Episode 286 – Modern Monetary Theory and the European Project with Dirk Ehnts

[00:00:42] Steve Grumbine: All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. I am bringing back my good friend, lecturer and author now. I think he’s been an author before, but he’s an author now for sure. Dirk Ehnts, he’s a lecturer at Torrens University in Australia and Steinbeis University in Berlin as an adjunct professor. And he’s also teaching the MA in economics of sustainability.

He’s also teaching at the summer school in Maastricht [Netherlands] and the MMT summer school in Poznan, Poland. But let’s just bring up the point of this conversation, which is a great book, I have it in my hands, I’m staring at it. It’s very pretty and simple. And I like the simplicity of the design, because this is trying to simplify what most people think of as very complicated stuff, which is modern monetary theory or Modern Money Theory, A Simple Guide To The Monetary System, published by Springer, written by my guest, Dirk Ehnts. Welcome to the show, sir.

[00:01:42] Dirk Ehnts: Steve, thanks for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

[00:01:45] Steve Grumbine: I love having you on, it’s been a little bit since we’ve had you on, but this book is a great opportunity to talk to you because there’s several books that have obviously come out and tried to do this in different ways.

Randy Wray has put out various books. He put out one for kids, almost like a coloring book. He’s put out his version of the basics of modern money. Warren has put out his stuff. Stephanie has put out her stuff. Of course, there’s the MMT textbook. And now we’ve got this, and this is very nicely laid out. I have my problems with Biden, which it starts out with, but I’m very interested in what we can glean from what’s happened, and what we can learn from it.

So, why don’t you take us to what spurred you to write this book? What was the incentive? What was the motivation?

[00:02:32] Dirk Ehnts: Money, of course, but not my own profits. But I wanted to explain modern money theory, and the idea was to write a short book, which explains modern money theory to people who have never had any education in economics, or in balance sheets, accounting, all these things.

So, the original version of this book appeared in German, because Springer was basically asking me to write a short introduction to MMT. Because I also published a textbook on MMT with them, and, they said, ‘well, just to get people interested in MMT, how about a short book of 60 pages on MMT?’

So I did that in German for the Eurozone and how it happens, how it works in Germany, with the federal government that we have there. And then the American colleagues from Springer USA, they were interested in having an American version because they said, well, MMT is kind of in right now, so there’s lots of people talking about it and we don’t have a book about MMT. So would you be willing to write one?

And I said, yeah, okay, sure. [chuckles] So as I said, well, we don’t have these small books, we don’t do short books on MMT or anything else. So in German, there would be some kind of book series which is published by Springer and they have 60 pages. And they said, well, we have this, book series is called Professional Practice and Governance and Public Organizations. So how about that? That would mean like 120 pages.

And that’s how it worked. So interestingly enough, it’s basically the demand driving the supply of books. So when they did that, when they asked me to expand that version, I, of course said, okay, I will have to rewrite the whole thing because US is not like the Eurozone; in a way you could say that the Eurozone is more MMT-ish than, compared to the US, because the European governments can spend and then they have to sell bonds and find tax revenues later. Whereas in the US you have to pre-finance, so the Treasury has to sell government bonds first and then they can spend.

But I was thinking about a new structure and I kind of thought, well, let’s leave out the balance sheets and instead use, basically stories. So I have this chapter in there about the paper currency of Virginia, for example, which takes place in the 1760s. And I start with the Biden administration and what they did in the pandemic, which is just to increase spending and not care about the Phillips curve or inflation and all that kind of stuff.

And then later on, I try to explain in more detail what MMT means and what’s different compared to mainstream economics as we know it— the economics that is taught at universities.

And then I end the book with two chapters on economic policy, why we need that, because for many people, it’s not clear, they think that if we just leave everything alone, somehow the economy will fix itself. So we’re back at the 1930s, in the Great Depression where they tried not doing too much for four years. And then Roosevelt came and you have the New Deal. Then the book ends with economic policies based on MMT, so there’s a couple of sub chapters of what could be done.

And the main idea was that I would not write in some kind of book where you would basically understand somehow what MMT is and then find all kinds of policy advice. So Randall Wray has written this book, How MMT Can Save America, and it’s a great book. So my idea was, to take a different route and to help people in governance and public organizations to get this kind of introduction to MMT, which makes a lot of sense and, hopefully, can help these people think society and the use of money differently so that we get better results in our societies.

So that was, that was the idea in the end.

[00:06:00] Steve Grumbine: Well, you know, we, we do a book club series and we’ve done one for Stephanie’s [Kelton] book, The Deficit Myth. We did one for Pavlina’s [Tcherneva] book, [The Case for a Job Guarantee] . We’ve done one for Randy Wray’s [Modern Money Theory]. If we can work it out, love to do one for this book as well, ’cause this is really, really fantastic. I really liked the approach, I like the layout. we can talk about that offline.

Why don’t we just jump right in, tell me, what did we learn through the pandemic? Obviously, it’s hard for me to not remember, and yet it’s all kind of fuzzy. I remember, when I talked to Pavlina during the pandemic, we were talking about nationalizing payroll. We were talking about basically paying people to stay home as a temporary measure to ensure that we don’t inflame the outbreak and to be able to basically allow us to give our very, very broken hospital system, our medical system, a chance to catch up to all the people getting sick.

And a lot of money was being spent, but not a lot of taxes were going on because people weren’t working. talk to us, what do we get from that period of time, this Copernican turn? Okay.

[00:07:04] Dirk Ehnts: Yeah. I think that before the pandemic, there was already some debate about MMT in academic circles, and lots of people said, well, it can’t be right. And it’s not possible to finance any deficit. They were kind of confusing and talking about paying for deficits and all of this, Of course they don’t get this right.

It’s the government which spends first and you cannot finance a deficit because the deficit is just the difference between government spending and tax revenues. But there were some surveys also, by I think University of Chicago and others, and everybody was mostly coming out against MMT and saying, it’s impossible to have these large deficits. And even if you would have them, they would be highly inflationary. These kind of arguments were made.

It’s kind of ironic that a year later, the deficit jumped from 1 trillion dollars to 3 trillion dollars and nothing happened. I remember that Democrats had been warning that Trump would cause these huge deficits and that would be bad for the economy, and they said, well, a trillion is too much. And then they had 3 trillion in 2020, because as you said, I mean, there were lockdowns, tax revenues collapsed, the government increased spending to address deficits in society.

