Economics and Finance Program

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What Is Money?: Bard Economist L. Randall Wray Discusses How Money Works on the Podcast Something You Should Know

L. Randall Wray, professor of economics at Bard and senior scholar at the Levy Institute, speaks with Mike Carruthers on Something You Should Know about the definition of money and how it actually works. “We need to get away from this notion that money is something we can get our hands on,” Wray explains. “If you go back in time, most market activity as far back as we go took place on the basis of credit and debit. And really that is how we should look at money. Money is credit in your hands and it’s somebody’s debt.” Wray asserts that the Federal Reserve cannot run out of money. “Money is a keystroke credit to an account . . . As long as there is one person left at the Fed with one finger, they can keystroke some more credits . . . Can the government or the private sector spend too much and cause inflation, which will reduce the value of the money? Yes, that can happen.” Wray’s newest book Money for Beginners: An Illustrated Guide was published in May 2023. Professor Wray’s interview begins at 24:00.

Post Date: 05-31-2023

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Bard Economist Pavlina Tcherneva Interviewed on Background Briefing with Ian Masters

Ian Masters spoke with Pavlina Tcherneva, associate professor of economics at Bard College, research associate at the Levy Economics Institute, and author of The Case for a Job Guarantee (2020), on his nationally syndicated radio program Background Briefing. In the episode, “As Pundits Warn of Recession and Inflation, We Get the Best Economic News Since 1969,” Masters asks Tcherneva for her take on the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report, which added 517,000 jobs in January 2023 and stunned most economists and people who continue to harbor a doomsday mentality about the economy.

According to Tcherneva, two years after the COVID-induced crisis, such good news about low unemployment levels tells us that “public policy has tools. It can act boldly, quickly and bring jobs back.” She points out, however, that these low unemployment numbers also reflect the 5.7 million people who are not looking for work, and 4 million people who are working part-time but would like to have full-time jobs.

“Part of the anxiety still being experienced in the labor market is that the jobs are there but they are not exactly these well-paying jobs with very good benefits and good working conditions. On that front, there is more to be accomplished. Let us remember our minimum wage is still $7.25, and no one can live on $7.25 an hour,” she asserts.

Tcherneva sees the big fiscal policies implemented over the last two years by the Biden administration, which do not overly focus on the financial sector or prioritize tax cuts for the wealthy, as all good news. Still, she advocates for more economic progress. “The question for me is did we come out of the pandemic with better jobs, better conditions for working families than we had going into the pandemic?”

Post Date: 02-14-2023

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Professor Pavlina Tcherneva Helps Chart a Path for Job Guarantee Program in Colombia

Pavlina Tcherneva, associate professor of economics at Bard College, research associate at Bard’s Levy Economics Institute, and director of the Open Society University Network's Economic Democracy Initiative, recently met with government officials in Bogotá, Colombia, to present her proposal for a national job guarantee program. At the invitation of Vice Minister of Finance Diego Guevara, Professor Tcherneva met with five government divisions: the ministries of energy, development, finance, and culture, and the SAE (Sociedad de Activos Especiales, or Special Assets Society), which administers seized assets of narcotics traffickers in the country.

“The job guarantee is an economic policy that provides public employment opportunities on demand to anyone seeking decent, living-wage work,” Tcherneva says. “It is a structural stabilization policy that alleviates the economic, social, and political costs of unemployment and precarious employment. It is equity-driven and draws on a long tradition of human rights and social justice.” Governments all over the world have implemented policies that provide some level of job guarantee, though none have a truly universal job guarantee program. One example in U.S. history is the Works Progress Administration. Part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the agency employed millions of Americans on a wide range of public works projects during the Great Depression.

