Holy shit, that was goddamn awesome.

Part of me wishes he'd stuck with the John Williams score, but even still, that was incredibly well edited.

*quality

Your video, Maisie Williams (aka Arya Stark) Pranks Game of Thrones Fans, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Well, cheers for sticking with it anyway, I really appreciate it.

It's a one hour talk on the deficit in particular, and most of what she says is based on MMT principles that would add another 5 hours to her talk if she were to explain them. With neoclassical economics, you can sort of jump right in, given how they are taught at schools and regurgitated by talking heads and politicians, day in and day out. MMT runs contrary to many pieces of "common sense" and since you can't really give 10 hour talks everytime, this is what you end up with – bits and pieces that require previous knowledge.

I'd offer talks by other MMT proponents such as William Mitchell (UNSW), Randy Wray (UMKC) or Michael Hudson (UMKC), but they are even less comprehensible. Sorry. Eric Tymoigne provided a wonderful primer on banking over at NEP, but it's long and dry.

Since I'm significantly worse at explaining the basics of MMT, I'm not even going to try to "weave a narrative" and instead I'll just work my way through it, point by point.

@notarobot

"Let's address inequality by taking on debt to increase spending to help transfer money to large private corporations."

You don't have to take on debt. The US as the sole legal issuer of the Dollar can always "print more". That's what the short Greenspan clip was all about. Of course, you don't actually print Federal Reserve Notes to pay for federal expenses. It's the digital age, after all.

If the federal government were to acquire, say, ten more KC-46 from Boeing, some minion at the Treasury would give some minion at the Fed a call and say "We need $2 billion, could you arrange the transfer?" The Fed minion then proceeds to debit $2B from the Treasury's account at the Fed (Treasury General Account, TGA) and credits $2B to Boeing's account at Bank X. Plain accounting.

If TGA runs negative, there are two options. The Treasury could sell bonds, take on new debt. Or it could monetise debt by selling those bonds straight to the Fed – think Overt Monetary Financing.

The second option is the interesting one: a swap of public debt for account credits. Any interest on this debt would be transfered straight back in the TGA. It's all left pocket, right pocket, really. Both the Fed and the Treasury are part of the consolidated government.

However, running a deficit amounts to a new injection of reserves. This puts a downward pressure on the overnight interest rate (Fed Funds Rate in the US, FFR) unless it is offset by an increase in outstanding debt by the Treasury (or a draw-down of the TT&Ls, but that's minor in this case). So the sale of t-bonds is not a neccessity, it's how the Treasury supports the Fed's monetary policy by raising the FFR. If the target FFR is 0%, there's no need for the Treasury to drain reserves by selling bonds.

Additionally, you might want to sell t-bonds to provide the private sector with the ability to earn interest on a safe asset (pension funds, etc). Treasury bonds are as solid as it gets, unlike municipal bonds of Detroit or stocks of Deutsche Bank.

To quote Randy Wray: "And, indeed, treasury securities really are nothing more than a saving account at the Fed that pay more interest than do reserve deposits (bank “checking accounts”) at the Fed."

Point is: for a government that uses its own sovereign, free-floating currency, it is a political decision to take on debt to finance its deficit, not an economic neccessity.

"Weimar Republic"

I'm rather glad that you went with Weimar Germany and not Zimbabwe, because I know a lot more about the former than the latter. The very, very short version: the economy of 1920's Germany was in ruins and its vastly reduced supply capacity couldn't match the increase in nominal spending. In an economy at maximum capacity, spending increases are a bad idea, especially if meant to pay reparations.

Let's try a longer version. Your point, I assume, is that an increase in the money supply leads to (hyper-)inflation. That's Quantity Theory of Monetary 101, MV=PY. Amount of money in circulation times velocity of circulation equals average prices times real output. However, QTM works on two assumptions that are quite... questionable.

First, it assumes full employment (max output, Y is constant). Or in other terms, an economy running at full capacity. Does anyone know any economy today that is running at full capacity? I don't. In fact, I was born in '83 and in my lifetime, we haven't had full employment in any major country. Some people refer to 3% unemployment as "full employment", even though 3% unemployment in the '60s would have been referred to as "mass unemployment".

Second, it assumes a constant velocity of circulation (V is constant). That's how many times a Dollar has been "used" over a year. However, velocity was proven to be rather volatile by countless studies.