And Stephanie’s book came out, The Deficit Myth, saying that we should not look at the deficit, that we should look at other things that matter. And it was a complete victory for MMT. I mean, the mainstream people all thought that a $3 trillion deficit would A, not be possible and B, that it would be inflationary as hell, and nothing happened.

So, the inflation happened later when energy prices rebounded, but it was pretty clear in 2020 that the deficit itself didn’t do anything. So, I call it the Copernican Turn, because we don’t bring anything new to the conversation. So if you understand MMT, you’re not talking about stuff that we haven’t looked at before.

It’s not that we came up with new variables, new ideas about statistical concepts. it’s still the same stuff that we have been talking about for centuries in economic theory. We talk about government spending, tax revenues. We talk about bond issuance, talking about full employment, price stability.

The thing that happened in 2020 is that I think people understood that government spending is really what the economy is all about. So the mainstream economics people, for them, the center of the universe is a star, which is called central bank and the radiation that is emitted by the central bank is the interest rate, which hits the economy and this is so powerful that central bank is really the only game in town.

And then the pandemic has shown us that the government can do quite a lot of things and they can save the whole economy and in times of crisis, everybody’s turning towards the government. We kind of knew that this was going to happen because this is also what happened in the global financial crisis, 2008, 2009, when the banks were bailed out.

But this time around the US government bailed out the American people. and that was something completely different. And Joe Biden did not listen to Larry Summers and the New Keynesians. I mean, Larry Summers said, if you want to bring down inflation, you have to have an unemployment rate of 5 percent for five years. That was his advice. So he said, well, cut government spending. And Biden said, no, this is not what I’m going to do, I’m going to increase government spending, I’m trying to address all these deficits that I see in our society. And that was really a big change policy wise.

This was called Bidenomics. This was, I think, mostly sought out by economic advisors of Biden. I don’t know too much about who they are, but I think there was this woman called Harris, was her last name, I forgot her first name. A couple of days ago in the New York Times, I think they had an article on her.

So it’s, very interesting that Bidenomics is very different from, what the New Keynesian textbooks are telling us to do in times of crisis. So that for me was the Copernican turn, which has, at least in terms of policymaking, has completely changed the way that the US administration is looking at things.

[00:10:57] Steve Grumbine: Let me ask you a question and nobody’s touching this and I genuinely don’t know why. feel like as an activist, especially in this MMT space, that it would be like the ultimate exclamation point for proving that the government spends first, taxes later. I mean, we’re giving Israel billions and billions of weapons right now, without a single ounce of tax being raised.

And we’re giving Ukraine tons and tons of equipment and gear paid for with public money. It’s the same thing, once again, for people that are used to seeing the US government blow its money on military Joe Biden has fully financed Netanyahu’s bloodlust in Israel, and he’s also fully financed Zelensky in Ukraine.

Does this not make for like a eye opener for folks that, Hey, your taxes didn’t go up. This is proof positive that for good—which we would think of as a Green New Deal, a job guarantee, ensuring that we ramp up production to eliminate supply chain bottlenecks, things like that.

That’s the good. The bad is we finance death and destruction around the world. And we do it without your taxpayer dollars. Right? I mean, there’s a real case there that can make people see exactly what you’re talking about, this Copernican moment. Even though this is not fun, even though this is extremely negative, it is the flip side of that.

When you have sociopaths at the helm instead of people with a vision for a sustainable future or a vision for a green transition, etc., why is it we can spend on that, but we can’t spend on good things. It seems like an opportunity.

[00:12:48] Dirk Ehnts: Yeah. This is a political game, that these parties that are embracing the, taxpayer money myth, are playing. It’s the same in most Western countries, same here in Germany. We also deliver weapons to the Ukraine, weapons to Israel. And in 2022 here in Germany, there was this new law.

So they created some kind of investment vehicle from the government side. They wanted to create a hundred billion euros for the German army because Russia just attacked Ukraine. And everybody was like, what? how is it possible to create a hundred billion euros of extra spending, which for Germany is lot of money.

So I don’t know the federal government’s budget is normally something like 400 billion, let’s say. So creating an extra 100 billion is, is a 25 percent plus thing. And they created this kind of vehicle and said, well, there’s no tax, so we can just give 100 billion euros to the German army to spend, and we’re not going to have any military tax or something so that people were kind of looking at it in disbelief saying, okay, so, how are you going to issue some bonds?

But bonds were also not issued. Technically the bonds are only issued when the federal government starts spending on those military goods and services. So there was also no bond issuance. So it was pretty clear to everybody that there were no army bonds. There were no army taxes.

So it was pretty clear that the government could spend right away, and worry about tax revenues and bond revenues later. So that was the German Copernican turn, but I think in every country you had these.

In the UK, the Copernican turn was when Boris Johnson asked the bank of England to allow him to spend money without issuing gilts, British government bonds. And first the Bank of England said, no, then over the weekend, they said, well, we’ll think about it. And on Monday they said, okay, but just for 40 billion pounds, no more. Okay? so I think it’s every country has had its Copernican moment in the pandemic.

[00:14:40] Steve Grumbine: So this is great segue into your paper currency of Virginia. You mentioned at the beginning. Let’s walk through this because for folks that listen to the show regularly, a lot of this may sound normal, but for folks that are just breaking into this space, I think this is really important to tie what you just heard Dirk break down regarding the military spending.

And let’s go back to a case in point of how money works. And we’re going to go back to 1760s and, the Commonwealth of Virginia. Go ahead. Walk us through that.

[00:15:14] Dirk Ehnts: Yeah. Yeah. There’s, there’s an academic paper by Farley Grubb, in which he describes the paper currency of Virginia, and how that worked. It’s a pretty interesting paper. It’s very technical. and, I think he did not understand MMT when he wrote the paper, but from reading the paper, you can really understand what, what has been going on.

And, I think it’s interesting from a pedagogical perspective, because you have a monetary system where the government directly prints money. So now we can finally talk about printing money. With an MMT background. And they just collected taxes and there was no central bank and yes, they, they did issue some bonds, but that was just a convenient way of, holding money.

So the rich people could swap their cash into bonds, but there was a zero interest rate. and this means the, the monetary system is easier to explain, and it’s also kind of nice to explain it from the point of view of the government. Normally we think about money like consumers.

So we want to have some kind of income. So we, we need to work or we need to borrow money. And then we spend money. But in this book, I’ve tried to take the reader on this journey and we arrive in Virginia in the 1760s. And we, we create some kind of village on an island next to the shore of Virginia.

