YouSaid · the spoken record

Stephanie Kelton

lines on the record: 100
first: 2025-03-13
most recent: 2025-03-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“In the front seat of the car and go on vacation to Europe and come back 18 months later and start the car and drive and everything would be fine. But you can't shut the economy down that way and just turn it off and then expect to come back a year later. You got a vaccine. Let's open everything up. Turn it back on and things work smoothly. It's just not going to happen.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, we have words for things like this when the labor market experiences a really negative shock. And then it doesn't sort itself out. We talk about labor scarring and hysteresis and this sort of stuff. I don't know that there's a term to use for stuff like this, but maybe there needs to be. And you're right. I mean, once we finally got chips again, they weren't the right kinds of chips. And so it does take a very long time. An event like this is not something you flip the switch off. And then, you know, I used to say when the pandemic started, you could park your car in a garage, turn the keys, you know, turn the engine off, toss the keys in the...”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yeah. And so that becomes a much bigger part. And you can hear him saying, you know, this is where it's coming from. This is what's driving. We still have problems with supply chains. Now we have this new problem. So it wasn't a supply side shock. It was a series. Yeah, we were just getting hit left and right, shock after shock after shock. And they fed through the system. And then at some point, when you get to energy, you know, then all bets are off because it's transportation, it's fertilizer, which gets food, which gets, and then it's just, you know, we sort of live that before in the 70s. You know how quickly an energy price increase can bleed through into broader consumer good categories.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're a brave man. I know using the T word is still the kind of thing that gets your head lopped off in certain circles, but I think that's right. And the part of the story that we haven't mentioned, of course, is the war and the role of energy and food. And, you know, I spent the last two days working on this new book. And so I went back and I reread every speech that Jerome Powell has given at Jackson Hole from 2020 to 2024. And you can see his thinking in real time. And when you read them all, one after the other, you really see his thinking initially with the transitory and then the war starts and he starts emphasizing energy as the war.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inflation went up for reasons mostly related to the pandemic and the disruptions, and it came down for reasons mostly related to the working out of the kinks in the supply chains and resolving some of those issues.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you, I mean, that was my sort of warning on inflation. I submitted it, it was ready to go in March, but they like to hold things. And so it was published in April. But I don't think that that last fiscal package is what gave us that burst of inflation. This is what I'm suggesting is you go back and you do a really careful retrospective on this. And yeah, played a role. But was it the reason that we tipped over we wouldn't have had the inflation that we had, you know, hitting 9% by the summer of that year by 2022, getting that inflation? This was a global phenomenon. Countries that did massively less fiscal than we did still had the same or more in some cases more inflation. So I think the truth is it was pandemic. It was pandemic related. It was supply chain and it...”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“came Omicron and then different parts of the world closing at different times. So I think Barry, when you look at the The autopsies that people have tried to do say, Where did all this inflation come from? Was it really that last stimulus package? Was it the $1,400 checks that, you know, some economists warned were going to put us over the edge? People who've gone and I think done the really serious work here, you know, Peter Orzag, Robin Brooks, and somebody else, they have a paper, Bernanke and Blanchard, Olivier Blanchard, Ben Bernanke have papers. The IMF has looked at this. Different Federal Reserve banks have looked. When you cut across all of the research that's been published, I think virtually everyone lands in the direction of it was overwhelmingly the supply side stuff. It wasn't the demand stimulus. That played a role, but it was a modest one. And I'm writing about this now, so I'm really steeped in going back and revisiting.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, you know, but she had the collision. So, yeah, you have an economy that is largely shut down. As you said, you've got consumers who can't, you know, spend money on services because most of that part of the economy is closed. So we all try shoving what money we do have into the goods pipeline and goods have to be manufactured and shipped. And then we all remember what that was like, you know, backups at the ports and all the rest of it. So that collision of constrained supply and some demand, yes, to be sure the stimulus packages from cares on through helped people not only replace income, but in some cases people ended up with more income than they had when they were working. And so all of those things together and then you have to remember that the pandemic came in waves. It wasn't just one-time shock. We thought we were kind of moving beyond it. And then here came Delta. And then here.