Fields Institute MMT-MCT Seminar

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.

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