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For a number of decades our economy has failed to work for ordinary citizens. Stagnant wages have been combined with underemployment and rising costs of basic goods like healthcare, education and housing. At the same time, a small minority of the population make obscene profits, while in the background we continue to hurtle headlong into an environmental emergency. However, despite there being no shortage of anger and anti-elite sentiment expressed in what is often referred to as the ‘culture wars’, no significant challenge to the dominant economic model has broken into the mainstream. The pound and the fury argues that behind this failure of imagination are a set of taken-for-granted myths about how the economy works – myths that stifle debate and block change. The book analyses these myths, explores their origin, how they circulate and how they might be dispelled at a time when, away from the public gaze, economic theory is opening up new possibilities of economic action. Possibilities that, as we emerge from the chaos of Covid-19, could lead to the radical structural changes we desperately need.
visited – institutions that should be educating and informing the public about the economy – continue to perpetuate myth. Modern monetary theory Moving credit creation away from private firms means moving it towards the control of our democratically elected government, which raises further points of discussion. Firstly, there is a widespread view that the state can't just create money out of nowhere, as it is limited in how much it can spend by how much tax it collects and how much money
’s role as “guarantor of last resort” resurfaced with a vengeance in the global financial crisis, its sovereign capacities elaborated by heterodox economists, varieties of Keynesianism, and the work around Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). 30 The economic success of China’s state-led development, both domestically and as a counter-model globally, has also been important. 31 The state is definitely back, though
what went wrong in the UK's initial response. 69 But there is a time when the costs of these interventions is likely to become subject to conflict, when debates about ‘balancing the books’ emerge. What then? Three camps are emerging. 70 At one end of the spectrum are those who see the lockdown interventions as further evidence of how the ‘magic money tree’ can be put to progressive or even radical use. Modern Monetary Theory
as a pot of money. This is exactly the opposite of modern monetary theory or classic Keynesianism and plays in favour of austerity and sound finance in every crisis. These problems of communication and the fading prospect of achieving higher growth in the 2020s are not so far reflected in the promises of the political classes. Capturing and holding the central state is now a
other) industry. However, it is useful to recall that the US government defines a ‘large’ company as being one with more than 500 employees. Under this definition, there are no more than 3,800 such manufacturing companies in the entire country.187 In the context of manufacturing, it is also important to raise the ‘employer of last resort’ concept promulgated by many politicaleconomic theorists. In recent years, this has been closely associated with Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its prominent advocates L. Randall Wray, Stephanie Kelton, and Pavlina Tcherneva (among