L. Randall Wray recently gave a lecture at Lewis & Clark College discussing some economic orthodoxies including whether a sovereign monetary system not tied to fixed exchange rates with other currencies or commodities like that in the U.S. can ever “run out of money.”
The transcript is posted at Media Roots where I sourced the video and slideshow and is linked at New Economic Perspectives.
L. Randall Wray’s introductory remarks-
President Obama, for a long time, actually, even before the current debate, argued, that ‘our government is running out of money.’ He would like to do more to help the economy, to help the unemployed, but Uncle Sam has run out of money. Economists argue that we’re on an unsustainable debt path. And most Americans seem to have come to some kind of an agreement with these two positions. I just saw, in the hotel this morning, a USA Today poll says 70% of Americans say progress on the deficit is needed this year. And it was by far and away the topic, that had the greatest percent of Americans agreeing this was an issue, a critical issue, that needs to be resolved very quickly. Nothing else was even 50%.
There’s this fear we hear all the time that we’ve been borrowing from the Chinese and someday they might stop lending to us and we’d be in trouble. We have a lot of people arguing that the big budget deficits today, and in the future, are threatening us with hyperinflation. So, we might suffer the fate of Zimbabwe or the Weimar Republic.
Many people argue that that debt is a burden on our grandkids.
And, finally, people point their fingers to Europe and say that could happen to us. We might have a sovereign debt crisis, like the Irish, the Greeks, the Italians, the Spanish. There is rising default risk on these nations’ debt.
And the bond vigilantes are attacking them, boosting interest rates, increasing interest payments on the debt, and imposing conditions on these countries, forcing Greece to sell off its national heritage in order to try to cover interest payments, that the vigilantes are demanding.
Is any of this true?
Mark Twain said, ‘It ain’t what you don’t know that gets into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just aint so.’
So, I’m going to be arguing, it just ain’t so. What we think we know is not true.
The video runs 1 hour and 4 minutes-
There are some complaints about the audio, but the left channel seems to work.
The slideshow contains 39 slides-
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