And then of course we want to, live well so we build huts and houses and whatever we bring some, some animals maybe, and do some farming. And finally the mayor says we need a road and I think we also need a public school and we want to hire two teachers. And, of course, there’s no money on that island.

So, so the question is, how do you spend money? And the only possible way to spend money is to print money yourself. Because if you want to tax people, people don’t have any money. So it’s very clear to the reader that the economy cannot start with the taxpayers giving money to the government.

Because clearly it’s a government monopoly. So the government determines what money is. So, the mayor, which is me as, as a writer of the book, I’m kind of asking these kinds of historical questions and asking like, okay, so, so what, should be the name of our currency? And because it was a British colony, it was the Virginia pound.

And then we have to think about, okay, so how much do we want to pay to somebody who’s building a road? So what should be the daily wage? I mean, it doesn’t cost anything to write, one Virginia pound, or a thousand Virginia pounds. There’s no difference in costs. So when we talk about government spending, it has nothing to do with costs.

There are no fiscal costs or whatever that should mean. I mean, the printing money thing is, it’s very cheap. In the real world, by the way, I, I was in Kansas City once at a conference, and I visited the, I think it’s called the billion dollar  and thy said that to print a bank note costs the Fed I think was 7 cents per note, so it doesn’t matter, of course, whether it’s a hundred dollars or $50. Twenty or ten, it’s always the same price. But returning to Virginia so in the book, I go on and say, okay, if we assume that we say, okay, a Virginia pound is a nice wage for day of work.

If you work in the construction sector and you help us build the road, then so who wants to build that road and everybody’s like, Oh, well, you know, I, I have to take care of family or I have to do some agriculture or I’ve gone fishing or I don’t want to work. So I, as a mayor, I kind of recognize that it’s easy to print money, but it’s, it’s really hard to get it accepted.

Nobody wants to work for me because nobody really needs that money. So I go back to the drawing board. So I, I asked a question. So how can we make people want the government’s money? And then of course, the answer to that is we, we should tax people. So if we impose tax liabilities, then people will, will be willing to work for money.

That’s the big change. and that’s what we do then in this chapter, we kind of understand that the tax liabilities are really the start of the monetary system. So, first you tax and then you issue money and you spend money. That’s very interesting because there’s many people who think that MMT says that somehow taxes don’t matter.

But in this scenario, without tax liabilities, the whole structure of the monetary system wouldn’t be working. And then of course I take readers through the whole thing. Government spending what are government bonds for and what does international trade look like in Virginia when we start trading with the colony of New York.

And I discuss also sector balances. So when the government spends money, that of course means that we have income and we have saving as well. So the public debt is equal to the sum of monetary instruments in our possession. I think it’s only about 20 pages or 25 pages this chapter, but if you have read that, I think you have a pretty good understanding of the fundamentals of MMT.

Of course, then in the next chapter, I have to prove that this also works for the digital age, but that’s what I’m trying to do in this, in third chapter.

[00:20:03] Steve Grumbine: Yeah, it’s fantastic. You know, Warren [Mosler] obviously did his business cards Clint Ballinger did his Thousand Castaways attempt at trying to do these things. I mean, there’s been a number of them, but this was really well done. I really liked this, you know, one of the things that I think is important as you go in the chapter four of your book.

The first segment is the failing monetary policy of inflation targeting. I just want to preface this by saying, you know, Warren, for as long as I’ve known him has said, Hey, these guys get the interest rate story backwards completely. You know, by raising interest rates to attack inflation, what you’re doing is really spending more money into rich people’s hands and creating inflation, you idiots! I mean, it’s like, God, guys, look, you’re doing it again. So inflation is constantly represented by the libertarians and the Austrians, and even the people that just don’t know any better, as a growth in the money supply. But that’s not really what it’s about. So take us through this chapter for the concept of modern money as part of economics.

[00:21:11] Dirk Ehnts: Okay. so you want me to talk about inflation targeting and why it fails?

[00:21:15] Steve Grumbine: Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, just just in general, like it’s obvious that, part of the problem here is, is that, people come I know for me, when I went to grad school, I was taught by the CFO of US Airlines who was a Reagan guy and who was also a monetarist. A lot of nonsense that I wish I could have flushed and not paid a lot of money to go to school for.

But as, as you read these things, and in particular, the idea as of modern money as part of economics is really important because we didn’t learn how money was created. We didn’t learn how governments finance themselves. They just jump straight to the government issues a bond and that’s how we finance spending.

That’s literally the beginning and the ending of the conversation. We didn’t get into charters. We didn’t get into money as a unit of account. We didn’t get into money as a creature of the state. We didn’t get any of that. So take me through what you’re, what you’re trying to get at here. Cause you go over spending bonds, trade, foreign exchange, et cetera.

You just talked about sectoral balances.

[00:22:21] Dirk Ehnts: Okay, the inflation targeting theory, which is called New Keynesian Economics, but it is not really Keynesian It all goes back to the idea of the Swedish economist Knut Wicksell  who wrote a book in 1898. It was later translated into English, and in English, the title is Interest and Prices. And Wicksell’s idea was that there would be some kind of interest rate, some kind of level of interest rate that would balance the economy. So he said, well, we have on the left hand side of the, of the equation more or less, we are producing consumer goods and we are producing investment goods. And this means that there’s more income for the workers than there is consumer goods.

Because investment in the investment goods production workers are also paid a normal wage. But that means that theoretically at least there’s not enough consumer goods around. But then, people also save, so households are saving. So this means that, if the workers would save enough money, so that the spending of workers would equal the, the quantity, of consumption, that then there would be a stable price level.

Okay, so that was the main approach by Wickselll who said, well, we have to somehow bring investment and saving into equality so that the demand for consumer goods equals the supply of consumer goods. And again, the main problem being that if you would only pay workers who are working in the consumption goods sector, their fair wage, then of course there would be no problem.

But the problem really is that you also pay those investment goods workers, and those don’t produce anything that you can consume. So, theoretically there is too much demand, and not enough goods. So, so we need to have people who are, or households who are saving money. And he said, well, depending on the interest rate, there will be different kind of levels of saving and also different kind of levels of, of bank lending.

