Comment on Modern Monetary Theory: Musk Edition
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Just to be clear, we do quite litterally print money and hand it around in time of crisis, and as a literal component of our economic development strategy.
For example, there was no reason Obama was obligated to focus on saving the banks per se. That same money could have gone to home owners instead. They chose to do it the way that they did. Likewise during covid.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
The US Treasury borrows from the Federal Reserve on assets that are added to the Federal Reserve balance sheet. And then the Treasury pays back the loan incrementally over the period of the loan (often on the order of 10-30 years). So it isn’t “literally printed”, it is borrowed at the Federal Reserve Prime Rate, which is typically less than the growth rate of accumulated tax receipts by year.
Absolutely. TARP was some bullshit used to prop up bank equity value at the expense of homeowners.
But the principle behind TARP was that the US government exchanged currency for equity stake in these failing firms. And the firms that recovered then bought back the state at marginally higher face value, which allowed the Treasury to book a profit for every business that hadn’t outright failed already. Over the life of the program, the real cost to the Treasury was minimal (arguably profitable, depending on who you believe).
The Treasury could have bought up mortgage notes instead, at pennies on the dollar, and started collecting interest on the debt just like the private banks had. Then they could have renegotiated mortgages of underwater homes at lower interest rates, while the private sector lenders filed for bankruptcy. That would have drastically reduced the foreclosure rate and dumped the material cost of the financial crisis on stock and bond holders of these private companies.
But in either case, we weren’t just printing a bunch of crisp new dollar bills (or their electronic equivalent) to fund the purchase. We were effectively doing the Vulture Capitalist trick of borrowing against the assets we’d just purchased, at an interest rate that was below the expected return value of the assets.
dis_honestfamiliar@lemmy.sdf.org 9 hours ago
You know… I was going to shitpost outright infinite money theory.
The government is a sovereign country. It can print money all day long. And based on your comment, it could print print money against bonds to fund a better life for all.
I mean this is a shit post, but I’ve also added that we could feed and house the poor.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Yeah, but at that point why print money against bonds? Just nationalized the Make Things Nice Industry and start handing nice shit out to people.
We do feed and house the poor. But then we harass them with bill collectors and eviction notices a few years later. Interestingly, it’s the send bit that’s more expensive.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
And those dollars borrowed from the Federal Reserve… where do they come from?
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
The balance sheets of the Fed’s depositors.
Bonsoir@lemmy.ca 10 hours ago
I think the point is that since these dollars are borrowed, they must eventually be repaid with interest, so on the long run, they will be removed from the economy and they don’t produce inflation like if it was free money. Now, if the government can just allow itself to get a greater amount of debt every few years and only pay the interest, it may lose its meaning…
GoofSchmoofer@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I’m curious how this action would have changed the last 20 years of politics? Those in power during that time did a shit job of really explaining why the banks got the money and not the homeowner. I think this really exposed who the federal politicians were representing, and it wasn’t the everyday voters. I think that anger and sense of betrayal that the American people were told to “kick rocks.” while the actual criminals got a bailout of our money still sits in the dissatisfaction of most of the population.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Optimistically? It would have spared us a decade of people scrambling for affordable housing as unemployment skyrocketed. It might have spared us the Tea Party backlash of '10 and subsequent economic contraction in '14 that mopped up what was left of midwestern liberal democrats. Spared us a BLM riot or two, without tens of thousands of unemployed people taking to the streets in Missouri and Delaware. Might have forestalled a lot of the rush towards Silicon Valley techno-fascism, too, while keeping more industrial business domestic and preventing the ratcheting of tensions with China and Russia internationally.
But maybe not. Maybe people would have been just as angry for different reasons. It would still have been too little, too late to salvage the pre-'08 economy. And we’d have plunged off the cliff a little sooner or a little later, under a slightly different administrative structure.
Idk how your eyes are widened to the corporate strings tugging at Obama/Biden and miss the even bigger strings hooked onto Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.
Unfortunately, I think the vulgar analysis of '09 is fundamentally correct. Americans woke up to a black president and, for a healthy chunk of them, that was a bridge too fucking far. The US could have been a paradise in 2010 and they still would have tossed all the liberals out.
The bailouts became a talking point. And Dems who made a career of trying to defend them were the first on the chopping block. But we still ended up sending Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders to fight the Big Orange Cheeto. And progressives lost downticket over and over again, often to a deluge of media ad buys and an army of professional political hatchet men. All of this was happening under the toxic cloud of Epstein-ism and AIPAC-backed genocide and horrifying pogroms in Latin America, Central Africa, and the Pacific Rim.