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The tools that you have. I'm pressing the buttons at the keyboard. I'm buying mortgage backed securities and treasuries, and I'm hoping it does something. But you all have the real firepower and you're not using it. That's what he said. And so when COVID came, I think we really did learn the lesson this time. Maybe a little too?”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was way too small, and as you just said, the way that it was put together was not going to provide a big shot in the arm for the economy. And so here's Bernanke sitting before Congress. And congressmen are really upset. They're saying, what is going on? You're supposed to fix stuff. It's your job. We gave you the dual mandate. Why isn't it being fixed? And Bernanke said, and I mean, I remember this, you know, it's a quote. He said, let me just say that monetary policy is not a panacea. It's not the ideal tool. Whoa, when he said that, I was like, you know what? He's not telling you that fiscal policy is the ideal tool, but he's telling you that fiscal policy is the ideal tool.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, you know, you got one fiscal package, the American Rescue Reconnect, right? It seemed like a big number at the time, 787 billion, but it wasn't nearly enough given what we were up against.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are. Yeah. I mean, maybe there was some kind of placebo effect associated with QE if people thought it did a certain thing, they behave in that way, and it has real impacts on the economy short term or something like that. But it sure didn't appear to do what the central bank anticipated and hoped it would do. And one of the things I can remember, you know, people like Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke, when they would get pressed on this, what are you hoping will happen? They would bring up the wealth effect and the reach for yield and that sort of stuff. But, you know, I remember Bernanke testifying before Congress. And Congress was really frustrated in the wake of the financial crisis. It's like, you know, unemployment is still really high. The economy is clearly not getting juiced by whatever it is you're doing.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I see in retrospect and what I thought at the moment, right, at the time, was that, you know, Bernanke and the Fed were thinking that QE was going to be like stomping on the gas pedal and revving up inflation. And we'd watched the Bank of Japan try and fail at this for at least a decade. I couldn't figure out why we expected a different result here from what they got there, but we went ahead and tried anyway. And, you know, three rounds of QE and Operation twists thrown in in the middle. Right. And still, we didn't get to 2% over the course of a decade. So if that's monetary stimulus, I don't know, you know, I'm struggling to see it that way.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think of it as monetary policy to be sure the central bank was trying to achieve something by doing that in part what they were trying to achieve was pushing down rates at the long end. I think from everything I've read, the evidence suggests that it didn't do very much at the long end. I mean, I've seen estimates, you know, 20 basis points. Well, you just didn't get a lot out of that. Now, they hope that, you know, people would reach for yield. You'd have a wealth effect. Maybe there was some of that kind of stuff going on. But in terms of stimulus, what I...”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think a couple of things I would unpack, rewind a second and go to QE. And I don't know if you think of that as monetary stimulus. I don't. You don't. You don't think.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought you were setting up a different argument than you went somewhere I didn't expect. No, I'm going to say it wasn't the death.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, you got a lot of treasuries or a lot of JGBs. You got a high debt to GDP ratio and high interest rates. You can very easily get into a situation where the rate hikes themselves are generating enough additional interest income that it itself can become a source of inflationary pressure. Right. So, I would say that's always the relevant risk. It's not that you're going to run out of money. It's not that you're going to turn into Greece. It's not that you're going to bankrupt the nation or burden future generations or any of that. It really is all about inflation as a constraint. And you can find yourself in a situation where you have, quote, too much debt, but in combination with kind of a central bank policy that is pushing interest rates very up. And you can get into that sort of...”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the central bank, so if we're talking about a country like Japan or the US, what I'll call and what I call in the book, you know, countries that issue their own sovereign currencies. It is not even an issue at higher rates of interest, right? Remember when Volcker was fed chair, Reagan was tripling the national debt, right? A massive buildup in military, you know, a couple of huge tax cuts. Deficits were increasing, the debt was increasing very rapidly, interest rates were quite high, but it still doesn't pose a financing challenge. The central bank is just crediting bank accounts. I mean, that's how the payments are made. And you can do that at very high interest rates. You can do that at very low interest rates. But when you get that combination of high interest rates and high debt.