MMT4All

                                                                ( Image by PIRO4D from Pixabay ) Gold. Mmmm - nice! But is it "money"? (a) What is gold? Gold is a rare element found in the Earth's crust. It is a shiny yellow metal with very interesting properties, the most important here being is that it doesn't easily corrode or oxidise, so a gold coin 2,000 years old will still look like a gold coin, rather than a lump of rust. Though you can sell gold for "money", there are probably no shops in the world that will accept payment of gold in exchange for goods. You can't buy stuff with it at the supermarket, or change it for money at a high-street bank. You can wear it as jewellery, and that's about it. Of course, there are many uses for gold in industries such as electronics, but the average person can't actually buy an...

The current popular macro-economic paradigm is corrupt, where 'popular' means here the statements proclaimed by most political leaders of all stripes and parroted by main-stream media (MSM) and its pundits. The paradigm is unfortunately taught in most universities. It rests on 3 pillars : (1) Ignorance of the sources and final destinations of all money (2) Ignorance of Sectoral Balances - for every deficit there is a surplus (3) The household budget analogy of government funding and spending These pillars need destroyed.

There are many things that mainstream economists and their supporters believe that are, frankly, nonsense. Here is a partial list, in no particular order. 1. The quantity theory of money. 2. Efficient markets hypothesis 3. The Laffer curve 4. Trickle down theory. 5. Fractional reserve banking 6. The money multiplier theory. 7. Loanable funds. 8. Monetarism. 9. Ricardian equivalence. 10. DSGE models and their requirements and assumptions. But what do they all mean? They are outmoded concepts designed in some cases to obfuscate what money really is, and how it works in most modern economies. If you see anyone using them, you know they are either ignorant or trying to deceive you. You could Google them, but I wouldn't bother. Google 'Modern Monetary Theory' instead.