Sometimes it feels like we're just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Yes, the 2008 global financial crisis utterly

discredited the neoliberal economic model. Yes, we're staring down the barrel of a

climate crisis which threatens our very existence.

But the other side of the equation, what we're supposed to replace that

neoliberal model with and how we're going to pay for

decarbonisation. Well that just doesn't have the same consensus.

Stephanie Kelton, an economist and former advisor for the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign argues that finding the money is actually the easy part.

She's a proponent of modern monetary theory, a set of ideas which turns fiscal assumptions on their heads and is also invited criticism from both the left and the right.

You lot have been asking for an mmmmmmm-t downstream for ages so here it is.

And if you want to find out more about Stephanie Kelton's ideas,

she's got a book called The Deficit Myth and is the subject of a new documentary

called Finding the Money.

There's a link to it in the description. I hope you enjoy this interview.

Stephanie Kelten, welcome to Downstream. Thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

So I guess my first question is this. Could you explain to me for the completely uninitiated what MMT is? And please bear in mind, you're talking to a literature graduate so write in comic

sands if you have to.

Okay well let me I'm gonna do this the way that you asked me to do it, but I feel a sense of obligation to the many people who

developed the writing and the scholarship that over now almost 30 years has been dubbed MMT. So it really is a very big

project that a number of us started contributing to 25, 30 years ago thinking about the monetary system and what

it is that we have today in the form of a Fiat currency, which is basically saying, you know, we don't

have a currency in the UK, the pound, in the US, the dollar, in Australia, the Australian dollar in Japan. the right, meaning we're not on a gold standard or some other monetary system where the

government pledges to convert the currency into something it could run out of gold or silver or another country's currency.

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