Stop Saying MMT Describes Reality – It Doesn’t

If you ever have the unfortunate experience of debating economics with an MMT advocate they will inevitably tell you “we are just describing how the monetary system actually works!” This is usually supported by a series of “accounting identities” and vaguely accurate narratives. In reality MMT is a THEORY, just as its name says. It is not based on an accurate description of the current monetary system and its policy ideas are totally theoretical, unproven and some are based on pure nonsense concepts that have been debunked. In this post I will detail some of the flaws.

1) MMT is specifically a THEORY of full employment using a Job Guarantee.

MMT’s description of the monetary system starts by assuming that the state is the monopoly supplier of currency. They then argue that issuing currency forces everyone to obtain the currency to pay taxes. If you cannot obtain currency then you are unemployed. Therefore, MMT argues that the government causes unemployment and that the government is the only entity that can resolve unemployment. This is the basis for arguing for a Job Guarantee.

There are multiple problems with this “description”. First, the state is not the only issuer of currency. Central Banks issue currency depending on demand for cash within private banks and banks issue deposits that are currency substitutes. In fact, the entire structure of currency exists to facilitate the use of the real money, deposits. Central Bank reserves facilitate deposit transfers. Cash facilitates the conversion of deposits to physical money. These monies are serving the deposit system and merely help users of the deposit system in various ways.

Further, taxpayers can pay taxes with bank deposits so a shortage of currency does not necessarily cause a shortage of money since the money supply is largely issued by private banks. Lastly, we do not reside in a state money system. We reside in a bank controlled money system where the state has outsourced money creation to private banks in many cases. Therefore, the state cannot be the cause of unemployment since the state is not the monopoly issuer of money. The MMT “description” misconstrues this reality and assumes the state is the monopoly supplier of money and the cause of unemployment when in reality unemployment is caused by a lack of investment spending and distribution of assets.

When pressed on this issue MMTers like to say “banks are agents of the state”. There’s no kind of way of saying this, but you have to be a fool to believe that JP Morgan is operating in the best interest of the state. JP Morgan and other private banks are owned and operated by their shareholders. They are not agents of the state and their liabilities absolutely are not state liabilities.

Contrary to popular opinion, MMT is not a theory of large deficits and government spending per se. It is specifically a theory of full employment and price stability and the Job Guarantee is how they achieve that. A Job Guarantee has been tried in only a handful of instances in the world and certainly doesn’t exist in any developed economies in the scale that MMT envisions. MMTers love to say “MMT is just a description and not something you implement”, but that’s not true at all. If you accept their description above then the only logical conclusion is a Job Guarantee, which is a policy idea that has never really been tried.

In short, MMT’s description of the cause of unemployment is controversial at best and wrong at worst. And the core policy idea they promote is something that has never even been implemented in the developed world.

2)  MMT misconstrues fiscal policy and monetary policy by consolidating the Federal Reserve into the Treasury. 

MMT claims that taxes do not fund spending and they show this by consolidating the Fed into the Treasury in their description. This is not how the monetary system works. The Fed and Treasury are specifically separate entities and when you consolidate them you are describing something that literally doesn’t exist. Consolidating the Fed and Treasury is fine for communicating general concepts, but they are specifically different entities for specifically different purposes and you cannot claim to be describing reality if your entire money creation narrative relies on consolidating them. In fact, the whole reason they’re separate entities is because the money creation story does not begin and end with the Treasury and Fed.

And that brings us to an important understanding. The whole reason there is a Federal Reserve is because there are private banks and the US government has outsourced money creation to private banks. We don’t have a fully “state money” system as MMT likes to portray. But MMT misconstrues this concept by consolidating the Fed into the Treasury to claim that the total government receives its own liabilities when it taxes. For instance, the US Treasury has an account called the TGA at the Fed. So, if you consolidate the Fed into the Treasury then you can argue that taxes settle by transferring government liabilities to itself. This would logically destroy those liabilities and spending would result in a new reserve credit that creates new money. Hence the MMT narrative that taxes destroy money and spending creates money.

MMTers typically respond to this by saying that the Fed creates reserves before the Treasury spends. This misconstrues why reserves are even a thing – because we don’t have a state money system and instead have a bank operated money system which relies on reserves for interbank payment clearing. When the Fed settles a payment with the US Treasury they mark down a bank’s reserve account (from existing reserves, reserves that were created specifically by the Fed for the purpose of Monetary Policy and interbank payment clearing) and that debit equals a credit at the Treasury’s TGA. The size of the Fed’s balance sheet doesn’t change. There is no creation of liabilities and no destruction of Fed liabilities. It merely transfers Fed liabilities from a bank to the TGA. And when the Treasury spends the Fed credits a reserve back to a bank. There is no creation and destruction of anything here. There is nothing but transfers. You can even see the credits and debits in real time every single day via the Treasury’s daily statement.

