The Job Guarantee: The Anchor Our Economy Needs

Managing poverty versus managing production.The Job Guarantee: The Anchor Our Economy Needs“We don’t need to choose between ‘cruel p...

darrenquinn.substack.com/p/the-job-guarantee-the-...

The Nihilism Trap: Why 'You Can't Vote Your Way Out' Is the New 'Degrowth'

We don’t get to choose which part of the machine we operate. We have to fly the whole damn plane.The Nihilism Trap: Why ‘You Can’t V...

https://darrenquinn.substack.com/p/the-nihilism-trap

Not a direct answer to something I was asked, but this is my generalised view

The question for Q2 isn't whether the trap exists. It does. The question is which flows break next. Stabilisation is just a flicker before continuation.
Stop reacting to the narrative and start acting on the structure. Read the dated log here:
buff.ly/QAdDsDm 10/10 #MMT

Orthodox economists miss this because they watch aggregates, not the structure.
This is a Compound Vulnerability State. High debt service (M1) makes every rate hike (M3) hit harder before it even registers in the ABS data. The causal loop accelerates. 9/10

Apply the pub test. Who benefits?
Creditors at elevated yields. The surplus obsessives who got their headline number. The banks.
Who pays?
The sub-contractors, the renters, and the workers facing violent casualisation. 8/10

Then CBA and Westpac locked the trap. They initiated out-of-cycle rate hikes (up to 7.19%) before the RBA board even met.
They saw the structural breakdown the Godley Terminal warned about 47 days earlier—and they didn't need a meeting to extract the rent. 7/10

🚨 M9 (Resource Utilisation): 0.96 (Severe). The physical economy is redlining.
The RBA stared at a corrupted dashboard, saw the Ceremonial Lie of "demand-pull inflation," and reached for the rate hike lever. But the inflation is structural. 6/10

The Trap in real-time:
🚨 M1 (Private Debt Service): 9.5 (Terminal). A tenth of household disposable income consumed purely by debt service.
🚨 M3 (Interest Rate Shock): 8.5 (Severe). Monetary policy is actively liquidating working-class buffers. 5/10

A crucial warning: The Terminal tracks 21 bespoke structural metrics (M1 through M21).
These are NOT your orthodox "M1/M3 money supply" aggregates. Money supply is a scoreboard illusion. These are Vulnerability Indices tracking the real physical load on the economy. 4/10 #econ #ausecon

On Feb 26, the Godley Terminal formally diagnosed Australia’s Stagflation Trap. Five load-bearing structural beams of the economy breached simultaneously.
This wasn't a forecast. It was a dated, structural reality. 3/10

For months, politicians have obsessed over a ceremonial spreadsheet surplus while actively executing household balance sheets. They call it "responsible economic management."
We call it Administrative Violence. 2/10 #AusPol

The Canberra Bubble keeps treating this "cost-of-living crisis" like an unpredictable weather event. It’s a Ceremonial Lie.
This is a structurally generated Stagflation Trap. And we caught it on the Godley Terminal 47 days before the banks priced it in. 1/10 🧵👇

I agree with that.

"..and has the will and the vision to use the power of government to benefit everybody." is the key part.

Correct, but it is not erroneous to tax it in an effort to effect a structural change. For the same reason we would like to tax the wealthy, it is the same principle. #MMT

It is the correct type of dashboard, spider chart, radar chart, spiky profile to use imho

SPECIAL EDITION — The Trap Was Already Closed: A Dated Structural Finding and What Happened Next On 26 February 2026, a diagnostic instrument recorded Australia’s Stagflation Trap formally. Here is the record — and the 47 days that followed.

Great work by a Modern Money Lab student who has already outgrown the Masters course he is on, although the label M.Econ. will be useful to him in times to come.

SPECIAL EDITION — The Trap Was Already Closed: A Dated Structural Finding and What Happened Next
open.substack.com/pub/darrenqu...

Understandable. There are a couple of different words for it, but I forget what they are. In general, it is coming up with the same idea as others at the same time and/or independently without hearing about the other person(s) until later.

MMTAction — Economics for People Economics for People — built on Modern Monetary Theory. Equip yourself with evidence-based arguments to defeat fiscal objections.

The MMT Digest — 23 March 2026

- MMT and the job guarantee
- New glossary entry: the job guarantee
- The Iron Law of the Surplus Trap

#MMT #ModernMonetaryTheory

Different author but same underlying principles, I can't believe it took me this long to discover Shanaka Anslem Perera either

I assume you agree with Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity?

Yes, thank you. It mirrors my: "There is no such thing as AI slop, that is human slop. It is the output of an LLM that was not filtered. That is a human fault, not an LLM AI fault. The LLM AI augments you, not replaces you. The Human in the AI slop loop is at fault, not the AI. Duh!!"

@spborden.bsky.social look at this

I agree. I am working on several very similar things to this. I am agreeing to the concept & general idea. I haven’t read the paper yet but it aligns well with my thinking.

If I was granted one wish, it would be for the world to wake up and stop singling out the already marginalized people. Stand with the marginalized people, make the world understand that what they do, is not your business! Just because you don't understand doesn't make it wrong, it makes you ignorant

Yes. This person is an example of those that think money is the only metric that matters.

Separately appropriated might be a better word choice

Capacity Macro | Substack Capacity Macro does not forecast markets. We diagnose structural limits. By the time a structural break appears on the scoreboard, the damage to your portfolio, supply chain, or business model has alr...

Yes and no - capacitymacro.substack.com You're one of the few that most likely understand where I am coming from.

I do not understan.