دانلود کتاب درک نظریه پول مدرن – پول و اعتبار در اقتصادهای سرمایه‌داری

I began working on my first book manuscript under the tutelage of Jan Kregel while on a Fulbright fellowship in Bologna, Italy, in 1986-7. Edward Elgar had just formed his own publishing company and (apparently) asked Jan if he knew of any manuscripts that might be available. Jan recommended mine and Edward took a chance, publishing it in 1990 as Money and Credit in Capitalist Economies: The Endogenous Money Approach. The book explored in detail the history of the endogenous money approach, showing that the then-dominant exogenous money theory with its deposit multiplier and central bank control of the money supply was an aberration. The endogenous money approach had been commonly embraced throughout the 19th century, and I wanted to show that the domination of the exogenous money approach in the second half of the 20th century was a wrong turn. In spite of Hyman Minsky’s warning to me to avoid writing a Genesis story of money’s origins, I did dip into speculation on the topic. While in Bologna, I met Otto Steiger, who was developing a private property approach to money and interest, identifying money’s origins in Mesopotamian loans of grain. Jan directed me to Keynes’s Treatise on Money, which led me to Knapp’s State Theory of Money and finally to what Keynes called his period of Babylonian Madness when he discovered that the names of all the early money units came from measuring units for grain. As I was also familiar with Lewis Henry Morgan’s (1877) studies of tribal society and the rise of class society, I was naturally skeptical of the orthodox story that claimed money originated as a medium of exchange created to replace inconvenient barter. Still, the main topic of my first book concerned how money works in the modern capitalist economy. I also looked in detail at recent innovations in finance, including the dangers of the increasing use of off-balance-sheet commitments, the rise of securitization, and the growing competition from nonbank banks (what we now call shadow banks). I warned that while all these innovations might enable individual institutions to shift risk, they made the system as a whole riskier and more likely to collapse-two decades before the Global Financial Crisis when that came to pass. In 1997, Edward Elgar took a much bigger risk, agreeing to publish my second book, Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price Stability (1998). By then, I had come to know Edward and Sandy Elgar, and their darling daughters, quite well, as we regularly caught up at the book displays at academic meetings. While working on the new book, I tried to convince Edward it would revolutionize the way we look at money-paraphrasing what John Maynard Keynes had said seven decades earlier about his General Theory: “I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize-not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years-the way the world thinks about economic problems.” Further, I asked him to price it at $25 and guaranteed it would sell. That book laid out what became known as Modern Money Theory (MMT). The term “modern money” was an inside joke, taking off from Keynes’s statement in the Treatise that Knapp’s state money theory applied to all money “for the past four thousand years”-i.e. the modern period. Unfortunately, the reception was not entirely positive! Some heterodox economists accused me of abandoning the ideas advanced in the first book, insisting that the state money approach of MMT is inconsistent with the credit theory of money addressed by the endogenous money approach. The heterodox academic journals generally refused to publish scholarly work on MMT. Orthodox economists accused MMT of claiming that the government should print up gazillions of dollars, causing hyperinflation. MMT’s advocacy for using the Job Guarantee to ensure full employment was rejected as some form of forced labor. For a long time, policymakers and media pundits insisted that MMT was crazy talk and certain to destroy the country. But when challenged to find holes in MMT’s explanation of how the government really spends, or why MMT claims that a sovereign government cannot run out of its own currency, all the critics had was crickets. No one has found any holes in MMT’s logic or description. In the long and slow recovery from the Global Financial Crisis, MMT gained followers and proponents as the ideas spread across blogs and the internet more generally. They put pressure on politicians, asking why the government refused to do more to alleviate suffering. With ample unemployed resources, why couldn’t the government use its sovereign currency? Followers no longer believed President Obama when he claimed he’d like to do more, but the government had run out of money. They criticized prominent pundits like Paul Krugman for dovish hesitancy in supporting more spending.