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's demographics. There's some reason that Japan is an exception to the rule. But I think the truth is that it's just we've got so much of it wrong that that's been the reason that all these bad things that were supposed to happen kept not happening.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just don't think the ratio is a very useful metric in terms of thinking about when you quote unquote gone too far. And I think it's always interesting how Japan tends to get left out of the conversation because it really is the counterpoint to so many of these arguments. I mean, the Japanese government pre-COVID had been running large persistent fiscal deficits for three decades, three decades. They had, you know, the tenure interest rate pinned at zero more recently, but they didn't interest rates didn't go up. They didn't suffer the crowding out problem of rising interest rates, pushing investment down. They didn't get an inflation problem. They've been battling deflationary pressures.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Repairing, crumbling infrastructure, improving our healthcare, education systems, and so on and so forth. And they can also get too big and they can also exacerbate or cause an inflation problem. So we don't diminish or dismiss any of those things, but really have a very different conversation about the role of deficits in the economy.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know flip our perspective around to see that every deficit is good for someone. I mean, that's right. So a lot of what the book does is to try to make clear why that's the case. Why is every deficit good for someone in purely financial terms? Government deficits are just the mirror image of a financial surplus in the non-government part of the economy. So we should talk about deficits for whom, deficits for what, right? Deficits can be used to accomplish big things like”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Since 1980. That's a long time, half a century. It's funny because you got Dick Cheney saying Reagan proved deficits don't matter. But everybody, you know, really believes that deficits have the potential. And in some respects, not all of it is wrong. You know, there are times where deficits can create problems, but so much of the commentary and the way we think about and talk about and shape policy around beliefs around the dangers and risks of running budget deficits. I just thought, you know, you almost need a chapter for every one of these different myths. And it's not the deficits don't matter. It's that they matter in ways that we aren't paying attention to. And so the book was really to try to get us to.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so I wrote the book not to say we shouldn't care about deficits, but to say to address a lot of what you just said, why do people continue to repeat these things decade after decade after decade? I mean”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got really lucky. And so there is some commentary in the hardback the very first published edition of the book about the pandemic, but that left my hands in March. And in June, it was out and in stores”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We At all. I was there and I had the copy-edited manuscript in front of me. And I remember just going through it one last time and two months later, the world changed. And I managed to get, there was room on the last page of the introduction or preface or something like that. And they allowed me to add a paragraph. As long as it doesn't.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, number one on the New York Times. Not number one, but it was in the top whatever. It made the list. I think there were 15th or something. Yeah.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Huge, yeah, huge, right? For sure, the phone rang. My editor was on the line, and he was just tickled, tickled, pink. And he said, I want to be the first to congratulate you. And he knew what the list was going to look like the next morning. Really? Yeah”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years before, years before that, and yeah, so I see this notification. I said, oh, Jesus, you know, my husband said, what? And I said, somebody's coming over. He said, who's coming over? I said, I don't know. I said, you got somebody coming over and you don't know who it is. So I Google and I see Larry King, New York Times bestseller, seven books and all the stuff. I thought, oh, Jesus, you know, I got to change. So I changed clothes. I went to the grocery store. I got some, you know, things to put out and host her and so forth. So she's a very sweet lady. She came to the house and I mentioned that I was kind of. Darling, you must be pregnant with a book. I get that. Okay. I didn't get it at the time she said it, but I understand it now, that it's exactly what you said. There's something that's in you that you just have to.