A June 27 FOX News online headline announced that sixteen left-wing Nobel prize-winning economists had signed a petition declaring that if Donald Trump is elected there will be increased inflation, while praising “Bidenomics” to the treetops. Apart from the fact that there is no such thing as “Bidenomics” – which is nothing more than the usual wild vote buying from every special interest group imaginable funded by Fed monetization of more debt (and more inflation) – the petition is further evidence of the pathetic, politicized state of “mainstream” academic economics. 

About two years ago, I had a brief exchange with modern monetary theory (MMT) champion and Stony Brook University professor Stephanie Kelton on Twitter (now X). It resulted in Kelton publicly challenging me, an economist and tenured professor at another large public university, to formulate a critique of her (and MMT’s) “chartalist” view that government currency has value only because it must be used to pay taxes.

The leading monetarist, Milton Friedman, blamed the Federal Reserve System’s policies for causing the Great Depression of the 1930s. According to Friedman, the Fed failed to pump enough reserves into the banking system to prevent a collapse of the money stock. Because of this, Friedman held that M1, which stood at $26.34 billion on March 1930, fell to $19.00 billion by April 1933—a decline of 27.9 percent.

On January 14, the White House issued an emotionally charged bulletin on overdraft fees. It outdid itself, packing the release with vituperative claims that overdraft fees were sneaky, hidden, just plain wrong, and exploitative, that they raked in excessive profits for the wealthy and padded the banks’ bottom lines, all at the expense of hardworking families.

Alexander Salter argues that “there’s no good reason to raise the inflation target,” and while he makes some valid points, his analysis goes awry because it is based on the faulty quantity theory of money.

On Sunday, activists from the environmentalist organization Extinction Rebellion stormed the green in the final, pivotal moments of the Travelers Championship, a professional golf tournament. The protesters tossed red and white chalk and smoke bombs before being tackled to the ground by police.