis: The Ecological Economics of Climate Change. Dordrecht: Springer.

Raworth, Kate. 2012. ‘A safe and just space for humanity’. Oxfam Discussion Paper, February 2012.

Raworth, Kate. 2017. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. London: Random House

SEI, IISD, ODI, Climate Analytics, CICERO, and UNEP. 2019. “The Production Gap: The discrepancy between countries’ planned fossil fuel production and global production levels consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C or 2°C.”

Skidelsky, Robert, and Edward Skidelsky. 2012. How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life. New York: Other Press.