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay? And I had just moved out to Stony Brook. We just moved to Long Island. And I get this email from this person. I've never heard of before. And she said, we have a mutual friend. And he says that I need to talk to you because I want to try to understand economics better. I will come to you. You know what? Would you talk to me? And I said, I guess so. You know, sure. You're going to come to me. So one day I'm sitting in the house, sweatpants, whatever, you know, t-shirt. We're in the basement. My husband, I think we're watching a football game or something. And all of a sudden I get the notification on my phone, you know, and it says, Marion Williamson is coming at four o'clock or whatever. And I thought, oh, was she running by that time with like Secret Service and everything? No, no, no.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had to get it out. It's so funny that you use that metaphor or that kind of terminology because I had a conversation with Marianne Williamson. Why”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, I think there was still some of that around when I was there. And, you know, there's certainly, you know, Bernie Francis Sanders for all the, you know, personality and so forth people associate him with a really kind of cantankerous old guy. He's just as friendly as anybody else on the committee. Mike Enzi, the chair of the committee, was just like you'd look at him and think, that's my grandpa. You know, he's just a mild mannered, soft-spoken, very easy, but things have changed, obviously. To say at the very least.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, we had a nice report. I will say that most of it felt to me very performative. You said making people's lives better. I don't think I ever really had the sense that that was what these hearings were about. A lot of it was allowing folks to have their five minutes of, I don't know.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, disability, fraud in disability or the budget crisis or whatever the hell it is. And maybe we'll reach out to the people at Heritage or Cato or AEI or someplace like that and we'll say, I need a quick paper on XYZ, you know, leading up to this hearing because they want to make their points as strongly as they can. He said, you might want to reach out to the people at CAP or the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities or Washington Center for Equitable Growth or EPI. You're just sort of.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, when I got to the hill, I think it was just the first few days after I arrived, he reached out to me. He was a really nice guy. And he said,”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the Republicans had the Senate, Democrats had the House at the time. And so Bernie Sanders was the ranking member, and he hired. Yeah.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so Stonybrook had a position for an endowed share in the history department, and he interviewed for it and they liked him. And then the provost at the time was an economist. I think he had been Jamie Galbraith's roommate at Yale, and he found out who Paul Kelton was married to. And then I think the conversations between the dean and the provost start in, they said, we got to get this. This is a twofold. We got to get them. And so we did. We decided it was a great opportunity to go and be together and, you know, build, and I could do public policy and economics. And that was going to be really appealing for me because I was just teaching economics at UMKC.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my husband was the associate dean at the University of Kansas, and I was the chair of the department at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. I had taken a bit of time away to work on the Hill. And so anyway, we were, you know, the universities are about an hour apart. We lived in Lawrence, Kansas. It's a great little college town. We loved it, season tickets to the men's basketball games and all that kind of stuff. It was a lot of fun. But he had one foot in the administration and one foot in academia. And he's a history professor. He writes a lot of books. And so he kind of put himself out there on the job market and he thought, well, I could either go for a dean position or I could, you know, go for some kind of endowed chair somewhere, you know, move up.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So another person who had a major impact on my life, a lot of people, if they hear his name and recognize it, they'll say, oh, Warren Mosler, the father of MMT. So Warren was funding a small program at the new school. He was supporting some graduate students. And he had a faculty member there named Ednell who had students kind of working on Warren's ideas. And I was part of that group. And Randy Ray, who was at the Levy Institute, another economist named Matt Forstatter, who was at Levy. And I all ended up going to UMKC in the same year because Warren provided some seed money to help the graduate student program really kind of build itself up there, bring some economists in, have a What an outpost, I guess, for MMT. And so we all went together.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's so much more to learn. I've done four courses, but I don't know enough. So I started taking the train once a week. I'd go down to New York City and I would sit in on courses at the new school. And I mean, I was surrounded by people I thought were 10 times brighter than I was. They were more thoughtful. They were having conversations that felt, you know, important and weighty. And I thought, oh, there's no way, you know, I'm not ready. I need to stick around and do some more coursework. And so that's what happened. I transferred. I finished up at the new school when Godly served on my dissertation committee. And that's kind of how the journey unraveled.