So he completely understood bank lending. So if you, if you read his book, you will find him saying that when the bank makes a loan, it will create the deposit by the stroke of the pen. Okay, so it’s very clear that this is what we now call endogenous money creation, that he does not talk about money in the way that, that the neoclassicals talk about it. So for him, it’s not that the banks are intermediaries who are lending out deposits, but it’s money creation.

[00:24:45] Steve Grumbine: What I want to do for a lot of folks hear the word endogenous and exogenous within and without. But can you take a moment and just describe the difference between what endogenous money is, what exogenous money is, and what the difference is?

[00:25:01] Dirk Ehnts: Okay. So think about the economy as something which does not include the government. Okay? So it’s just households as consumers and firms as producers and profit makers. So the money that is exogenous comes from the government, from outside, okay? So it’s coming from outside this idea of, of the monetary circuit.

And the money that is inside, that is created inside the monetary circuit is the money that is created by the banks, which are lending money to households and firms. And this is why they call it endogenous and exogenous. I hope that explains it.

[00:25:35] Steve Grumbine: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I just wanted to get that out there so we didn’t lose it.

[00:25:41] Dirk Ehnts: Sure. This vocabulary it’s very, very old and it relies on very old concepts. So in a way, if you’re calling it endogenous money and exogenous money, you’re kind of rooted in the 19th century history of economic thoughts, things or theories. We should call it reserves and bank deposits, in modern terms and not endogenous.

So Wicksell basically said, well, we can we can have price stability if we set the interest rate right. So if the interest rate set by the central bank is equal to that rate which creates price stability in the market, then we will have zero inflation. And this idea was, kind of new and he said he called it the natural rate of interest.

[00:26:21] Dirk Ehnts: And he defined it as the interest rate set by the authorities or central bank, which would bring about the situation where aggregate supply would equal aggregate demand. So nobody would change prices. It would be complete price stability.

And this is basically also what the New Keynesians rediscovered. So Michael Woodford, who’s an economist at Columbia, he wrote his book in 2003, I think, also calling it Interest and Prices. And he said, well, I’m following Wicksell, and I claim that by getting the interest rate right, I can create a situation in which I have perfect price stability, 0%, 2%, whatever I want to target.

And if I have that, I will also have full employment. Okay. So the, one of the main ideas of New Keynesian economics, and that’s a little bit underreported, is that you only have to focus on the inflation rate. So if you get the inflation rates down to your target rate, then automatically you will move to full employment.

Why? Because in their theoretical models, they assume that if you set the interest rate, let’s say you set the interest rate too high at the central bank, then there’s not enough demand because there’s not enough bank lending. So not enough money is created to buy all that stuff. And that means if the interest rate is too high, there’s not enough demand, so there will be a positive output gap.

So there’s some output which is not sold. So the inflation gap then is basically correlated with the output gap. So if the companies do not sell all of the goods and services they have produced, they will reduce prices. And the relative change in prices will depend on the relative change in output.

So the output gap and the inflation gap in the language of those New Keynesians, they’re always parallel in their theory. So this means, of course, that if you want to close the output gap, if you want to make sure that you have aggregate demand equal to aggregate supply, the only thing you need to do is you have to have zero inflation because they have defined that the inflation gap of zero also means an output gap of zero.

And this is how they created this idea that you can steer the economy with the interest rate. And, Woodford and his colleagues, they recognize that the government could with government spending, create too much demand or maybe not enough demand, but too much demand was seen as a problem in the 1990s.

So if you read the old papers by the New Keynesians from the late 1990s, they understand MMT in a way. So you find paragraphs where they say, well, the US government cannot run out of money. but they, they kind of abandoned this idea because they want to constrain the government.

So New Keynesian economics, I think they try to create a theory which gives a theoretical explanation of the political reality that they wanted to have. So it was, I think it was from the start a project to justify the idea of central banks moving interest rates up and down, having all the power and taking government out of this equation. So this is how they came up with this idea that fiscal deficit should be constrained.

So you find that in the European Union, of course, in the Eurozone, but you also find it in academic papers in the late 1990s written by the New Keynesians who say, well, if we want to have inflation targeting, we have to constrain the government and we can do that by using public or fiscal deficit limits.

And this was the idea. And, the problem is, of course, that it didn’t work. Okay, so, yeah, you are old enough to remember. So, in the 2000s, when [George] W [Bush] was president, there was a jobless recovery. And it was a scandal because the Fed puts the interest rate down to 1% and there was some economic growth, mostly because of the real estate bubble which was developing, but employment wasn’t up.

So it was strange to see that the theory said, if inflation is just right, then you should have full employment, but there was this jobless growth problem in the W. Bush economy. And then inflation started to increase and they increased the interest rate, but then the global financial crisis resulted.

Okay. So it’s like they, for the first time, they, they use this kind of dogma, they use this kind of theory and they, they push interest rates up to get inflation down just a little bit. And what follows is the biggest financial crisis since 1931-32. So that was also a catastrophic failure.

And, and then the recovery in the 2010s was also a failure. They should have spent more money, so they, especially at the Obama administration, should have spent more money. The fiscal stimulus was too small. You are also in the United States.

There was zero interest rates for, for half of the decade. It didn’t do much. Investment went up but not by much. So investment divided by GDP was way below the historical average. So if you look at the data from the last 25 years, the whole theoretical edifice doesn’t hold water, so nothing’s working. And even now you can see that higher interest rates do not decrease private investment.

Private investment in the United States is stable for the last two years, and interest rates have been increasing, so none of what the theoretical model says about the real world, what would happen, really happens.

Of course, then the Michael Woodford and the other New Keynesians would say, well, sometimes there are crisis and when that happens, you need to have fiscal policy and monetary policy cannot do the heavy lifting.

So there’s a paper in the American Economic Review from 2022 by Michael Woodford, where he says basically that. But he doesn’t admit that his theory is a complete failure. And I’m not even touching the inequality thing. So inequality, of course, is a huge problem, in the United States.

So I remember that Pavlina had crunched the data and I think that, in the Bush boom when it finally happened, I think 90 percent of the increase in GDP and in income went to the top 10 percent and there was almost, almost nothing left for the lower 90%. Which is bad.

Plus, of course, in the 2000s, everybody was looking at the interest rate, everybody was looking at inflation targeting, and nobody cared about trade policy. And China increased exports to the US quite a lot, and jobs went from the US to China. Industrial employment went down from 18 million to a little bit above 12 million inside one decade. So by 2010, one third of, of American industrial jobs were lost –one third! Okay. And that is of course what created Trump and Make America Great Again.