By consolidating the Fed into the Treasury MMT misconstrues Monetary Policy and Fiscal Policy. Monetary Policy is carried out specifically by the Central Bank and helps to maintain a smooth running payments system. Fiscal Policy is enacted by Treasury and helps the government spend. MMTers like to claim that the government spends first and taxes second and they depict this using a consolidated Fed/Tsy. This is quite literally not how government financing is enacted. And the government is required by law to obtain financing before it can spend. It’s literally impossible for the government to spend first and then tax second as MMT states because it is illegal for it to spend out of its account before it obtains financing. It’s especially odd that a State Theory of Money, which claims the rule of law binds the system, simply ignores the fact that the current laws in the USA require the Treasury to fully finance itself before it can spend.

Further, you have to understand why the Fed is even a thing. And the Fed is a thing specifically because we have a monetary system constructed around private banks that the government is specifically subservient to. So you have private banks creating most of the money in the system and they don’t handle interbank clearing well during panics. We saw this originally in the early 1900s and most recently in 2008. So we created a central clearing entity that wouldn’t stop processing payments during panics. That’s what the Fed does and it does this by forcing banks to hold reserve balances.

It’s crucial to understand that the only reason reserves are even a thing is because we have private banks. So when you consolidate the Fed into the Treasury and treat their liabilities as the same thing you logically end up with a de facto nationalization of the banking system. After all, the only way you could argue that the government receives its own liabilities without the Fed being a thing would be by claiming that the Treasury issues all the liabilities. Obviously, if there was no Fed then the consolidated Fed/Treasury would use a regular bank account and they would clear payments by debiting and crediting private bank deposits. If the government wanted to create new money in that world (by running a deficit) their spending would mark up private bank deposit liabilities and taxes would redistribute some of those existing bank liabilities to the government’s spending account. If the government ran a balanced budget their taxes and spending would balance and there would just be redistribution of existing assets/liabilities. Taxes would not destroy liabilities as MMT claims unless the government was the one actually issuing the liabilities as banker to the entire country. Obviously, this isn’t remotely close to our reality.

This is important because we have specific government entities for specific reasons. And we break up their accounting and assets and liabilities to show exactly what the role of those financial instruments are. For example, the Fed holds trillions of dollars of MBS and T-Bonds due to QE. The Fed pays employees and operates their interbank clearing system, in part, by using the revenue from their balance sheet. Do the MMT people really believe this money isn’t there? Do they think it’s all a fiction? That would be outrageously misleading, but in the real world we precisely quantify those assets because they are real assets that have material economic impacts for real people. They aren’t just “destroyed” because some economic theory treats them as arbitrarily consolidated assets.

Consolidating the Fed and Treasury into one sector is about as useful as consolidating the entire world into one sector to show that there are no financial assets and liabilities in the aggregate. Why would that be useful? It wouldn’t, of course, because it obscures the specific details and how specific micro entities exist and perform specific functions.

3) MMT misconstrues the concept of funding in a modern economy.

MMT people like to claim that “taxes do not fund anything”. This is a misunderstanding of credit at best and completely wrong at worst.

Let’s use an example to debunk this simple concept. Consider two new economies where we form a government and agree to use a common currency that is issued endogenously via bank loans. Economy 1 is filled with people who sit on the beach all day and do nothing. Economy 2 is filled with people who invent Microsoft using bank funding. Microsoft Corp provides labor and income to its residents and also soars in value because of its technological advancements. As a result the citizens of Economy 2 are far wealthier than the citizens of Economy 1. If you have a government involved in all of this then the citizens of Economy 2 can use that government to tax some of this wealth and spend more than the government in Economy 1 can. In other words, Economy 2 is far better off and its government has more funding via taxes because its citizens endogenously innovated and created wealth that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Economy 1 can try to spend as much money as Economy 2, but they will simply create inflation because they didn’t create the real value and resources along the way to support new money creation. Keep in mind that there was zero government spending to fund or finance Microsoft’s creation, but Microsoft’s value creation gives us the ability to redistribute assets for public purpose without creating inflation.

There’s a bit of a chicken/egg element here. Government spending could be self funding if it creates the resources necessary to support that money creation. But in most cases the govt is just taxing existing resources and then redistributing the monetized value of those resources. For example, if I create Microsoft and $1 trillion of new endogenous value then the government has resources it can tax that would not otherwise exist. we can monetize these assets by creating deposits or by having the government print money to buy those resources. In the latter case you could say the government “spent first”, but it’s an irrelevant concept because the monetization of the resources is only viable if those resources are produced. MMT plays word games with this concept to make it appear as though the government is self funding just because it can print money (self financing). MMT wants to depict the government as not being beholden to capitalists and its private sector when the reality is that capital very much funds the government’s viability by creating the resources that can be monetized and redistributed without disastrous inflation otherwise occurring.

