A lot of talk of universal basic income, there setting the entire world up to be a police state. Why is the question ?? and don't give me it's a virus and it's killing poorly old people, nobody has ever cared about them, it's an excuse to screw us all over in a new and exciting way.
I do, and its a brilliantly insightful observation of where our global, political economies are headed. China and the U.S. will lead the way, and in fact are leading the way. The EU has been held back by German Finance ministers, but they will eventually have no choice but to give way to reality and cast aside their hopelessly outmoded and harmful thinking. In 2008, a major financial "dislocation" occurred, as Shvets calls these events. As a result, we experiencedwhat could be considered the U.S. Central Bank-Treasury acting upon Modern Money Theory (without formal acknowledgement). It was a tacit acceptance of the theory. MMT can be traced back at least as far as Abba Lerner's writings in the late 1940s. Of course in Lerner's world, nascent MMT thinking was tempered by the constraints of commodity based currencies. With the unleashing of sovereign currencies starting in 1971, the full nature of fiat money, its freedom and pitfalls, began to be more widely recognized. In the U.S., this occurred among economists who were proteges of Lerner and Minsky -- the latter, in contrast to some of his colleagues, thoroughly understood the new Keynsian economics. The scholars of what became MMT delved into every aspect of central bank and treasury operation as it actually occurs in our present world of sovereign fiat currencies. Only very, very recently did these economists begin to be formally recognized as having contributed something of value and as having been profoundly correct, at least in some, if not most, respects! Of course, we all must recognize that MMT, being a drastic break from pre-1971 conventional thinking regarding government financial operations, is not going to be instantly well-understood among economists in general, and certainly not among the public. The first undergraduate macroeconomics text by two stalwarts of the MMT school of economics -- W. Randall Wray, and William Mitchell -- is just now out. It will be a block buster. At the same time, it's bound to be the subject of withering criticism -- and I might note here that so was Keynes "General Theory ..." when it first appeared. As always, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.
There is a good amount of food for thought in your post. I printed it out so I can have more time with it. Thanks for a nice contribution to this forum.. There is one thing in your post that I believe is a common mis-understanding, and that is that "the fed makes bubbles". If we looked carefully at this, I think we would have to conclude that the fed does not create bubbles so much as they either allow or facilitate them. In the opinion of many economists, bubbles, which are part and parcel of cyclical economies, are a natural consequence of human nature in a capitalist economy. I don't know of anyone who thinks they can be entirely avoided in a capitalist economy, but there are those, such as myself and George Soros, who believe they could at least be recognized early and tamed by timely Central Bank or fiscal policy.
I think Viktor Shvets is someone very worth listening too. My main reservation is that perhaps he has overweighted de-globalization. Once Mr. Trump, who is personally responsible for chaos in global markets, is out of office, I think we should see a geopolitical calming of global markets. www.abc.net.au/news/programs/the-business/2019-10-03/extended-interview-with-viktor-shvets/11572748
Fed is the cause of large systemic risk and bubbles...pretty simple...print print print call it something sophisticated get people to believe an economic paradigm that includes this kind of intervention as being good. Then blame the market when misallocation happens from artificially low interest rates , ad more intervention and rinse and repeat.. interest rates are the fundimental signal to entrepreneurs and lenders as to the current risk in the market. Lend below the free market interest rate and get money going into businesses that normally wouldn't be viable at a higher interest rate ..bubbles!!!