Post Date: 12-13-2022

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Bard Economist L. Randall Wray Wins 2022 Veblen-Commons Award in Recognition of Significant Contributions to Evolutionary Institutional Economics

L. Randall Wray, professor of economics and senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, has won the 2022 Veblen-Commons Award. This award is the highest honor given annually by the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) in recognition of significant contributions to evolutionary institutional economics. Named after the founders of institutional economics, Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) and John R. Commons (1862–1945), and awarded since 1969, the Veblen-Commons Award is presented to scholars “on the basis of their contributions to a better understanding of both the economic process and the behavior of the major institutions that shape that process and society’s goals and values” (Trebing, 1992, 333). By recognizing significant contributions to institutional analysis, this award furthers the goal of institutional economics to make the world a better place.

Recipients of the Veblen-Commons Award have made outstanding contributions to institutional economics in the tradition of Veblen and Commons. Award recipients have focused their work on some of the most important topics confronting human society. Such topics include exploring the underlying power relations within society, the origins and implications of inequality, feminist economics, the origins of discrimination, the enabling myths of the dominant groups, the continuing conflict between rights and duties, the possibilities offered by modern technologies and the use of those possibilities for good or ill, the causes of financial crises, among others. Previous recipients include Levy scholars James Galbraith (2020), John F. Henry (2017), Jan Kregel (2011), and Hyman P. Minsky (1996).

L. Randall Wray is a senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute and professor of economics at Bard College. He is one of the original developers of Modern Money Theory. Wray’s most recent books are Why Minsky Matters (Princeton University Press, 2016), and A Great Leap Forward (Academic Press, 2020), and Handbook of Economic Stagnation(with Flavia Dantas; Elsevier, 2022). Four new books will be published in 2022/2023: Making Money Work for Us (Polity Press, Fall 2022), Money For Beginners (with Heske Van Doornen; Polity Press, 2023), Modern Monetary Theory: Key Thinkers, Leading Insights (editor; Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022), and The Elgar Companion to Modern Money Theory (with Yeva Nersisyan; Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023).

Wray is the author of Money and Credit in Capitalist Economies (Edward Elgar Publishing, 1990), Understanding Modern Money (Edward Elgar Publishing, 1998), The Rise and Fall of Money Manager Capitalism (with É. Tymoigne; Routledge, 2013), Modern Money Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; 2nd rev. ed., 2015), and Macroeconomics (with William Mitchell and Martin Watts; Red Globe Press, 2019).

Wray previously taught at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and at the University of Denver, and has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Paris, Bologna, Bergamo and Rome, as well as UNAM in Mexico City. He holds a BA from the University of the Pacific and an MA and a Ph.D. from Washington University, where he was a student of Minsky. He has held a number of Fulbright Grants, including most recently at the Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia. He is the 2022 Veblen-Commons Award winner for contributions to Institutionalist Thought and will be the 2022-2023 Teppola Distinguished Visiting Professor at Willamette University, Salem Oregon.

Learn more about the Veblen-Commons Award here.

Post Date: 08-02-2022

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Bard Economist L. Randall Wray on How Modern Monetary Theory Isn’t the Future. It’s Here Now.

In the Wall Street Journal, Bard economist and leading scholar of Modern Monetary Theory L. Randall Wray comments on how important elements of MMT, including the claim that a government need never default on debt issued in its own currency, are now accepted by much of the economic and financial establishment. “We got five or six trillion dollars of spending and tax cuts without anyone worrying about payfors, so that was a good thing,” says Wray. “In January [2020], MMT was a crazy idea, and then in March, it was, OK, we’re going to adopt MMT.” L. Randall Wray is Professor of Economics and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.

Post Date: 11-23-2021

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How Should We Measure Well-Being? Dimitri B. Papadimitriou Talks with Financial Times about Bard Levy Institute’s New Federal Contract to Broaden Measures of Economic Well-Being

Many of the metrics we commonly use to understand economic growth and well-being were developed nearly a century ago, and may no longer paint an accurate picture of the economy. The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College last week won a $300,000 federal contract to aid the US Department of Labor in its efforts to broaden how it measures the economic well-being of US households. Levy Institute President Dimitri Papadimitriou talked with Rana Foroohar of the Financial Times about how new metrics, such as measuring women’s unpaid labor, could create more clarity for policymakers.

Post Date: 11-09-2021