So inflation targeting was a failure because it didn’t work in the sense that it was, it was not working as a policy that is supposed to tame the business cycle. But, also, under the regime of inflation targeting, nobody understood that a global financial crisis was around the corner. And nobody understood that lots of good industrial jobs were going to foreign countries, creating a real big problem.

So, the wage share of the US went, went down by 7 percent also in, in those 10 years from 2000 to 2010. So it was a miserable failure, as an economic policy, because many things happened that were not good for most of the American workers.

[00:34:02] Steve Grumbine: You know, this, this brings us to another segment of the book here that I want to try to bring into current scenarios. And that’s on the international trade side. Obviously, what you just said, with China ramping up production, and US losing jobs,  you know, one of the things that has also been going on as a result of the geopolitical battles is the rise of the BRICS. And we’ve talked about this with Yan Liang and we’ve talked about it with a number of other MMT economists.

We’ve also talked with political scientists as well. You know, people frequently that are not MMT oriented will come at you and say, well, what happens if we lose faith in the dollar? You know, it’s only as good as if we have faith in the dollar, and so forth. But there’s a lot of countries out there that don’t have a petrodollar. A lot of countries out there that don’t have the primary world reserve currency and they still conduct international trade. And they still conduct domestic policy. And they still do everything else.

I mean, obviously, there’s a lot of privilege because empire, the U S empire, doesn’t just use its currency as just merely facilitating transactions. It uses it as a means of control. The swift system sanctions, doing what they did to cut off Russia and seize their assets, and so forth.

So, the rise of the BRICS as seen as the great escape from US hegemony. And yet, at the same time, it’s still a fiat system. It’s still a system., it’s not like these countries are giving up their currency like the Eurozone did or the, you know, the European union did on the Euro.

This is really a different thing altogether. I’m just curious if you could speak to that in the MMT lens, especially within the framework of your book.

[00:35:51] Dirk Ehnts: Okay. So, so there’s two dimensions to international trade. So there’s the financial dimension, about money flows. And there’s the real dimension about goods trade, and services trade, obviously.

Warren’s position always was that he said, well, imports are a benefit and exports are a cost. And I think that’s the main insight that MMT brings to the table here. So you have to understand that it’s true. I mean, if, if in a country you produce, let’s say a hundred thousand cars, and then 20, 000 of those cars are exported. That means that people produce more than they consume. And, of course, the companies who are selling those cars, they get the benefit of the money flow. But that doesn’t mean that this is a good deal for the country as a whole.

Okay? So maybe, the, the whole situation is caused by low wages for workers. So the workers, in terms of wages, receive maybe only wages with which they can buy 80 percent of the car production. And then 20 percent of the car production can be exported and the car exporters can pocket the profits, those – they can pocket those revenues from foreign countries as a profit.

And that, of course, means it’s a distribution issue. That’s the, the whole thing. And when it comes to managing an economy, what you want is, you want to have jobs with high productivity. Where output in terms of US dollars per hour is high. And this is about industrial jobs because only there you have this high output.

You could also talk about financial sector jobs but let’s leave that aside. That’s a different kind of thing. They make their money in a different way. But, but here we are talking about really about value added. This is about trade and goods that you can touch and so on.

So what should countries do? And countries who are poor, they want to have more industry because they understand that with industrial production, you can produce more goods that you can then consume. And at the same time you have more industrial jobs, which pay higher wages so that the workers have higher wages so they can afford to buy those consumer goods that they produce.

Countries like China, I mean, back in the 1980s, China has had, a very bad economy. Okay. So the 1960s and ’70s were a disaster politically and economically. The Chinese currency was something that nobody wanted to buy. Okay? So talking about this pyramid of currency idea and sovereignty as a spectrum and all of that. I mean, with, the rise of China, it’s, it’s very clear that you’re, you can have the worst currency in the world, as China had in 1980, and you can still come out for 40 years later and be the country that has made the biggest steps in terms of economic development.

So, having said that, China’s problem was that they did not have the technology for industrial production. So that’s the old New Classical story, you have to combine capital and labor. And it was, also, the classical story. I mean, Adam Smith didn’t really write about it because there were no factories in his time, so it’s, it’s more New Classical than classical, but yes, that’s, I mean, that’s the wealth of nations.

And this is again, Adam Smith, obviously. So Smith said the wealth of nations is the consumer goods production. And you have to spread the wealth if you have a good government in, in all the classes of society that you have so that everybody’s being able to consume.

So what do you do when you do not have the technology, for industrial production? And China said, well, we have cheap labor. And we can put down the exchange rate, so that eight renminbi is one us dollar. And then we have unions, which are communists. So we can guarantee low wages. So how about 50 cent per hour?

And then American companies went to China. They were forced to create joint ventures with Chinese companies so that, over time, control over those technologies that were used were with the Chinese companies. And this is how they created this kind of economic miracle that they created, okay? Lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

So what you need in order to create these good jobs is technology. And, and we’re not used to thinking about it like this because normally the Western countries have the best technology. So, probably, Americans think that their cars are best. I mean, Germans think naturally that their cars are best. I mean, with Tesla now, there really is a car maker which, even from the European perspective, is probably the best in terms of electric vehicles.

So we’re kind of not used to having other countries producing products that are better than ours. And if you would have free trade in electric vehicles, then we would all be buying Chinese vehicles because they’re way cheaper. They cost half of the price of our vehicles. I mean, if you have to have the Tesla Cybertruck, okay. And if you have the money, yeah buy it.

But the workers, so those people who are riding on labor income, they don’t have this kind of money. They would buy the Chinese cars. And that would mean that, that the whole car industry in, in, in Germany, the whole car industry in, in America, it would die out.

I mean, it would probably take 10 years, but they would die out. And then you would have lots of unemployed industrial workers. What do you do with those? I mean, they, they become a political problem because they used to have a good wage. They used to earn maybe $30 an hour. And now, even with the job guarantee, you cannot put them into a job guarantee job and say, look, you can now work for half of that and earn fifteen dollars. That’s not going to work. so what you have to do is you have to convince the Chinese companies to produce in Germany, in the United States, if the American and the German companies are not able to keep up, okay. So the whole thing would go away if Tesla and other companies would produce electric vehicles, which are competitive, then we wouldn’t have to talk about this whole thing.

But I mean, this is why they put up tariffs, I guess. So, so putting up, up tariffs means that they tell the Chinese companies, you cannot export your cars to America. If you want to sell to the Americans, you have to produce here in the United States. Made in America. Creating jobs, industrial jobs, for American workers. I think that’s why they have those tariffs.

