In the pandemic, the U.S. government has spent money on a scale not seen since World War II—without worrying too much about how it would pay the bills. That looked to some people like the triumph of Modern Monetary Theory.
A newish school of thought that wants to rehabilitate budget deficits—and get policymakers thinking more boldly about what they could achieve with public money—MMT burst out of obscurity a few years ago. It’s now regularly name-checked by top officials and big-name academics, though disapprovingly more often than not. Yet when those same people set out their own ideas about the economy, they often sound a bit more MMTish than they used to. Wall Street, meanwhile, has put out plenty of reports arguing that governments are practicing some form of MMT, for better or (usually) worse.
