This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Surpluses & deficits are hotly debated – but what about the currency? — Emile Woolf, Renegade Inc: When a British importer buys German goods he must pay for them in euros. For that purpose he (or his agent) will acquire euros from a German bank, and after settling the bill the German exporter (or his bank) is now a holder of British pounds. What will he do them? He can use them to buy British goods, or even UK treasury bonds, or he can exchange them for a different currency – but if, instead, he just sits on them indefinitely he will, just like the retailer who never cashes your cheque, be handing the importer a free gift!
• John McDonnell is right: we do disagree on macroeconomic policy — Richard Murphy: I said he should not agree to a fiscal charter promising a balanced budget which is wholly economically unnecessary and even destructive. But he did. I also argued against the fundamentally neoliberal concept of an independent central bank that takes control of key aspects of economic management out of democratic control and which was Ed Balls idea. But John bought into it. And as a result he backed off from People’s QE : he was advised that a central bank cannot create money to help ordinary people, job creation or the building of social housing. Instead John accepted that central banks can only use that power for the sake of saving bankers.
• The macroeconomic challenge of the twenty first century — Richard Murphy: Petrodollars created the architecture of the economies of the world that are now creaking at potential massive cost to us all. Now wise management of the fiscally created dollars, euros, pounds, yen and more can provide the alternative, costless but ultimately liberating source of the lubricant for our future economies. As a result we no longer need to burn the planet to liberate the potential in all people. The fiscal dollar can instead build the foundations for prosperity and social harmony that we all crave.
• New Paper: Demand-Side Business Dynamism — Mike Konczal and Marshall Steinbaum in Roosevelt Forward: This paper argues that the decline in mobility, dynamism, and entrepreneurship is a result of declining labor demand since 2000. When it is hard to find another job, employed workers stay at the jobs they have, impairing their ascent up the job ladder and the accompanying wage growth over careers that historically led to the middle class. Declining entrepreneurship can also be explained by workers’ reluctance to leave large, stable incumbents to start their own firm or to work at a start-up when they cannot be assured that they will have a more stable job to return to. Thus, we find that the concentration of employment in old firms and in large firms mirrors the timing of declining labor mobility due to declining demand.
• Understanding Trump — George Lakoff: Private enterprise and private life utterly depend on public resources. Have you ever said this? Elizabeth Warren has. Almost no other public figures. And stop defending “the government.” Talk about the public, the people, Americans, the American people, public servants, and good government. And take back freedom. Public resources provide for freedom in private enterprise and private life. The conservatives are committed to privatizing just about everything and to eliminating funding for most public resources. The contribution of public resources to our freedoms cannot be overstated. Start saying it.
• How Did We Get Such a Terrible Nominee? — Ted Rall:
  
• The Bank of Japan needs to introduce Overt Monetary Financing next — Bill Mitchell: When economists talk of ‘printing money’ they are referring to the process whereby the central bank adds some numbers to the treasury’s bank account to match its spending plans and in return is given treasury bonds to an equivalent value. That is where the term ‘debt monetisation’ comes from. Instead of selling debt to the private sector, the treasury simply sells it to the central bank, which then creates new funds in return. This accounting smokescreen is, of course, unnecessary. The central bank doesn’t need the offsetting asset (government debt) given that it creates the currency ‘out of thin air’. So the swapping of public debt for account credits is just an accounting convention.
• Economic change will not happen until the left understands money — Ann Pettifor in openDemocracy: The fact is that as western economies try to recover, they are sunk again by a mountain of private debt whose repayment is made less likely by austerity policies. These are policies with the ideological aim of “shrinking the state” but which, in the process contract both public and private sector investment, employment and incomes. The consequence of weak demand built on a mountain of debt is deflation: a generalized fall in prices and wages. Most economists, especially those in thrall to the finance sector, have an obsession with, and an aversion to inflation. The reason is that inflation erodes the value of debt. Deflation does the very opposite: it inflates the value of debt. Creditors are not disturbed by deflation, as it effortlessly, and silently increases the value of their most valuable asset: debt.
• Education, The Enlightenment, and the 21st-Century — Fred van Leeuwen for the RSA: There is an inherent conflict between blind faith and critical thinking. That is true whether it is religious fanaticism or the imposition of political ideologies or nationalistic or ethnic dogmas in schools. Although I am not confounding barbaric terrorism with the “values” of the market, it is a danger if one grants markets and management thinking unexamined reverence. Placing education in such a straightjacket is having a major impact on development because it is affecting the way in which communities are conceived, justice is understood, and democracy is practised.
• The DNC Email Leaks: The Gift That Keeps On Feeding Distrust — John Kiriakou in Truthdig: As my friend the State Department whistleblower Peter Van Buren said recently, “People are claiming the Russian government risked something close to war to hack DNC emails to embarrass [Hillary] Clinton after her own email shenanigans and to help [Donald] Trump, who maybe would win in November and who maybe would make decisions favorable to Russia? You realize that’s what has to be true for this [Vladimir] Putin scenario to be true, right? We’re back to the 1950s, accusing politicians of being in league with the Russians.” […] The issue is that the DNC colluded and conspired to favor the Clinton campaign and deny Bernie Sanders the Democratic nomination for president. The DNC’s actions were Nixonian, and they read like an account of that shamed president’s actions from a chapter of “All the President’s Men.”
• Overt Monetary Financing would flush out the ideological disdain for fiscal policy — Bill Mitchell: Monetary policy is really such a blunt and ineffective tool that it should be rendered redundant. The mainstream have never provided a convincing case that manipulating interest rates is somehow the preferable and effective option for stabilising the spending cycle. The GFC experience would suggest otherwise. All the monetary policy gymnastics have had very little impact. It would be much better to set the overnight rate at zero and leave it there and allow the longer term rates (which are impacted by inflation risk) settle as low as possible. Then, manage the spending cycle with fiscal initiatives that can be targetted, adjusted fairly quickly and which have direct impacts.
• Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit — Glenn Greenwald: Put simply, Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who — for very good reason — was widely perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of status quo elite corruption. It’s astonishing that those of us who tried frantically to warn Democrats that nominating Hillary Clinton was a huge and scary gamble — that all empirical evidence showed that she could lose to anyone and Bernie Sanders would be a much stronger candidate, especially in this climate — are now the ones being blamed: by the very same people who insisted on ignoring all that data and nominating her anyway.