Our guest this week was Rohan Grey, assistant professor at Willamette University College of Law where he teaches Contracts, Business Associations and Securities Regulation. Rohan is also a prominent advocate of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and has also recently been involved in drafting regulations in the digital asset and currency space. Our wide ranging conversation took us through historical periods, current policy debates, and included:

• Why laws have historically been ‘kind to the rich’ and ‘just to the poor’
• The notion of ‘legal realism’
• The fog of legal liability risks
• MMT vs Classical Economics
• Defining money from the MMT vantage point
• Personifying ‘the taxpayer’
• Private credit vs official money
• Why the US actually left the gold standard in the 1930s and not the 1970s
• The greenback and the paper money movement
• Currencies backed by precious metals and ‘Schrodinger’s Gold’
• Governments have monopoly over the use of force, but not the creation of money
• The policy paradigm shift precipitated by the pandemic
• MMT is not just about deficit spending, and other major policy components
• Unemployment as a policy choice
• Biden’s “whatever it takes” moment
• Neoclassical monetary tightening and the ‘shadow of Volcker’
• E-Cash, CBDCs and policy frameworks for the digital realm
• Central Bank vs Treasury – who should have sovereignty over the currency
• Why it can be wrong to be right too soon
• And much, much more

This is “ReSolve’s Riffs” – live on YouTube every Friday afternoon to debate the most relevant investment topics of the day, hosted by Adam Butler, Mike Philbrick and Rodrigo Gordillo of ReSolve Global* and Richard Laterman of ReSolve Asset Management.

*ReSolve Global refers to ReSolve Asset Management SEZC (Cayman) which is registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as a commodity trading advisor and commodity pool operator. This registration is administered through the National Futures Association (“NFA”). Further, ReSolve Global is a registered person with the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority.