5 stars. Been listening since mid 2019. Great podcast and appreciate diving into monetary policy. Christian and Patricia are great interviewers and do a good job researching and preparing for episode topics. Thank you for providing all the hours of information and entertainment. If you are new to the podcast some of my favorite episodes are the MMT Money Story from Warren back in July 2019, and I think the central bank episode with Steven Hail is also an interesting one.
Would love to see a future episode as a structured debate with a neoclassical academic from the UChicago school. Mosler has done a 2 hour debate with Dr Robert Murphy from the Austrian school, but Mosler was far more literate and Dr Murphy wasn't able to coherently make any points, which left something to be desired. I feel there's something to be gained from a more structured debate with set topics and time for rebuttal with you guys or Warren, specifically touching on taxes, inflation, setting the price level, the role and power of the federal reserve, etc.
One downside of this podcast is I think it doesn't adequately address conflicting, classical viewpoints. For ex in one older episode Christian referred to classical economists as trolls, or he will make a play on words about Friedman's name instead of explaining why MMT is a counter to a traditional theory. There are also some specific MMT ideas that I would like to see more fleshed out. For ex, on this podcast and in Mosler's paper, it's commonly mentioned hiking rates causes inflation through increased interest income and increased forward pricing, but there are deflationary aspects of hiking rates I don't think are adequately addressed. The idea that interest rate 'expectations' have a role in inflation is dismissed in Waren's paper, but why? The Weimer example can fit the MMT theory as Waren has written about, but there are other examples where rates are going up while inflation going down (Volcker or the modern day past 6 months) that I am not convinced fit the MMT theory of interest rates. Anyway, as classical economics is the dominant theory guiding most of our modern politicians, my opinion is more time should be spent directly addressing it.
Thanks for producing such a great product.
