Excerpt
Today – amid the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic – the Bank of Canada is printing billions of dollars to buy government bonds in order to lower interest rates. For the first time they have moved beyond “quantitative easing” – buying up government bonds in the secondary market to lower interest rates – to direct purchases of government bonds. They are supporting massive federal and provincial government deficit spending. The Bank may not loudly endorse MMT, per se, but they are acting on that basis and demonstrating that the state can indeed always pay for what must be done. Similarly, all kinds of orthodox economists and policy makers have temporarily accepted that a massive increase in public spending can and should be undertaken without raising taxes and almost irrespective of the deficit and debt.