And again, this is new for us because, normally, we have the best technology in the Western countries. But now it’s Chinese. And I just saw on Twitter the other day that now there’s, I think, there’s more Chinese engineers and more Chinese scientists than in any other country.

And they just started to have universities. A couple of years ago I was in Shanghai and at University of Shanghai they had 70, 000 students and it was just the beginning, okay. So they will create more universities that will create more students, more engineers. So China will be at the frontier of technological advances in the 21st century if things continue like they do.

The question that you asked me is more about the financial side. So what happens if there’s political problems? Let’s, let’s call it that. So, I don’t know, Russia invading Ukraine. So when there’s political problems that the US is confiscating funds from, let’s say, Gaddafi, and it’s confiscating funds or threatening to confiscate funds from other countries who are supporting Russia, maybe?

Then, of course, you have the countries they are looking forward to create some kind of payment system that is outside of the United States; outside of their influence. And I think this is what it’s about. So it’s not necessarily about replacing the dollar, but it’s about creating a payment system which works. And which helps countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, even though they are enemies of Saudi Arabia, but, and also Russia and China to trade among themselves without having to use the Swift system, or other American-based systems, for payments. It kind of makes sense then to say, well, if I have my own payment system and it’s a fiat system, why not use our own fiat currencies?

And that’s what they will do. So I think it was a huge mistake when the American government said that they will confiscate Russian money. Because one of the main ideas of economic power is that with the US dollar, you can buy stuff in foreign countries and the foreigners will always be happy to have US dollars.

But if you threaten account holders from foreign countries with confiscation, and they confiscated dollars of Russian billionaires close to Putin I mean, it’s okay as a policy, it kind of works to, to threaten Russia and to, to cut off some of these billionaires, but the long-term consequences will be that the rest of the world will make sure that this will not happen to them.

So they will build up a parallel payment system. And try to get rid of those institutions that are American based. And that’s gonna be a big problem. And I don’t know if you heard about it, but the, the Saudi Arabians just announced that they will not sign again the treaty that they have with the US from the 1970s, that they agreed to sell oil only in US dollar[s]. So they, just last week I think it was announced, so they will now be able to to sell oil against renminbi; against ruble; against euros. And that’s also a consequence of many countries getting together because they think that the US is more and more unreliable.

I mean, we don’t have to mention the elephant in the room here. If Donald Trump is elected president again all bets are off. What that means for security purposes, I mean, here in Europe, we rely on NATO and Trump wanted us to make a lot of more . . . I mean, already there are payments that we Europeans make. But I think he wanted to increase that. And if he’s friends with Putin, we don’t know where he stands with respect to Ukraine. so there’s a lot of geopolitical uncertainty. And that forces the rest of the world to, to form clubs, if you want.

So we, the European Union and Eurozone is already, it’s a club. So it’s easy for us to make payments among ourselves. We don’t need any American infrastructure. And the rest of the world, basically China and her friends, they are now trying to do the same things without the level of political integration that we have in the European Union because they lack a spatial closeness.

So China is not spatially close to Saudi Arabia, it has a border with Russia, but, but most of the countries that are aligned with China are, are far away.

[00:45:51] Steve Grumbine: That’s interesting. So, in particular, though, what we’re talking about is payment system to payment system transactions. How would that function? Like, if the U S wanted to do business with the BRICS? I mean, would there be like a ingress and an egress from the SWIFT to the BRICS or theoretically, how do you think that actually operates?

[00:46:15] Dirk Ehnts: Let me give you an example. Before the war in Ukraine, the Russians sold their gas to European countries in return for euros. For the Europeans, that is a nice structure. why? Because they cannot run out of euros. Okay, so, for us, we can always create euros, so if there’s companies who want to buy Russian gas, they can borrow euros from banks; use it to pay, for example, Gazprom, which is one of the companies or the main companies that Russia is using; half private, half public. And Gazprom, if I’m not mistaken, they have a bank account in Luxembourg.

So you just make a payment with the European Target 2 system. It’s now named T2 system because they have a second version, but but anyway, so the whole payment process happens in, inside the European Union inside the Eurozone, and the Russians get their money. They got their, get their Euros and nothing can go wrong.

But when the war happened and the Europeans threatened to also shut down the gas pipelines and say, look, we want, we don’t want to buy your gas even if you would deliver it, which the Russians did not really do. And then the Russians said, well, we now sell our gas to you in ruble. In our own currency.

And then, of course, this means that there’s an increase in complexity. An increase in risk because now the energy supplies of Europe, they first have to buy ruble via some kind of correspondent bank. So they basically have a bank account, in Russia with the Russian bank. And then the Russian bank has an account with the central bank of Russia and they have those reserves.

So they are able to sell rubles for euros. That is not a technical problem. You can do it, but there’s a lot of risk. So this means now that the European importers of gas, if they are charged in ruble, they have bank accounts in Russia with rubles. And if something goes wrong, then of course it’s the other way around.

Now the, the Russian government could say we, we close the account and we crack down on the Western European corporations and we confiscate all their money. So that is where the political power aspect comes in. Technically, it’s not a big change. But geopolitically it’s a big change whether you can use your own currency to pay for stuff.

I mean, everybody talks about the exorbitant privilege of the United States that everybody else on this planet accepts US dollar. But a lot of people in Asia and a lot of people in Europe and also in Africa, a lot of companies accept euros. So we in Europe, we also have this, and that means that we can spend lots of euros and import what we need without having to worry about the fact that first we need foreign currency. And only once we have received that, however we did that, we can then spend it.

So things are more complicated when you are charged in foreign currency. And you have more control if you control the currency which is used for international trade.

[00:49:01] Steve Grumbine: I really appreciate you filling in those holes, man. That was fantastic. Let’s dive into what I think is a really important part of this. And that is the concept of policy space. I’ve long been on record that I’m not —I don’t believe that we can vote our way out of the fiascoes that we’re dealing with.

That’s my take. I just, see this as an oligarchy. I think that there’s been study after study, Ivy League study after Ivy League study, that showed public opinion and voting has negligible, if any, impact whatsoever on policy space. And that’s kind of mind numbing to me that we’re so disconnected from our ability to have agency in our political systems. But,

these policies that MMT would sidle up to would promote a Green New Deal, job guarantee, all these different things. Can you talk to us a little bit about MMT through the lens of policy?