If both Y and V are constant, any increase in the money supply M would mean an increase in prices P. The only way for an economy at full capacity to compensate for increased spending would be a rationing of said spending through higher prices. Inflation goes up when demand outpaces supply, right?

But like I said, neither Y nor V are constant, so the application of this theory in this form is misleading to say the least. There's a lot of slack in every economy in the world, especially the US economy. Any increase in purchases will be met by corporations with excess capacity. They will, generally speaking, increase their market share rather than hike prices. Monopolies might not, but that's a different issue altogether.

Again, the short version: additional spending leads to increased inflation only if it cannot be met with unused capacity. Only in an economy at or near full capacity will it lead to significant inflation. And even then, excess private demand can easily be curbed: taxation.

As for the Angry Birds analogy: yeah, I'm not a fan either. But all the other talks on this topic are even worse, unfortunatly. There's only a handful of MMT economists doing these kinds of public talks and I haven't yet spotted a Neil deGrasse Tyson among them, if you know what I mean.

@vil
RT does have an issue when it comes to russian politics and military operations,but the same can be said about CNN.so i agree in certain instances to be a tad skeptical.

abbey martin lefts RT for the very reasons you mentioned.

but this is thom hartmans show,who is a liberal and has always been critical of power,american politics and american military interventions.

the real substance of this video is william black.who you may not be familar with,but he was one of the main regulators who prosecuted the bankers from the saving and loan scandals of the 90's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis

he also wrote a great book:
http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/blab2p

so while RT can,and is at times,a propaganda arm for russian politics.
it aint pravda.

5 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

This video has been seconded as a duplicate; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof seconded with isdupe by eric3579.

Didn't think there was any way this wasn't on here before, Turns out it is

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Daft-Punk-Pharrell-Williams-Stevie-Wonder-Get-Lucky

This video has been nominated as a duplicate of this video by Shepppard. If this nomination is seconded with *isdupe, the video will be killed and its votes transferred to the original.

Everyone who works with John Williams agrees he is a God.

so because williams uses an orchestra with a triumphant trumpet here or there it's ripping-off anyone else who has composed something using similar instrumentation? Shows a complete lack of understanding about music and how chord progressions are built...

But season's passes are BS, I'll give you that:)

Never mind, apparently sports writing can get pretty gross... "Jason Whitlock, a black sports writer, slammed Williams in a 2009 Fox Sports column for having "chosen to smother" her beauty "in an unsightly layer of thick, muscled blubber." His main gripe, unsurprisingly, was about what he called her "oversized back pack." He explained, "I am not fundamentally opposed to junk in the trunk, although my preference is a stuffed onion over an oozing pumpkin.""

Just easier if you look at http://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.pl?show=rel&aid=3431

I think GitS:SAC tv series is the best anime series ever. Ever single episode I would always watch at the edge of my seat absorbing every second of the story.

Innocence was way too obtuse to get into.

I don't understand why they got Mary Elizabeth McGlynn for this movie, yet she's not voicing Motoko Kusanagi. She's perfect for this role! Same with William Frederick Knight not voicing Chief Aramaki.

How'd this not get more votes, this was awesome.

Might be the music and the sound of that blaster, but star wars audio makes me skin crawl like I've been trapped in a cell and forced to listen to John Williams unbroken for years.

I don't think so, I think Williams was just so good in the role that nobody would ever be able to compare. He sounded like the best part of the movie, but I couldn't say from personal experience as I am allergic musicals.

I know this is probably the most insipid possible point to raise over an interesting video, but why is everyone always telling us George Orwell's real name? Other authors don't seem to get the same treatment. In the world of pop music it's Elton John (whose original name was actually Walter Sloppycock or whatever it was), in literature it's George Orwell. Or they'll casually mention some fact about a certain Eric Blair and then pause to not so subtly observe your reaction.

It doesn't seem to me to be a very important thing to know. Like the occasional debate over who actually wrote Shakespeare's plays - probably this bloke called William Shakespeare, but maybe not, who knows - someone did it, and a jolly good job they did of it, and that person we call Shakespeare. The body of work is what counts, and good lord but Orwell had a hell of a body of work. Sometimes the bodies of actual fascists.