The team thoroughly enjoyed October’s book, The Deficit Myth, and sought out opposing viewpoints to add context. It seems that Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) advocates are winning debates (bloomberg.com; tiered subscription) and the counter-arguments we’ve found either lack persuasive evidence or debate minor points surrounding MMT doctrine. The most coherent and compelling arguments against MMT stems from the budding crypto-currency asset class and community and, in particular, bitcoin.
Most ‘Bitcoin-ers’ would point to Abba Lerner’s (whose ‘functional finance’ in 1943 preceded MMT) conversation (varoufakis.files.wordpress.com) with John Maynard Keynes at a mid-1940s Fed seminar to illustrate the dangers of MMT…
Lerner: “Mr. Keynes, why don’t we forget all this business of fiscal policy, public debt, and all those things, and have some printing presses?”
Keynes: “It’s the art of statesmanship to tell lies but they must be plausible lies.”
From legendary hedgies like Stan Druckenmiller (forbes.com) and Paul Tudor Jones (lopp.net) to institutional investors like Blackrock (markets.businessinsider.com) and MassMutual (bloomberg.com; tiered subscription), and public corporations like Square (squareup.com) and MicroStrategy (cointelegraph.com), investing in bitcoin is losing its stigma and difficulty (barrons.com) in establishing an investment. The best introductory texts for enterprising bitcoin investors include Inventing Bitcoin and The Bitcoin Standard. We’ve found value in other books on bitcoin (here, here, and here) and a book for those interested in the #2 crypto-currency Ethereum.