[00:49:59] Dirk Ehnts: Yeah. so, I mean, you played a part in this. I mean, you spread the word and that’s how it works in terms of politics. As academics, we come up with ideas. We try to explain how things work, and we maybe see that there’s a lot of deficits in our societies; the fiscal deficit not being one of them.

And we can basically suggest that look, if there would be policymakers asking us, like, how could you create full employment? How could you ensure that there’s price stability? Then of course we could offer these kind of theories and we could offer our ideas as policies. And the politicians would basically then use their own staff to make laws out of these suggestions that we propose.

Economists are not normally lawyers, that’s not our job. but that’s the idea. And the question of course is, So as long as this taxpayer money myth is out there, probably people or policymakers will not really listen to us. I mean, they listen to us, but they will say, well, if the voters still believe that lots of public debt is bad, I mean, I’m just a policy maker, I’m a politician. I have to maximize my votes. So I understand that MMT is correct, but I cannot come around and say, I’ll join you, because I get voted out of office if I talk like that.

So the idea is that we have to talk to the public and, again, thanks for all your work that you’ve done, I mean, you did a great job. Lots of people already know about MMT and I think the politicians, they recognize now, especially now that there’s this documentary Finding the Money by Maren Poitras, which is great if, I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet.

[00:51:27] Steve Grumbine: Oh, yes.

[00:51:28] Dirk Ehnts: I think you can, stream it from Apple TV and Amazon and so on. It’s a very nice documentary. And and once the voters have come around and they understand like, okay, so there is this alternative thing. So they saw the documentary, they bought Randy’s book about how to improve America with, with MMT.

And they see that all these policies are possible. Then of course they might demand change, and there will be some kind of movement, and it will spread and then it will take over, as an economic theory. But this doesn’t happen a lot. So the last time it happened was that we went from Keynesian theory to neoliberal, and New Keynesian theory. And that was in the seventies, roughly, when the Keynesians were basically going out of universities and replaced by conservative, real business cycle theories and so on.

So these kind of academic revolutions, these kind of revolutions in theory, they don’t happen a lot, and you have to use chaos theory in order to predict when they’ll happen. So, so I’m pretty sure that MMT already is very influential, especially in the U S with Bidenomics. I mean, I’m very sure that the policy makers know about all of this.

I also know that John Yarmuth, the Democrat from Kentucky, he once went on C SPAN and said, look, the public debt is just the, the sum of dollars that the federal government spends, minus what was returned in the tax revenues. So he recommended the book by Stephanie. So I know that, there is already some influence and it will grow because the problems don’t go away.

As I explained, inflation targeting is, it’s not working. It has theoretical flaws and they carry over, and I think John Maynard Keynes once said that you never should recommend certain policies based on a flawed theory. There’s no way that this will work. And that’s why, I’m pretty sure, that in order to address the problems that we have in our society. So we have climate change. Problems with climate change, global warming. I’ve seen the news in the United States. You have a period of heat.

On the Greek islands in Europe, we have people dying. It’s 45 degrees Celsius. I don’t know how much that is in Fahrenheit, but probably over a hundred. Maybe approaching 110. So people start to go on a hike or on a walk and they make a mistake – and then they’re out of water – and then they die.

So maybe a dozen people were dying on those Greek islands in the last couple of weeks. And I think in Saudi Arabia, some of the pilgrims died, yesterday when it was also something like forty-five degrees. And in India, it’s also forty-five degrees in large parts of the country where they do agriculture. Forty-five degrees means, that the crops will be dying and there will be not a lot of grains to eat.

So,this stuff, it’s horrible. And, you have to understand how to deal with that. And the first thing that you need to understand is the way that money and resources interact. And for that, you need MMT. So this means that the political change will come when people recognize that there are real world problems and they’re looking for theories to help them deal with it.

So this is why I love this master in economics of sustainability. Because there’s many students who are not like 18 or 19 years old, but they are people who are adults. They’re working and they’re interested in finding solutions for the problems that we face on this planet. So it’s, it’s a great study program.

It would also be great to teach this to students who are 18, 19, because they will be affected even more by, by the change that is coming. And the global warming is coming and it’s, getting hotter and hotter and we have to deal with that. The one thing that we cannot afford to do is to do nothing.

I mean, then we will have one crisis after the other. That will lead to political change for sure. it’s just a matter of time.

[00:55:11] Steve Grumbine: Yeah, I mean, the catalyzing effect of climate change makes the case for a job guarantee with climate migrants. It makes the case for a Green New Deal, makes case for just about everything we talked about right there. It was so wonderful to see Jason Hickel, who had previously been more of a Positive Money guy, suddenly really on the MMT train and talking about a job guarantee.

And he’s got really, really good geopolitics too. I really like Jason Hickel quite a lot. Seeing some of the students we talked with, Colleen Schneider, who’s one of the other folks that’s teaching, et cetera. It’s just, it’s really exciting to see the marriage of degrowth values, with an MMT lens. AndI do have one question for you, completely unrelated to all this that I would like to see if you can answer for me.

And that is, obviously Post-Keynesians are frequently seen as kissing cousins of the MMT community. A lot of people look to the Post-Keynesians as fellow travelers. But when I read Post-Keynesian writings, I see a lot of things I as a lay person go, wow, that’s not right. The money creation story – on and on and on – there’s so many things. And I say to myself, is that just . . . they’re the closest ones to MMT that we have a relationship there?

Is that a historical relationship? Cause I don’t see them, many of them anyway, actually taking the MMT framework for understanding currency into their larger body, you know, economic. What’s the difference? What is the relationship between Post-Keynesian and Modern Monetary Theory?

[00:57:00] Dirk Ehnts: Okay. That’s a very good question. It’s a history of economic thought question, really. Let me see if maybe I can fill in some, some of the spots, but it’s, it’s a very big question. I don’t come from a Post-Keynesian background. So I, was just getting my PhD in a mainstream university and I understood that I understood nothing about money. So I went looking for answers and I found Randy’s [Wray] primer back in 2011. So I became an MMTer from the mainstream camp.

Then I started to work at the Burden School of Economics and Law in 2012 for three years. The others were Post-Keynesians there. And they were nice guys, but it was always a bit strange. I always thought, well, why, why is it that they never asked me to write, co-write papers, co-author papers, or write a chapter for one of their books? And when I left them in 2014, the last thing I did was, I just published in December for 2014, the German version of my MMT book, Geld und Kredit—so, Money and Credit— to talk about how money is created and credit, and it was an MMT book in German.

