Nathan Tankus Profile picture
Newsletter: Notes on the Crises Book: Picking Losers, about the Fed, under contract with @vikingbooks email: crisesnotes(at)gmail(dot)com
Simon 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 Profile picture jprieto Profile picture Mark Flowerchild #MMT #RealProgressives Profile picture Vytautas Vakrina Profile picture SalidaDelEuro Profile picture 16 subscribed
Dec 7, 2023 9 tweets 3 min read
We Jews wonder why the world did nothing as the Nazis put us into concentration camps. Well there were not photos of the true conditions of the concentration camps in 1941, let alone photos every day. Every hour of every day. Livestreams. Yet people talk about college campuses. The denial and justification far too many Jewish Americans engage in for the genocide happening in Gaza is on a far more profound and earth shattering scale than the most vile antisemitic America firster in 1941. I don't want to ever hear any of this "wondering" ever again.
Dec 2, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
I have been reading this revolting quote from Nixon circulating about "Indian women" from the middle of the Bangladesh genocide in June 1971 and I like to periodically check up on primary sources so I dug it out and made subtitles. Truly disgusting freaks. You can find the Nixon library link for the whole tape here. This is extracted from roughly the 50 minute mark.

nixonlibrary.gov/white-house-ta…
Sep 15, 2023 37 tweets 9 min read
Like many,I enjoyed reading @SethAckerman's piece on Brenner. He covers a lot of things that I've had a problem with and may eventually write up in a more comphrensive thing on profit rates (there's just a lot to do!) I have a few critical comments though

jacobin.com/2023/09/robert… I want to emphasize here that I think the piece is good in a number of respects and my critical comments are not meant to reject the piece as a whole. I just care about a lot of issues tangential to the main point but which come up over the course of it.
Aug 22, 2023 13 tweets 3 min read
FYI @LevMenand and Josh Younger's paper on the repo market as money financing of treasury securities is out. I appreciate their citations to @StephanieKelton and I making a similar argument as well as my 2020 piece where I make the same core argument

journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/CBLR… Here's that 2020 piece.

crisesnotes.com/the-way-people…
May 24, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
"Minting the coin would be almost as bad as default" is such an annoying argument because there's absolutely no evidence for it but you can't ever fully debunk it because it's an argument designed to be impervious to evidence. "hOw CaN YoU eB sUrE???" concern trolling abounds. The Fed buys trillions of dollars of government securities and it has no impact on household spending plans but suddenly people are going to hear about a big coin and splurge? Give me a break. It's one of the most unserious arguments that has the gloss of "very serious thinking"
May 23, 2023 5 tweets 1 min read
This piece captures something really important: The Biden administration genuinely thinks doing the coin hurts them more than doing what they are currently doing. They are wrong about that. Shitposters and suburban moms alike will be thrilled.

theverge.com/2023/5/23/2373… Democrats and Dem-leaning independents want nothing more than for republicans to eat shit and be owned. Politics is about persuading Democratic and Democratic leaning voters that what you're doing is good and defeats republicans and the coin does it in spades.
May 23, 2023 8 tweets 2 min read
I'm going to ask the Fed for more detailed demographic information, but based on these percentages of each racial group who use cryptocurrency for investment purposes, Black people don't seem to disproportionately use cryptocurrency for investment purposes. ImageImage Based on their numbers (and using the "identify as x" only adult U.S. population numbers) the rough estimate of the percentage of cryptocurrency investors who are Black is 11.5%, below the percentage of U.S. adults who only identify as Black.
May 23, 2023 14 tweets 3 min read
The amount of people who refuse to believe Democratic party leadership would be hubristic and foolish and assume that this debt ceiling episode must be a contrived plot from the beginning to get austerity is staggering. It's just a photo negative of American Exceptionalism. A party that was just chomping at the bit for austerity would have started negotiating at day one and get whatever deal with cuts was acceptable to house Republicans (if there was one) two months ago. They really did royally screw this up. What's going on right now is not an act.
May 22, 2023 4 tweets 3 min read
Good newsletter today from @TheStalwart about their upcoming interview with @RajaKorman. I've long emphasized that the most important thing to look for in changing the international currency hierarchy is changes in debt denomination

bloomberg.com/news/newslette… Here's a pull quote from a talk I gave five years ago at the University of Manchester at @johndhaskell . This reminds me I should edit that talk and publish it in the Newsletter. And here's my March 2020 piece on international monetary issues.

crisesnotes.com/the-federal-re… It is the extraordinary amo...
May 9, 2023 14 tweets 5 min read
Okay i am bored on this flight so lets do a classic: ask me about whatever curiouscat.live/crisesnotes ever do meetups in town? — Yes! I did one right before i left but will be doing a proper one next week in Manhattan curiouscat.live/crisesnotes/po…
May 6, 2023 16 tweets 3 min read
Those who read this piece I wrote last year know that I don't think higher measured after the fact ("ex post") profits tells us anything causally about target profit margin driven price increases. Kalecki-Levy Profits equation determines those. However...