Now, obviously, a government has a printing press so the government doesn’t only fund its spending from existing income. And that’s an important concept to understand when we talk about our government being able to “afford” certain things. But it’s also obvious that governments with large taxable income bases have a lot more spending flexibility because they can fund spending from existing money. So yes, taxes absolutely fund spending and the fact that a government can print money does not change that fact. Any theory that says otherwise is not describing reality.

This misunderstanding ties into their misunderstanding of “private sector net financial assets” wherein they misconstre the definition of private sector saving (another messy definition) in order to promote a view based on an accounting tautology. They love to present the economy as being just two sectors to promote the view that only the government can provide “net financial assets” and claiming “it’s an accounting identity”. Yes, it is. It’s a very silly one. As silly as saying that if you consolidated the entire global economy into one sector then there are no net assets in aggregate. In reality, the private sector creates net financial assets within the private sector and does not rely at all on the government to do so. Anyone with a 401K can see that their net savings is comprised of assets other than government bonds and currency. The resources that stem from this asset creation add to private savings and are, by far, the most important assets in the economy, but MMT would have you think that the government does not rely on the private sector to create resources (and the funding that flows from them).

4) MMT assumes that the government is a “sovereign currency issuer” to reinforce the lack of funding constraints.

MMT advocates love to say that governments are “sovereign currency issuers” which don’t need to obtain money to spend money. But the MMT concept of “sovereign” is not quantifiable and applies mainly to large developed economies like the USA. These governments have much more flexible balance sheets and can afford many of the things MMT advocates for. But MMT uses this term in a vague sense without quantifying it.

For instance, in 2005, Randall Wray said Turkey was “sovereign” and that their budget deficits and balance of payments was “indefinitely sustainable”. Turkey now famously has hyperinflation stemming largely from a balance of payments constraint. The thing Wray got wrong was that Turkey was never really “sovereign” in any meaningful sense of the word. They relied heavily on the kindness of strangers to produce their domestic resources and no amount of government money printing was going to magically make Turkey create these resources at home.

Saying “sovereign currency issuers” can afford more than countries that aren’t sovereign is like saying “wealthy people don’t need to borrow to spend” without quantifying what “wealthy” even means. So, this whole narrative around “sovereign currency issuer” reminds me of the old joke about the economist on a deserted island trying to open canned goods and assuming we have a can opener. No, every country isn’t sovereign and MMT’s definition of sovereign is so vague that it’s meaningless. They might as well be saying “really really rich countries have more flexible spending capacity”. This just isn’t a useful description of anything and these concepts are important to understand because policy makers who do not understand them can make disastrous predictions that literally destroy an economy like Wray’s 2005 prediction.

In sum, the assumption of being “sovereign” is vague at best. Their treatment of reserve accounting (and accounting more broadly) is misleading at best and wrong at worst. They intentionally consolidate separate entities to misconstrue the difference between Monetary Policy and Fiscal Policy. Their description of private sector net saving is a silly accounting identity that is depicted in an intentionally misleading manner. The idea that “taxes don’t fund spending” is just factually wrong. And a Job Guarantee isn’t even a thing in any developed world economy. So no, MMT doesn’t describe reality. It’s just a theory of economics based on a few interesting ideas that are largely misconstrued to promote a political ideology.

So, the next time someone tells you that MMT just describes reality point them here so they can be disabused of these misleading narratives.

¹ – Everyone funds their spending, but we won’t get into that MMT misconception since I’ve covered it in detail before. 

² – MMT people invariably respond to this with some hand-wavy generalization about how the government can’t hold its own liabilities. Aside from the fact that the Fed is a hybrid public/private institution, it should be clear that different government entities issue different types of assets for specific reasons. Different government agencies hold various forms of  other intra-government liabilities for specific reasons.  For instance, reserves serve specifically to allow the Fed to operate monetary policy. T-Bonds exist specifically to allow the Treasury to operate fiscal policy. The Fed holds T-Bonds by implementing monetary policy. Are we going to start claiming that the Fed doesn’t really have a $4.5T balance sheet made up of other government liabilities? Are we going to start saying it doesn’t really earn income from those T-Bonds? It doesn’t really fund its operations, in part, from that income?  Look, theories are nice and MMT has some good parts to it, but let’s get real – this theory isn’t reality.