Understanding Modern Monetary Theory

Mainstream economics courses teach students money is a scarce resource and nature has boundless capacity to be exploited when in fact it's the other way around, argues Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) economist Steven Hail.

Advocates say you don't do MMT, rather it's a description of how the monetary system works. And countries like New Zealand, where the Government - via the Reserve Bank - is the monopoly issuer of a fiat currency, are monetary sovereigns and thus can't run out of money. 

"We think the monetary system is central to the way modern economies work. And so it's really important to base a discussion of macroeconomics and public finance on having a proper description of the monetary system," Hail says in the latest episode of interest.co.nz's Of Interest podcast.

"When the Government has plans to invest in healthcare, transportation, climate change, housing, anything else that they're going to be spending on, when people say where are you going to get the money, that's the wrong question to ask. The question that we need to ask about national government spending is always where are the productive resources coming from? Where are the people? Where are the materials where's the technology? Where's the institutional capacity, which businesses have spare capacity to meet the Government's demand for what it wants to do? And that transforms your discussion about government economic policy," Hail says.

I first interviewed Hail in 2020 as Covid-19 swept the globe as one of a series of interviews trying to make sense of what was going on and what it all meant. A recurring theme in these interviews, as governments spent lots more money than they had in decades, was MMT. Hail was then a lecturer at the University of Adelaide School of Economics. He now runs Modern Money Lab, a not-for-profit, in partnership with Torrens University.

Looking back now, to what extent does he think the massive government spending contributed to the subsequent global inflation surge?

"Well, the first thing to say is that we've just been through about three of the four horses of the apocalypse. So if the worst problem we're going to have in terms of reacting to that is a temporary increase in the inflation rate in New Zealand to just over 7% per annum, we've done pretty well...The second thing to say is what was the alternative to supporting businesses and supporting people during the pandemic and during lockdowns?" Hail asks.

"Did the spending contribute to inflation? Well, to an extent. But every major central bank in the world that's researched the drivers of inflation following the pandemic said that most of it was to do with the supply side. That's not surprising, is it? A, we built a global economy with very fragile, incredibly complex supply chains, and they just collapsed during the pandemic. And subsequently, of course, once we got over the worst of that, we then had the Russia-Ukraine war driving energy prices up and food prices, too."

"You can argue that some of the government spending was not as effective or efficient as it might otherwise have been. But we're talking about what immediately before would have seemed almost an unimaginable catastrophe that governments were having to react to overnight," says Hail.

And what about the role of quantitative easing (QE), through which the Reserve Bank spent $53 billion buying government and local government bonds on the secondary market from banks during 2020-21? Used for the first time in NZ during the pandemic, QE had been used by central banks in other countries such as Japan, the United States, Europe and Britain for years before that.

"Now, in all those other countries where quantitative easing was used to a very large extent over many years prior to the pandemic, it caused a significant increase in inflation, or it caused an uncontroversial so that everybody accepts it significant increase in total spending in the economy, on precisely no occasions. And there's a good reason for this, which is that quantitative easing is not really the creation of new money," says Hail.

"It's certainly not giving money away. It's an asset swap, and it's actually an asset swap of two very similar assets these days. Because, after all, central banks pay interest on the reserves private banks hold at central banks, and most central banks are part of the broadly defined government sector. So those reserves are an interest bearing financial liability of the government, really. And when central banks buy treasury bonds from private banks, what are they buying? While, those treasury bonds. What are they? Interest bearing liabilities of the government sector."

"So when you practise quantitative easing, you're really swapping apples for very similar apples. You are not adding to the net financial assets of the private sector. What you are doing is putting a little bit of downward pressure on long-term interest rates."

Still Adelaide-based, Hail is visiting New Zealand during August to run an interactive seminar in Auckland, and show the documentary Finding the Money- featuring Hail's friend and high profile US MMT economist Stephanie Kelton - in both Auckland and Wellington. As well as an introduction to MMT, the seminar will look at the economy as a subsystem of the natural environment and probe human behaviour, inequality and global trade. It'll also cover planetary boundaries and climate change.

Listen to more on these topics and others, including economic growth, sustainability and reducing our impact on the environment, in the podcast audio. 

*You can find all episodes of the Of Interest podcast here.