MMT als Schluss- und Höhepunkt des größten Schuldenzyklus der Geschichte?

In dieser Woche hatte ich hier eine erste Besprechung der Thesen von Stephanie Kelton in ihrem neuen Buch über die Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Heute geht es weiter. Wichtig: ich zitiere hier eine Besprechung des Buches von Stephanie Kelton, alle Aussagen sind also, soweit nicht vom Autor explizit erwähnt seine und nicht die von Frau Kelton!

• “(…) Kelton’s concrete policy proposals would be an absolute disaster. Her message can be boiled down to two sentences (and these are my words, not an exact quotation): Because the Federal Reserve has the legal ability to print an unlimited number of dollars, we should stop worrying about how the government will ‘pay for’ the various spending programs the public desires. If they print too much money we will experience high inflation, but Uncle Sam doesn’t need to worry about ‘finding the money’ the same way a household or business does.” – bto: so weit, so bekannt.
• “(…) because Kelton dresses up her message with equations and thought experiments, she may end up convincing an alarming number of readers that MMT really can turn unaffordable government boondoggles into sensible investments, just by changing the way we think about them.” – bto: Und vor allem bietet sie eine Lösung für das Problem der schon jetzt zu hohen Schulden. Darum geht es doch.
• “The first chapter of the book makes the fundamental distinction for MMT, between currency issuers and currency users. Our political discourse is plagued, according to Kelton, with the fallacy of treating currency issuers like Uncle Sam as if they were mere currency users, like you, me, and Walmart.We mere currency users have to worry about financing our spending; we need to come up with the money—and this includes borrowing from others—before we can buy something. In complete contrast, a currency issuer has no such constraints, and needn’t worry about revenue when deciding which projects to fund.” – bto: Richtig ist, dass wir etwas besorgen müssen, was wir nicht herstellen können, um unseren Verpflichtungen nachzukommen. Deshalb gab es auch das Münzmonopol, um den Herrschenden Einnahmen zu sichern.
• “To take full advantage of the special powers that accrue to the currency issuer, countries need to do more than just grant themselves the exclusive right to issue the currency. It’s also important that they don’t promise to convert their currency into something they could run out of (e.g. gold or some other country’s currency). And they need to refrain from borrowing (…) in a currency that isn’t their own.” – bto: weshalb es in der Eurozone eben nicht so leicht ist. Kommt aber auch hier, denn niemand braucht es so sehr wie die Eurozone.
• “The insistence on countries issuing debt in their own currency helps to explain away awkward cases such as Venezuela, which is suffering from hyperinflation and yet has the ability to issue its own currency. The answer (from an MMT perspective) is that Venezuela had a large proportion of its foreign-held debt denominated in US dollars, rather than the bolivar, and hence the Venezuelan government couldn’t simply print its way out of the hole. In contrast, goes the MMT argument, the US government owes its debts in US dollars, and so never need worry about a fiscal crisis.” – bto: Wobei, so richtig erklären die Schulden in Dollar, die Venezuela hat, nicht die Inflation. Sicherlich trägt die Zerstörung der Angebotsstrukturen in dem Land erheblich zur Inflation bei.
• “Kelton repeatedly stresses throughout her book that printing money is not a source of unlimited real wealth. She understands and warns her readers that if the federal government prints too many dollars in a vain attempt to fund too many programs, then the economy will hit its genuine resource constraint, resulting in rapidly rising prices. As Kelton puts it:Can we just print our way to prosperity? Absolutely not! MMT is not a free lunch. There are very real limits, and failing to identify—and respect—those limits could bring great harm. MMT is about distinguishing the real limits from the self-imposed constraints that we have the power to change.” – bto: Dabei blickt sie auf die Konsumentenpreisinflation und nicht auf die Entwicklung der Vermögenspreise. “It’s not revenue but (price) inflation that limits the government’s spending capacity“, so Kelton.
• “Now (…) we can succinctly state the fundamental problem with Kelton’s vision: regardless of what happens to the ‘price level,’ monetary inflation transfers real resources away from the private sector and into the hands of political officials. If a government project is deemed unaffordable according to conventional accounting, then it should also be denied funding via the printing press.” – bto: das halte ich für einen ganz wichtigen Punkt. Wir brauchen eine Budgetrestriktion, wenn wir die Mittel in die produktivsten Bereiche lenken wollen.
