[csomar]

Krugman is very keynesian when it comes to economics. I also feel he is not the genius the media makes him to be.

Think of Modern Money Theory as this crazy theory that challenges our intuition but actually makes sense if you really understand it.

> there is apparently at least some circumstances where printing money doesn't lead to inflation

If everyone in the USA (and the world) decided tomorrow not to hold the USD any more, you'll have hyper-inflation in the matter of a few hours. Printing money is just one variable to inflation; and not really a very important one if you have lots of money flowing already in the economy.

[twblalock]

> I also feel he is not the genius the media makes him to be.

In his defense, he did win a Nobel prize in Economics.

[core-questions]

> Think of Modern Money Theory as this crazy theory that challenges our intuition but actually makes sense if you really understand it.

How does one get to the point of understanding it?

[csomar]

Two things changed my view about MMT and money: 1- The way we "print" money is by issuing credit. That seems safe since it is credit and not actual "money printing" but as soon as that credit expire, you need to re-issue it again. So it's the same thing as printing in the longer run. If you want to reduce the money supply, you stop issuing credits. In MMT, you add taxes and this has the same effect. 2- By having an interest rate and issuing credit, money becomes a commodity. This is wrong as people should not ask banks so that they can make transactions. Money should be available to anyone who wants to make a transaction. Notice that I use the word available and not free. MMT is not about giving people money for free, but about making it available for anyone.

There is a whole class of people that built fortunes just by sitting on money. Working people had to pay these other people and for what?

[primrose]

"Working people had to pay these other people and for what?"

The productive capacity this money enabled. Except instead of the gov doing it 1000 miles away, they had skin in the game, took risks and monitored the situation to ensure success.

[csomar]

I'm specifically talking about government bonds, since these have 0 risks. If risk is correlated to yield, these should have no more than 0% interest rate.

[pyuser583]

How much support does MMT have among mainstream economists?

[_2d30]

None.