Eric Tymoigne and Randall Wray's (T&W, 2013) defense of MMT leaves the MMT emperor even more naked than before (excuse the Yogi Berra-ism). The criticism of MMT is not that it has produced nothing new. The criticism is that MMT is a mix of old and new, the old is correct and well understood,...

Eric Tymoigne and Randall Wray's (T&W, 2013) defense of MMT leaves the MMT emperor even more naked than before (excuse the Yogi Berra-ism). The criticism of MMT is not that it has produced nothing new. The criticism is that MMT is a mix of old and new, the old is correct and well understood,...

This paper excavates the set of ideas known as modern monetary theory (MMT). The principal conclusion is that the macroeconomics of MMT is a restatement of elementary well-understood Keynesian macroeconomics. There is nothing new in MMT's construction of monetary macroeconomics that warrants the...

More advanced technologies demand higher degrees of specialization - and longer chains of production connecting raw inputs to final outputs. Longer production chains are subject to a "weakest link" effect: they are more fragile and more prone to failure. Optimal chain length is determined by the...

When anything goes and nothing fits together this can be euphemized as pluralism, blossoming with fresh ideas. Lacking a common fixed point, discussions between various schools of economic thought actually amount to a repetition of contradicting views with more refined arguments. It seems...

We implement a new approach for the identification of "news shocks" about future technology. In a VAR featuring a measure of aggregate technology and several forward-looking variables, we identify the news shock as the shock orthogonal to technology innovations that best explains future...

This paper presents a Keynesian critique of Steve Keen's treatment of the aggregate demand–credit–endogenous money nexus. It argues his analytic intuition is correct but is developed in the wrong direction. Keen's fundamental relation describing determination of AD in an endogenous...

Basic ferro-alloys are some of the most important ingredients for producing carbon and special steel (using ferrochrome). The market of basic ferro-alloys is somehow independent of other raw materials markets, depending mostly of steel. There are sometimes speculative operations, but they do not...

Most of the daily steel we so much need is obtained now in electric furnaces, for which the main raw material is scrap. The scrap market is a very sensitive one, depending very much on internal collect, exports and imports, the market of steel and freight. Commerce with scrap is one of the most...

The special ferro-alloys are the most important ingredients for special alloyed steel. They are much more expensive than basic ferro-alloys and there are fewer producers. The market is volatile most of the time due to the balance offer-demand: some special ferro-alloys are obtained only in a...