• “At this time, let us emphasize the important point that government cannot be in any way a fountain of resources; all that it spends, all that it distributes in largesse, it must first acquire in revenue, i.e., it must first extract from the ‘private sector.’ The great bulk of the revenues of government, the very nub of its power and its essence, is taxation, (…). Another method is inflation, the creation of new money, (…). A third method is borrowing from the public.” – bto: Auch ich denke, dass das stimmt, wobei die Schlussfolgerung nicht sein muss, dass Staaten sich nicht verschulden dürfen. Wir wissen, dass es durchaus im Interesse der Bürger ist, wenn der Staat sich in gewissem Masse verschuldet.
• “Because it’s harder for the public to understand what’s happening when government money printing makes them poorer, there is a definite sense in which standard taxation is ‘honest’ whereas inflation is insidious. This is why Ludwig von Mises considered inflationary finance to be ‘essentially antidemocratic’: the printing press allows the government to get away with spending that the public would never agree to explicitly pay for through straightforward tax hikes.” – bto: Aus dem Scheitern des Sozialismus wissen wir, dass eine Budgetrestriktion wichtig ist. Diese würde hier wieder wegfallen.
• “(…) whether or not the Consumer Price Index is rising at an ‘unacceptably’ high rate, it is a simple fact that when the government prints an extra $1 million to finance spending, then prices (quoted in US dollars) are higher than they otherwise would have been, and people holding dollar-denominated assets are poorer than they otherwise would have been. Suppose that prices would have fallen in the absence of government money printing. In this case, everybody holding dollar assets would have seen their real wealth go up because of the price deflation. If the government merely prints enough new dollars to keep prices stable, it’s still the case that those original dollar holders end up poorer relative to what otherwise would have happened.” – bto: Und viel schlimmer noch ist die Inflation der Vermögenspreise.
• “Kelton and other MMT theorists would object at this point in my argument. They claim that if there is still some ‘slack’ in the economy, in the sense of unemployed workers and factories operating below capacity, then a burst of monetary inflation can put those idle resources to work. Even though the rising prices lead to redistribution, if total output is higher, then per capita output must be higher too. So, on average, the people still benefit from the inflation, right?” – bto: Abgesehen von der Vermögenspreisinflation haben wir es hier auch mit den Zombies zu tun, die zu Überkapazitäten führen. Nun zu denken, diese mit (noch mehr) Geld wiederzubeleben, halte ich für sehr ambitioniert.
• “According to Mises’s theory of the business cycle, ‘idle capacity’ in the economy doesn’t just fall out of the sky, but is instead the result of the malinvestments made during the preceding boom. So if we follow Kelton’s advice and crank up the printing press in an attempt to put those unemployed resources back to work, it will simply set in motion another unsustainable boom/bust cycle. In any event, in the real world, government projects financed by inflation won’t merely draw on resources that are currently idle, but will also siphon at least some workers and raw materials out of other, private sector outlets, as I elaborate in this article.” – bto: die Logik ist so: höhere Staatsausgaben bessern die Konjunktur und machen es so attraktiver für die Banken Geld zu verleihen, was zunächst gut ist, allerdings wieder zu Fehlinvestitionen und damit der nächsten Krise führt.
• “In summary, the fundamental ‘insight’ of MMT—namely, that governments issuing fiat currencies need only fear price inflation, not insolvency—is something that other economists have acknowledged for decades. Where the MMTers do say something different is when they claim that printing money only carries an opportunity cost when the economy is at full employment. But on this point, the MMTers—like their more orthodox cousins the Keynesians—are simply wrong.” – bto: weil jede Ausweitung der Geldmenge zu einer Entwertung von Geld führt.
• “(…) why doesn’t every government on earth follow the criteria for becoming a monetary sovereign? (…) the reason most governments (including state governments in the US) in the world aren’t ‘monetary sovereigns’ is that members of the financial community are worried that they would abuse a printing press. The Greek government knew its economy would receive more investment, and that it would be able to borrow on cheaper terms, if it abandoned the drachma and adopted the euro. The Venezuelan government knew it could obtain much larger ‘real’ loans if they were denominated in a relatively hard currency like the USD rather than the Venezuelan currency, which could so readily be debased.” – bto: Der Punkt ist, die privaten Geldgeber wollen nicht unbegrenzt über den Tisch gezogen werden.