crisesnotes.com/prices-prices-… The flipside of this point is that economists (and Powell) are totally wrong to claim the opposite- you can't simply tell us that any changes to margins are all about demand (either directly through sales growth or through some supply and demand explanation of price setting)
May 1, 2023 5 tweets 4 min read
My questions for the FDIC after the New Republic acquisition by JPM.
My questions are based on my understanding from this piece I wrote the week after the SVB rescue.
Happy to have any journalists ask my questions to make sure they get answers
crisesnotes.com/the-dizzying-a… HI Brian,  Following up on ... Actually got a quick reply before I finished reposting this from my typo. Pretty unsatisfying, but good to know we won't know anything for days. Established journalists should grill them on this stuff. Nathan, I’m afraid we’ll ha...
Apr 3, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
This sentence is absolutely true, but it is not the twitter understanding of New Keynesianism at all

"The main tenet of the New Keynesian (NK) paradigm is that price dispersion caused by nominal price stickiness is the primary source of allocative
inefficiency" (quote is from this paper

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… )

Krugman has done a lot of damage to the popular understanding of modern economics
Mar 15, 2023 30 tweets 8 min read
I will write a whole piece on this, & its important engagement which I really appreciate from @PeterContiBrown.TLDR:

1) I think this historical narrative is inaccurate

2) I think this thread fundamentally misunderstands the franchise view which begins with inductive description Let's take the historical component first. Here,where I think @PeterContiBrown is wrong is based in original historical research I began conducting a decade ago & have presented on,but got derailed from finishing and publishing (I'm hoping to devote at least part of my PHD to it)
Mar 13, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
The Fed's announcement says "These assets will be valued at par". What that means is the collateral price for these assets at the discount window will be equal to their face value. To get a taste of what that means, read this piece I wrote from 2020

crisesnotes.com/central-bank-c… Here's the Fed's announcement. What is confusing to me is why they created a separate facility ("Bank Term Funding Program"), and whether this separate facility is based on 13(3).

federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pre…
Mar 3, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
The challenge of climate change from my point of view is best handled by a carefully coordinated mixture of Very expansionary fiscal policy, restrictive (non-interest rate) monetary policy and very restrictive non-financial regulation The report I did last year is, in my view, a major step in clearing the conceptual ground for that program but we need far more work, especially on the restrictive non-financial regulation part
files.modernmoney.network/M3F000001.pdf
Mar 2, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
Found this quote from Walras in my facebook memories. Very fascinating stuff. According to me seven years ago- "the equation Walras seems to be suggesting is this: Image (M+E)*V+C=PQ
where M= gold and silver (or just gold)
E= paper money, account at the central bank, etc using E for "engraved" like the bureau of engraving and printing
V= number of transactions per dollar of M +E
C= number of transactions settled with credit instruments
Feb 22, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
A lot of debates around the spectrum of moneyness revolve around disputes over whether moneyness is something instruments have independently or whether its an emergent property of payments systems that instruments plug into. So if you are an instrument independent analyst than treasuries, repo liabilities or any supposed"shadow money"you can't make a direct payment with does not count.But if you think "money is what a payment system does" then it is the ability to convert at or near par that matters
Feb 21, 2023 6 tweets 1 min read
This is so incredibly embarrassing. Useful to have a list of New York Times reporters not to take seriously tho

Reed Abelson
Maria Abi-Habib
Peter Baker
Emily Bazelon
Brooks Barnes
Julian Barnes
Susan Beachy
Jack Begg
Ginia Bellafante
Walt Bogdanich
Alan Blinder
Kellan Browning
Russ Buettner
David Chen
Feb 21, 2023 10 tweets 2 min read
I'm a long, long way from being in a position to write about this but I think a lot of left rate of profit discussions as well as more mainstream "savings gluts" discussions, besides all their other problems, don't really conceptually distinguish businesses from asset managers It's definitely true that plenty of asset managers have difficulty finding "low risk" investments that pay a benchmark rate of return (especially in a ZIRP/LIRP world). But just because they do doesn't mean there are few "investment outlets".
Feb 11, 2023 5 tweets 6 min read
@arindube @SethAckerman @totallyfeckless Not only have I responded to this point multiple times, I in fact responded to @LPetach posting this exact same screenshot of this paper!

@arindube @SethAckerman @totallyfeckless @LPetach As for your point, I agree people have persisted in using it. and maybe I'm wrong and a theoretical downward sloping demand curve not premised on utility functions is useful. But then it needs to be provided a theoretical foundation.