Money Capital

"During the pandemic, the US government proposed to spend a seemingly unfathomable amount to recover from the pandemic. The aid they proposed obviously came with an enormous price tag, but since the US government prints the money, why can't we just create however much is needed to get us out of any crisis? The prevailing view-the backstop on government spending and budgeting-has been what's known as "monetarism." This view, which has shaped the policy debate in the US and most advanced economies since the 1970s, holds that the main risk of just "printing" more money is inflation-the more money there is in the economy, the faster prices rise. This is why the government cannot just spend as it pleases, and why the Federal Reserve uses interest rates, their principal means to alter how much money is in the economy, to try to keep inflation low. But there is a lively debate in policy and economics circles on whether we should be so concerned with inflation when there are productive uses to spend money on. A recent school of thought, Modern Monetary Theory, says if a government can print money, there should be nothing to stop it from spending whatever it may take. Others say that MMT offers neither a reliable measure of how much spending is too much nor a method of anticipating the effects of massive spending on the economy. In view of these criticisms, monetarism and deficit concerns still reign. In this book, economists Patrick Bolton and Haizhou Huang argue that there is another useful way to think through scenarios in which government would be wise to print new money. They point to a well-studied area that can be an effective source of insight for monetary policy: corporate finance. Bolton and Huang argue that the way companies create equity, by selling shares on the stock market to fund their activities, can be thought of as an equivalent to government creating more money to spend in the economy. And since the stock market has been studied so extensively, and the effects of issuing new equity have been so rigorously examined, this provides a wealth of understanding of the effects of money creation and spending. Bolton and Huang's book offers both an alternative to monetarism and a more rigorous and applicable model than MMT. The authors also shed new light on well-established Keynesian policy principles and provide a new explanation of China's spectacular growth over the last four decades from a monetary and financial perspective"--