Yves here. It’s remarkable how deeply internalized fear of generating “too much” inflation and/or “too much” in the way of Federal debt impedes rational discussion of MMT. For starters, deficit scaremongers refuse to acknowledge that operationally, there’s no need to fund Federal spending with bond issuance, which is a holdover from gold standard days. The Federal government can simply net spend. But MMT critics regularly refuse to consider that idea.

Philip Pilkington is trying to push debate into a more productive direction by estimating how much larger the US Federal deficit could be before self-reinforcing (as in accelerating) inflation kicked in. Before you balk at the idea that inflation of 4.9% is unacceptably high, consider that what makes inflation nasty is failure of wages and interest income to keep pace. If pay setting and investor expectations saw higher interest rates as sustainable, there’s no reason that workers should be net worse off than now, and they are likely to be better off with the economy running in a higher gear.

We’ve had policy interest rates set below the rate of inflation by design since the crisis, which has hurt savers and retirees and encouraged investors to walk on the wild side, encouraging speculation and over-commitment to high-risk strategies like private equity.

By Philip Pilkington, a research analyst working in investment management and focusing on macroeconomic research. Originally published at Fixing the Economists

Readers are probably aware that there is quite a lot of discussion of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and the potential for fiscal experimentation batting around at the moment. Others have weighed in on this already, and I have little to add.

It is striking, however, that most of the push-back — where there is push-back — is not focused on trying to discredit the idea that we should engage in fiscal experimentation. Indeed, the notion that we should engage in fiscal experimentation seems to be, if not mainstream, at the very least part of the discussion.

Yet, vulgar strawman-style arguments against MMT aside, no one seriously disputes the fact that if too much fiscal expansion is undertaken the economy will eventually hit a hard inflation barrier, past which any increase in spending will generate inflation rather than real output expansion. Interestingly, no one seems to have tried to come up with a new framework for estimating where this inflation barrier might be and whether it is too risky to overshoot it.

So, I’ve decided to fill that gap. Linked below is a paper where I use a new capacity utilisation-based framework to provide hard, yet optimistic numbers of how far we might push the economy in the spirit of fiscal experimentation.

I find that we could probably safely increase the current US fiscal deficit by around 5% of GDP structurally — that is, from the current level of around 3.8% of GDP to around 8.8%. This would give rise to annual real GDP growth of around 6% and a once-off shot of inflation that would drive the annual growth in CPI to around 4.9%. As I say in the paper, this would then lower the private debt-to-GDP ratio from around 200% of GDP to around 190%.

I argue that, based on a new framework I’ve developed for measuring the likelihood of sustained, runaway inflation that I call the Worker Bargaining Index (WBI), it is highly unlikely that a sustained inflation will result.

That said, after undertaking such an experiment, we would be wise to watch whether sustained, overly high nominal wage growth results and if so take action. Given the current institutional arrangement, tight monetary policy would probably be the best response but it would also be possible to tighten the fiscal stance. So long as nominal wage growth merely kept pace with the new 4.9% rate of inflation and did not greatly outstrip it, the economy should be safe from a wage-price spiral.

Here is a link to the paper:

How Far Can We Push This Thing?