And I put that into their post boxes and I never heard from them again. So, I don’t really understand why, because money creation and the sectoral balances stuff, I mean, Wynne Godley was not an MMT economist, but he was an economist of the left. And he talked about balance sheets, and he talked about balances, and fiscal stance, and so on. That was pretty close to MMT stuff.

And Marc Lavoie, I think he wrote in a paper, two years ago, he wrote that he agrees with ninety-three percent of what MMT says. So I don’t know why it was. I think it’s probably something which is caused by Warren Mosler not being an academic.

I think it’s a cultural problem inside the economics discipline. So, Warren Mosler was this complete outsider. A banker who was looking for academics to talk to, to develop the theory of money. And the Post-Keynesians probably looked at him and said, look, you’re just an outsider, you’re not even an academic and you have no idea who John Maynard Keynes was. And we are Post-Keynesians.

And if you ask Warren, he will always say that he never read the line of Keynes. and that’s true, I guess. So, I think it’s more of a cultural problem. It’s a little bit like, like talking to mainstream people. And then mainstream people always ask me, so where’s your model? Where’s your equilibrium model? And I’m saying, no, no, I can’t do that because MMT has a different methodology. And then they say, well, theory means you have some equilibrium model, it’s, it’s about mathematics and you must be economically illiterate if you don’t know how to do mathematical models. So I’m not going to talk to you.

[Laughter] by the way, there’s a mathematical model in my, textbook in German, and hopefully there will be an English version soon. And I’m going to use that in the next couple of months also with the Scottish economy. So, so yeah, you can, use these ideas of MMT and plug them into a mathematical model. But I think that in the Post-Keynesian camp, there’s a lot of interest in the history of economic thought. And when you meet somebody, the first thing almost is, is the question, so who’s your PhD advisor? It has become a little bit of a cult because the numbers are going down and there’s very little places left where you can become a professor.

It’s also a very exclusive club because everybody knows everybody else. And my PhD advisor, for example, was not a heterodox professor. So, most of the heterodox economists that, that I’ve met in my life, for them I was a strange guy. And I think last week I wrote an email to one of the organizers of the Post-Keynesian Post-Keynesian, is it a summer school or workshop? Maybe it’s a one day Post-Keynesian workshop.

And I said, well, if you want to include some MMT, I’m here. I would be happy to help and give a lecture on MMT because you’ve been doing that for probably 20 plus years and you have never done an MMT lecture there. So, if you cannot afford to bring one of the American guys over, I’m here in Berlin and it’s a short hop by plane or train now to London.

Yeah. So, I mean, it’s, difficult, also, because MMT is using a lot of stuff that was discarded by most of the Post Keynesians. So, back in the ’70s and ’80s, you had people like Paul Davidson talking about money in the real world. Which sounds great, but it doesn’t go into the details at all. So the Post Keynesians kind of abandoned this idea to talk about money and to talk about the fiscal stuff that Abba Lerner has been talking about, functional finance,

they didn’t talk about chartalism. I think it probably had also something to do with the fall of the Soviet Union. That the Zeitgeist was more like, okay, so government is bad, private sector is good, so don’t talk about functional finance. It’s just, nobody will take you seriously. They told me that multiple times in Germany, that I should not talk about functional finance and that the government could spend more money and help.

Because the government was the root of all evil, right? I mean, the 1990s they said, well, if you want to have a good economy, give all the power to the market. And that will be the end of history. So the Post-Keynesians, they had to deal with that crap more or less. They had to adjust to that. So they didn’t get papers published because the referee said, oh no, it’s not neoliberal enough, basically.

And that meant that probably many Post-Keynesians in the 1990s and 2000s were probably trying to compromise. To find a spot in academia where they could somehow live. And that of course was completely the opposite of what MMT did and said. So MMT was like, okay, let’s explain money in balance sheets, and let’s talk about facts. And let’s not worry about academic positions because, I mean, Randy [Wray] probably had a position. Bill Mitchell had a position. Stephanie Kelton was advising the Democratic Party.

So if you don’t have to care about this academic stuff, because you don’t need to be confirmed by some kind of university commission where there’s conservative economists, then of  course you don’t need to compromise. And MMT was always about understanding reality. And there was, no compromise at all, it’s still like this.

And I think this is a different way of academic life, if you want, because MMT was never about academic life. I don’t mean to say that the PhD students of Stephanie and Randy and everybody, I mean, they, they got their position, so that’s working all right. But I think that the situation in Europe is, it’s harder to be a heterodox economist in Europe.

The United States is a big country and you always have these left kind of places. But in the whole of Europe, there’s only one place which is kind of left, which is SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

But I couldn’t name a single left university in the whole of Germany or Europe. If you would be that young person saying, I want to study and I want to create a better world, I wouldn’t know where to send that student. That’s how it is. I mean, everything’s mainstream now.

[01:03:40] Steve Grumbine: That’s very sad. the big eye opener for me was Warren’s statement that he would say, you know, the number one insight that MMT brings is that money is a simple public monopoly. And then I would take that further. And I would take the young guns like Rohan Grey and Raul Carrillo that would say that money is a creature of law and that law is being the unit of account.

These are things that really spoke to me and helped me get away from the belief that banks were just doing this thing randomly and that governments were slaves to bonds and on and on and on. This is a real big game changer. Anyway, Dirk we’re at our time now. I want to thank you for what I think is a great discussion.

Folks I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Real Progressives is a 501 c3 nonprofit. We survive by whatever contributions we can get. And for your benefit, it’s tax deductible. So please consider becoming a monthly donor. Dirk, please tell everybody where we can find more of your work.

[01:04:47] Dirk Ehnts: Yeah. Thanks, Steve. It was great to be on your show again. Very good questions. I enjoyed, especially, the last question. It’s always great to, do that; think about how things developed.

Well, I have a website, just my name, DirkEhnts.de, and there’s a English or American flag on there somewhere, if you click on that, you will find my books and you can also contact me via that website. On Twitter you find me as also my name. So it’s D E H N T S. And I think that’s, roughly all you need to contact me and find me, and find my work. Thanks.

[01:05:21] Steve Grumbine: I always seem to find you. So thank you so much. All right. With that, for my guest Dirk Ehnts, Steve Grumbine with Macro and Cheese. We are out of here.