The slides that I used during the latest seminar can be downloaded here: Heterodox_Macroeconomics_2023

A very special thank you to those who attended the seminar and showed interest for the topic.

I have organised a seminar on macroeconomics that covered economic history, monetary and fiscal policy.
The main theme of the presentation was the monetary system and its linkage to the fiscal policy.
I started with a history of money and the different monetary theories, followed by an introduction to modern macroeconomics. It then went into the details of government spending, taxation and monetary policies with relative interactions and effects on real economy.

It was meant to provide an heterodox answer to these questions:
– What is money and why is it accepted?
– How does the monetary system determine the fiscal policy?
– How does the government spend?
– Why does the government tax?
– How government and central banks coordinate?
– What is the Euro area really?

Purpose of the seminar:
I have been doing research in heterodox (non main stream) macroeconomics since 2012 and came across several conclusions and empirical evidence that I deem very important and would like to share with as many people as I can.
The seminar was directed to a wide audience, no particular knowledge of macroeconomics and/or finance is strictly required and I delved into each topic in a pedagogical way.
It was not a lecture where I just presented theories or numbers, instead I always started from real cases and provided an explanation using the heterodox macroeconomics theory.
The focal point of the seminar was the answer to this question:
How can fiscal and monetary policies affect, in a good or bad way, our and future generations’ life?

Participation:
The seminar was free and I was the only one presenting.
The duration of the seminar was 4 hours and was held in English (Swedish).
One important point: there were neither business nor political organisations behind this event – it was entirely self organised and funded.

Outline of the seminar:

1. Macro Fundamentals
We divided the economic system into 3 sectors (Private, Public and Foreign) and analysed how they work and interact with each other; we followed the sectoral balances approach.

2. Money and Money Things
We started with the evolution of Money from primitive society to contemporary era (we will look at both the traditional and modern money view). This led to a review of the main differences between Orthodox and Heterodox macroeconomics.
The last section focused on the difference between Money and Money-Things along side the different currency regimes.

3. Sovereign Government and Fiscal Policy
After having defined what a (full) sovereign country was, I delved into the operations of spending, taxation and deficit in modern money environment.

4. Modern Monetary System
This part was a bit more technical yet easy to understand. We went through the operations of money creation by both central banks and private banks.
We then looked into the details on how the coordination between treasury and central bank works in practice.

5. Deficit Spending Arguments
In this part we reasoned on different arguments that typically arise when dealing with deficit spending: sustainability, inflation, full-employment and trade balance.

6. Financial Stability
The last part was mainly dedicated to the Financial Instability Hypothesis (i.e. stability is destabilising). We went through the determinants of the modern financial crisis from 1929 to 2008.

How did it go in Stockholm 2023?

Invitations sent: 12
Invitation accepted: 12
Declined: 0
Accepted in the first time and then declined: 0
Not even replied: 0
Expected participants: 12
Participants in the room: 13

How did it go in Örebro?

Invitations sent: 32
Invitation accepted: 7
Declined: 12
Accepted in the first time and then declined: 2
Not even replied: 14
Expected participants: 7
Participants in the room: 7

How did it go in Stockholm?

Invitations sent: 63
Invitation accepted: 21
Declined: 10
Accepted in the first time and then declined: 6
Not even replied: 32
Expected participants: 15
Participants in the room: 10

The slides that I used during the seminar can be downloaded here: Heterodox_Macroeconomics_2023