New OEC Under-Secretary-General for Financing and Development
Editor
On 19th December the Organisation of Educational Cooperation Secretary General announced the appointment of Dr Fadhel Kaboub as Under-Secretary-General for Financing and Development. He previously served as an Associate Professor of Economics at Denison University (OH) and President of the Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. He also served as a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College (NY), the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability (MO), the Economic Research Forum (Egypt), the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (MA), Power Shift Africa (Nairobi), and Center for Strategic Studies on the Maghreb (Tunis).
In a recent interview with Sowmya Sivakumar [1], he explained how MMT is slowly shifting the debate in the US, with important lessons for India and rest of the world:
“The US government is certainly influenced by MMT insights, but has not yet completely understood the MMT framework, and is not using the full kind of monetary sovereignty and fiscal policy space that MMT allows.
“Pre-Covid, MMT economists had identified four major inflation pressure points in the US: transportation and energy, healthcare, housing/real estate sector, and higher education.
… From an MMT perspective, one should be doing two things to address them: a) increase productive capacity in these sectors so output becomes more available, and b) tax and regulate abusive market power. Based on that pre-Covid-19 inflation analysis, the whole package of policies that MMT recommends comes under the umbrella of what we call the ‘Green New Deal.’
“Now, the newly-passed Inflation Reduction Act has parts of the original Green New Deal that was already watered down to the Build Back Better Bill, which even the Democrats rejected. It did shift the conversation about inflation from the old paradigm which says: every time you have inflation, raise interest rates and reduce the deficit. But it has made progress on a very small scale. On the other hand, we still have the Fed raising interest rates like crazy. This is definitely not consistent with the MMT understanding, because raising the interest rate will not increase productive capacity, or reduce the abusive power of oil-gas or shipping companies, and so on. Everything the Fed is doing will not even put a dent on inflation. In fact, it might fuel inflation. So it’s a half-and-half, confused, incoherent approach with patchwork type of policies. .. “
Dr Fadhel Kaboub
1. https://www.newsclick.in/There-WholeIdeological-Package-That-Goes-RaisingInterest-Rates-Fadhel-Kaboub
