Fields Institute MMT-MCT Seminar

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I’m off to the USA on Thurs­day for two con­fer­ences:

• The Amer­i­can Mon­e­tary Insti­tute con­fer­ence in Chica­go on Sept. 20–23; and
• The Post Key­ne­sian con­fer­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mis­souri Kansas City on Sep­tem­ber 27–29

The lat­ter will re-unite the par­tic­i­pants at the Fields Insti­tute MMT-MCT sem­i­nar held in Toron­to  on July 3rd this year: myself, Stephanie Kel­ton, Scott Full­wiler, Michael Hud­son, Steve Keen, Matheus Gras­sel­li and Nathan Cedric Tankus.

I start­ed this post sim­ply because Nathan has been at me for ages to post the pho­tos, and then I real­ized that, though I had put the videos up on Youtube, I had­n’t made a spe­cif­ic post here.

That’s remiss of me (and it also shows why I want to be able to hire staff who will do what I for­get to do). So I’m mak­ing amends now: below are the four pre­sen­ta­tions giv­en at the sem­i­nar, as well as the pho­tographs tak­en over the two days (OK Nathan, I final­ly did it).

First­ly, a bit of back­ground to explain why the sem­i­nar was held. It’s no secret that there has been some ten­sion between myself and MMT in the past. This sem­i­nar was an attempt to get past the ten­sion, and try to devel­op a coher­ent Post Key­ne­sian mon­e­tary macro­eco­nom­ics. It was a great suc­cess on that front–helped out immense­ly by hav­ing a math­e­mati­cian of Matheus Gras­sel­li’s cal­i­bre involved, since some dif­fer­ences between my approach (for which Mike Hon­ey­church coined the label “Mon­e­tary Cir­cu­ity The­o­ry”) and Mod­ern Mon­e­tary The­o­ry were eas­i­ly resolved with a bit of math­e­mat­i­cal wis­dom.

The key issue here was my asser­tion that “aggre­gate demand equals income plus the change in debt” and the MMT focus upon sec­toral bal­ances in which “the sum of all sec­toral bal­ances is zero”: were they irrec­on­cil­able per­spec­tives (with at least one being nec­es­sar­i­ly wrong), or could they be rec­on­ciled?

Just days before the sem­i­nar, Matheus Gras­sel­li (who is Deputy Direc­tor of the Fields Institute–which is one of the world’s pre­miere cen­ters for applied math­e­mat­ics) sug­gest­ed that we try to derive my propo­si­tion from nation­al income identities–which we duly did. The two views, which may super­fi­cial­ly appear in con­flict, are in fact con­sis­tent (Matheus and I will explain how in our pre­sen­ta­tions in Kansas City).

We sent this argu­ment to Stephanie and Scott before the con­fer­ence, and they agreed completely–so a major bone of con­tention was out of the way even before the sem­i­nar began. We were off to a fly­ing start even before we downed any Sake at the pre-sem­i­nar din­ner.

The sem­i­nar itself was held on Cana­da Day (July 2nd), so we had the build­ing to our­selves, with the six of us, Jim Stan­ford, and Matheus’s PhD stu­dent and col­lab­o­ra­tor Bernard Cos­ta-Lima in atten­dance. I gave the first talk, fol­lowed by Stephanie, Michael, and then Scott. Here they are in the order of pre­sen­ta­tion on the day.

Steve Keen

At the res­o­lu­tion allowed by YouTube, my slides are unread­able in the video record­ing, so here are the slides them­selves record­ed from the lap­top.

Stephanie Kel­ton

Michael Hud­son

Scott Full­wiler

The sem­i­nar was a major step in the evo­lu­tion of a coher­ent Post Key­ne­sian mon­e­tary macro­eco­nom­ics, and I look for­ward to con­tin­u­ing the col­lab­o­ra­tion at the UMKC con­fer­ence at the end of the month.

If you liked this post, go check out my sub­scrip­tion site, Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics. SK.