• “For a framework that prides itself on neutrally describing the actual operation of money and banking since the world abandoned the gold standard, it’s awkward that MMT is simply wrong about money. In this section I’ll summarize three of the main errors Kelton makes about money.” – bto: Dann schauen wir uns die doch mal an.
• “Money Mistake #1: Contrary to MMT, the Treasury Needs Revenue before It Can Spend. (…) the Treasury consistently maintained a checking account balance of around $5 billion and that the daily closing amount never dipped much below this level. (…) the Treasury itself sure acts as if it needed revenue before it can spend. That’s why the Treasury secretary engages in all sorts of fancy maneuvers—such as postponing contributions to government employees’ retirement plans—whenever there’s a debt ceiling standoff and Uncle Sam hits a cash crunch.” – bto: Das stimmt, vermutlich hat die Regierung ein Überziehungskonto bei der Notenbank. Dieses ist aber aus politischen Gründen nicht unbegrenzt.
• “Even when the Fed has clearly been monetizing new debt issuance—such as during the world wars—all of the players involved technically have gone through the motions of having the Treasury first float bonds in order to fill its coffers with borrowed funds and only then spending the money.”– bto: man hat sich also die Mühe gemacht, die Illusion aufrecht zu erhalten, dass das Geld nicht von der Notenbank kommt. Dies wohl auch, um das Vertrauen in Geld zu erhalten.
• “Money Mistake #2: Contrary to MMT, Taxes Don’t Prop Up (Most) Currencies. (…) Kelton explains (…): [A] currency-issuing government wants something real, not something monetary. It’s not our tax money the government wants. It’s our time. To get us to produce things for the state, the government invents taxes (…) This isn’t the explanation you’ll find in most economics textbooks, where a superficial story about money being invented to overcome the inefficiencies associated with bartering (…) is preferred. In that story, money is just a convenient device that sprang up organically as a way to make trade more efficient. Although students are taught that barter was once omnipresent, a sort of natural state of being, scholars of the ancient world have found little evidence that societies were ever organized around barter exchange.” – bto: Hier bin ich sofort bei ihr. Wissen wir doch, dass es immer um Kredite ging. Und wir wissen auch, dass das Problem für die Bürger darin besteht, dass sie nur mit dem offiziell anerkannten Zahlungsmittel Steuern bezahlen können.
• “MMT rejects the ahistorical barter narrative, drawing instead on an extensive body of scholarship known as chartalism, which shows that taxes were the vehicle that allowed ancient rulers and early nation-states to introduce their own currencies, which only later circulated as a medium of exchange among private individuals. From inception, the tax liability creates people looking for paid work…in the government’s currency. The government (…) then spends its currency into existence, giving people access to the tokens they need to settle their obligations to the state. Obviously, no one can pay the tax until the government first supplies its tokens. (…) Taxpayers weren’t funding the government; the government was funding the taxpayers.” – bto: Das ist so, wie Frau Esken twitterte, dass nicht der Angestellte im Supermarkt ihr Gehalt bezahlt, sondern sie seines, weil sie bei ihm einkauft.
• “The only problem is that it’s demonstrably false. It is simply not true that dollars were invented when some autocratic ruler out of the blue imposed taxes on a subject population, payable only in this new unit called ‘dollar.’ The MMT explanation of where money comes from doesn’t apply to the dollar, the euro, the yen, the pound (…) Come to think of it, I don’t believe the MMT explanation applies even to a single currency issued by a monetary sovereign. All of the countries that currently enjoy monetary sovereignty have built their economic strength and goodwill with investors by relying on a history of hard money.” – bto: wobei dieses Gegenargument eine Behauptung ist. Es ist kein Beweis.
• “Money Mistake #3: MMT Confuses Debt with Money.” – bto: Jetzt wird es spannend. Für mich ist alles Geld das Produkt von Schulden.
• Kelton: “The debt clock on West 43rd Street simply displays a historical record of how many dollars the federal government has added to people’s pockets without subtracting (taxing) them away. Those dollars are being saved in the form of US Treasuries. If you’re lucky enough to own some, congratulations! They’re part of your wealth. While others may refer to it as a debt clock, it’s really a US dollar savings clock.” – bto: So weit so unstrittig, denn es ist immer Schuld und Forderung zugleich. Wenn auch von unterschiedlichen Wirtschaftssubjekten.
