In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, policy makers in the U. S. and in other nations have reduced interest rates, expanded central bank balance sheets, increased deficits to levels generally not seen since World War II, and begun seriously rethinking financial...

Central to current policy debates regarding public pensions, the appropriate macroeconomic policy mix, and any number of other issues related to growth, development, poverty alleviation, and so forth, is the concept of fiscal sustainability. For neoclassical economists, fiscal sustainability is...

The debt ceiling debate could be ended right now given that the US Constitution bestows upon the US Treasury the authority to mint coins. Further, this simple change would lift the veil on how current monetary operations work and thereby demonstrate clearly that a currency-issuing government...

This paper uses the sector financial balances model of aggregate demand to illustrate the effects of fiscal austerity policies on the economy. It further demonstrates that government deficits are not directly controllable by policy makers but are rather endogenous to the responses of the private...

Recognizing that analysis of the daily activities have recently become a standard part of the monetary economics literature, this paper provides a detailed description of the Fed's daily tactics from an institutionalist perspective. The three relevant categories of time in the Fed's daily...

This post will explore at length (warning!) and in detail (another warning — wonk alert!) the MMT perspective on the debt ratio and fiscal sustainability. While the approach suggests a macroeconomic policy mix and strategies for both fiscal and monetary policies that most neoclassical...

A number of debates are taking place regarding the appropriate response of monetary policy both to the crisis and the Great Recession that followed, particularly in regard to interest on reserve balances and so-called unconventional monetary policy operations. This paper describes in detail an...

The ADB COVID-19 Policy Database displays the measures taken and monetary amounts announced or estimated by the 68 members of the Asian Development Bank, two institutions, and nine other economies (i.e., a total of 79 entries) until May 2020, to fight the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic....