This month, I have been mostly reading:

• A former UK Chancellor attempts to save face and just becomes confused — Bill Mitchell: The Bank of England, like other central banks, engaged in high-profile and politically damaging public commentaries about fiscal matters and other economic policies beyond their ‘legal’ remit, thus compromising the public divide between monetary policy and fiscal policy. The politicians thought they were creating some division between the two arms of policy in the eyes of the public but these central bank interventions just reinforced the obvious fact that politics was woven through the entire structure of macroeconomic policy making, which then raised questions of accountability and democracy. The central bankers were appointed and not directly accountable to the people. Their constant interventions into broader economic policy matters thus blurred the link between voters and decision makers. This was one way in which economic policy making had been depoliticised although in this case the external authority often turned against the elected representatives rather than gave them a convenient scapegoat to divert political blame.
• Why is MMT so popular? — in which Simon Wren-Lewis declares himself a foul-weather friend, in order to have his New Keynesian cake and eat it: Policymakers following austerity when they clearly should not annoys me a great deal, and I am very happy to join common cause with MMT on this. By comparison, the things that annoy me about MMT are trivial, like a failure to use equations and their wordplay. You will hear from MMTers that taxes do not finance government spending, or that spending comes first, but you will hardly ever see the government’s budget constraint which makes all such semantics seem silly. […] Of course having a fiscal authority following MMT and a central bank following the Consensus Assignment once rates are above their lower bound could be a recipe for confusion, unless you believe what happens to interest rates is unimportant. I personally think we have strong econometric evidence that changes in interest rates do matter, so once we are off the lower bound should we be fiscalists like MMT or should we return to the Consensus Assignment? That is a question for another day. And then there's:
• Simon Wren-Lewis, MMT, maths — Alexander Douglas in Medium: If I want to understand how an engine works, I need to know which parts move first so I can know which parts move others and which are moved by others. Why, then, might mainstream macroeconomists like Wren-Lewis think that the actual order of spending and financing operations is irrelevant in this case? I suspect it’s because mainstream macroeconomics doesn’t care about causation; in fact, insofar as mainstream macro works via general equilibrium solutions, it can’t reasonably care about causation. There simply is no realistic causal explanation of how a general equilibrium comes about, since every unit must be assumed to be a price-taker (maybe with some stochastic Calvo stuff mixed in). In the background, there’s always some implicit appeal to a Walrasian auctioneer, or some other purely hypothetical mechanism for bringing historical processes into the citadel of eternity to become a problem with an instantaneous solution. But MMTists, like many heterodox economists, don’t work with general equilibrium models. So for them the order of operations does matter.
• The Trump Presidency, Or How to Further Enrich “The Masters of the Universe” — Noam Chomsky interviewed by David Barsamian, in TomDispatch: At one level, Trump’s antics ensure that attention is focused on him, and it makes little difference how. […] It’s enough that attention is diverted from what is happening in the background. There, out of the spotlight, the most savage fringe of the Republican Party is carefully advancing policies designed to enrich their true constituency: the Constituency of private power and wealth, “the masters of mankind,” to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase. These policies will harm the irrelevant general population and devastate future generations, but that’s of little concern to the Republicans. They’ve been trying to push through similarly destructive legislation for years. Paul Ryan, for example, has long been advertising his ideal of virtually eliminating the federal government, apart from service to the Constituency -- though in the past he’s wrapped his proposals in spreadsheets so they would look wonkish to commentators. Now, while attention is focused on Trump’s latest mad doings, the Ryan gang and the executive branch are ramming through legislation and orders that undermine workers’ rights, cripple consumer protections, and severely harm rural communities.
• Cryptos Fear Credit — Perry Mehrling: One of the most fascinating things about the technologist view of the world is their deep suspicion (even fear) of credit of any kind. They appreciate all too well the extent to which modern society is constructed as a web of interconnected and overlapping promises to pay, and they don’t like it one bit. […] Fiat money is untrustworthy enough, promises to pay fiat money are doubly untrustworthy. […] I view all of this through the lens of the money view, which places banking at the center of attention, views banking as fundamentally a swap of IOUs, and views money as nothing more than the highest form of credit. It is view developed not so much around a philosophical ideal but rather as a way of making sense of the operation of the world as it actually exists, outside the window as it were. In that world, the payment system is essentially a credit system, in which offsetting promises to pay clear with only very minimal use of money. And prices arise from the activity of profit-seeking dealers who absorb fluctuations in demand and supply by standing ready to take any excess onto their own balance sheet, relying on credit markets to fund the resulting inventory fluctuations. One can imagine automating a lot of that activity–and blockchain technology may well be useful for that task–but one cannot imagine eliminating the credit element. Credit is not a bug, but a feature.
• How Economists Turned Corporations into Predators — INET's Lynn Parramore interviews William Lazonick: LP: Wait, as a stockholder I’m not an investor in the company’s capabilities?
  WL: When you buy shares of a stock, you are not creating value for the company — you’re just a saver who buys shares outstanding on the stock market for the sake of a yield on your financial portfolio. Public shareholders are value extractors, not value creators. […] Agency theory aids and abets this value extraction by advocating, in the name of “maximizing shareholder value,” massive distributions to shareholders in the form of dividends for holding shares as well as stock buybacks that you hear about, which give manipulative boosts to stock prices. Activists get rich when they sell the shares. The people who created the value — the employees — often get poorer.