• “(…) Kelton’s claim about the national debt is wrong. (…) Kelton forgot that when the Treasury floats new bonds, that action (in the MMT framework) also destroys dollars by removing them from the hands of the public. So if all of the outstanding Treasury debt were held by the public (or foreign central banks), then the cumulative federal budget deficits wouldn’t correspond to any net dollar creation, even in the MMT framework.” – bto: Sie müssten durch die Fed zu 100 Prozent finanziert sein oder aber durch die Schaffung neuen Geldes durch die Banken.
• “(…) when the Federal Reserve buys outstanding Treasury securities in the secondary market and takes them onto its balance sheet, this creates new dollars. Therefore, to the extent that the outstanding Treasury securities are sitting on the Fed’s balance sheet, then that portion of the national debt would correspond to ‘how many dollars [have been] added to people’s pockets without subtracting (…) them away.’” – bto: was einleuchtet. Die Notenbank hat dem Staat neues Geld gegeben und das ist nun im System.
• “For an even starker illustration of the MMT confusion between debt and money, consider Kelton’s approving quotations of a thought experiment from Eric Lonergan, who asked, ‘What if Japan monetized 100% of outstanding JGBs [Japanese government bonds]?’ That is, What if the Bank of Japan issued new money in order to buy up every last Japanese government bond on earth? Lonergan argues that ‘nothing would change,’ because the private sector’s wealth would be the same; the BOJ will have engaged in a mere asset swap. (…) In response to these claims, I make a simple point: you can’t spend Japanese government bonds in the grocery store. That’s why money and debt are different things.” – bto: Hier bin ich nicht dabei. Beides sind Schulden, nur in anderer Form. Wenn Italien Mini-BOTs ausgibt, ist das Geld: umlauffähige Staatsschulden. Insofern führt neue Verschuldung auch zu Geld, wenn es nicht der Tausch vorhandenen Geldes ist, sondern mit einem neuen Verschuldungsakt mit Kreditschöpfung verbunden ist. Oder?
• “In chapter 4, Kelton lays out the MMT case that government deficits, far from ‘crowding out’ private sector saving, actually are the sole source of net private assets. Using simple accounting tautologies, Kelton seems to demonstrate that the only way the nongovernment sector can run a fiscal surplus is if the government sector runs a fiscal deficit.” – bto: Oder es gibt einen massiven Handelsüberschuss. Das stimmt. Wobei es natürlich ein weiteres Henne/Ei-Problem ist.
• “Using standard definitions, people in the private sector can save, and even accumulate net financial wealth, without considering the government sector at all.  For example, Robinson Crusoe on his deserted island can ‘save’ out of his coconut income in order to finance his investment of future labor hours into a boat and net. Even if we insist on a modern financial context, individuals can acquire shares of equity in new corporations, thus acquiring assets that don’t correspond to a ‘debit’ of anyone else.” – bto: Das ist dann Sparen in einer anderen Form. Die Verkäufer haben dann allerdings das Geld. Insofern stimmt es schon, dass nicht alle Sektoren sparen können. Innerhalb eines Sektors – zum Beispiel Haushalte – kann es beides geben und es würde auch über Generationen Sinn machen. Also Ausgaben in den jüngeren Jahren, dann sparen, dann entsparen. Außerdem sollten die Haushalte den Kapitalaufbau der Unternehmen und damit künftige Einkommen finanzieren. Der Staat kann ebenfalls investieren und dazu Ersparnisse des Bürger nutzen.
• “The problem is that Kelton’s fun book is utterly wrong. The boring suits with their standard accounting are correct: it actually costs something when the government spends money. The fact that since 1971 we have had an unfettered printing press doesn’t give us more options, it merely gives the Fed greater license to cause boom/bust cycles and redistribute wealth to politically connected insiders.” – bto: nachvollziehbar. Ich denke aber angesichts der Überschuldung der Welt und den Kosten der Corona-Krise der logische nächste Schritt. Auch mein Vorschlag, die Staatsschulden der Euroländer in einheitlichem Prozentsatz vom BIP in einem gemeinsamen Fonds auf EU-Ebene zu bündeln und von der EZB ewig und zinslos refinanzieren zu lassen, ist letztlich nichts anderes. Es gibt nur einen Unterschied: ich würde es einmalig machen und für alle gleich. Nicht nur für die Krisenländer.

→mises.org: “A Review of Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth”, 23. Juni 2020