L. Randall Wray is a professor of Economics at Bard College and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute who is a long-term proponent of Modern Monetary Theory, a heterodox macroeconomic theory that teaches the government should not worry about accruing debt, because it is always able to print more money to service that debt. This is one of those theories that sounds too good to be true - how could it be that there’s nothing wrong with debt, and that there’s nothing stopping a country like the United States from spending as much as it wants on social services and public works projects? At the heart of the theory, the piece that makes the whole thing go, is a huge shift in the way that we understand money. Instead of seeing it as an immutable unit of exchange, MMT theorists argue that money is primarily a money of account - which is simply a ledger system for keeping track of who owes what to whom. We take apart Wray’s story of the history of money, with a detour into Medieval tally sticks, how barter systems evolve into monetary ones, and how central banking sealed our economic fate, and how debt is far more valuable than we realize.
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(00:00) Go! Who is Randall Wray?
(00:05:03) Money's Origins and Importance
(00:13:55) Development of Writing and Record-Keeping
(00:26:00) Tribal Justice Systems
(00:35:51) Ledger and Barter Systems
(00:41:58) Tally Sticks and Medieval Finance
(00:52:30) Transition from Tally Sticks to Central Banking
(01:02:33) Central Banking and its Origins
(01:19:17) The Role of Central Banks in Preventing Bank Runs
(01:26:57) Tax Liabilities and Money Demand
(01:37:10) Currency Redemption and Economic Circulation
(01:46:08) Fiscal Policy and Future Burden
(01:56:20) The Role of the Federal Reserve and Treasury
(02:04:40) Bond Market and Fiscal Management
(02:13:22) Government Spending and Inflation
(02:20:22) Oil Price Shocks and Policy Responses
(02:30:03) Dollar Dominance and Financial Trust
(02:35:00) Future Economic Questions
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PODCAST INFO: Anastasia completed her PhD studying bioelectricity at Columbia University. When not talking to brilliant people or making movies, she spends her time painting, reading, and guiding backcountry excursions. Shilo also did his PhD at Columbia studying the elastic properties of molecular water. When he's not in the film studio, he's exploring sound in music. They are both freelance professors at various universities.
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