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was like magic. And I get there, and Randy Ray is there. He's on a sabbatical, I think, and he's doing research there, but I meet this guy named Wynne Godley. And Godly is just a fascinating character. I write about him a little bit in the book. He really pioneers the work around sectoral financial balances and stock flow consistent modeling, and he's this old British guy who was, you know, quite famous in England as a policy advisor and economic forecaster. He was known as one of the, I think, seven wise men. And anyway, his office was right next to mine. We shared a wall. He would sit in his office and play the oboe and just an amazing person. And I learned so much from him that I got there and I thought,”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's beautiful up there, and so they gave me money, and the Levy Institute gave me office space and housing, and they had this arrangement with Cambridge. And the idea was you go and you spend a year there and you start writing. And then you would return and finish up the PhD. So”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In economics. So I started on the journey. I got the fellowship, which was go to the Levy Institute. Where's that located? It's in upstate New York. It's right there on the campus of Bard College, kind of in the Hudson Valley. Very.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it wasn't. And, you know, when I was at Cambridge, I was there. It was a very unusual program because, you know, you show up straight out of undergrad. You do four courses. Each course is one year long. And at the end of the one year period, you start writing a dissertation. And then you're a PhD economist having four courses at the graduate level under your belt. And I thought, how do you sell yourself as an economist? Really? It just didn't feel right. And I wasn't sure I could compete for a job in academia, which is four courses. And most of kids, I'll say kids, most of the people that I did the master's degree with, they were flying back to the US and they were interviewing for Wall Street jobs. And I knew that that was not my path. And I'd already gotten a fellowship from Cambridge University through Christ College to go to the Levy Institute and spend a year working on the dissertation.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was already, you know, people will use the word heterodox. I don't like that word, but for lack of a better synonym at the moment, I'll just use it. But, you know, I had been reading people like Minsky and I was really into that kind of stuff and Veblen and, you know, the history of thought really grabbed me. And I think John understood that if I'd gone to Harvard, I would have gotten a really conventional training and I wouldn't have been exposed to some of the really interesting thinkers and theorists. So John Henry said, go to Cambridge, not Harvard, but go to Cambridge University. And there were people there he thought were interesting. And that's what I ended up doing.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so Randy came to lunch. I'd never met him before. I knew who he was. But John said to Randy, give her some advice. Tell her what she should do about graduate school. And Randy said, go to Harvard. And John said, no, no, no, no, don't listen to him. And he was totally opposed. Because I think he rightly understood that if I had gone to Harvard, that I would have received a certain kind of training and by that point.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I ended up going with them. Doing most of my undergraduate work at Cal State Sacramento. And that's where I ended up taking a micro theory course with this guy named John Henry. And I could have picked any course in the catalog, any Tuesday, Thursday section. I happened to pick that one. He just kept encouraging me to keep going. And by the time I took the history of economic thought, I was really hooked. And he took me out to lunch one day. I was thinking about graduate school because he said, you know, you ought to think about it. And so he took me to lunch. And this guy named Randy Ray happened to be in town. And Randy is an economist. He did his PhD dissertation at Washu under Hyman Minsky. So a lot of listeners will be familiar with Minsky because it's stuff like the Minsky moment and all that.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, we were living in North Carolina. I was a senior in high school. I was going to go to the University of North Carolina. My dad was in the military, so we lived all over the place. And one day he came home and he said, you know, we're sitting at the dinner table and he announces that he put in his retirement papers. And the family was going to go back to California. And I could either stay on the other side of the country by myself at 17. Well, a college kid with a car that used to break down on me all the time, or I could follow them to California. Of course, I missed all the application deadlines.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suicide rates? I didn't think about that at the time, but I learned later. I also didn't realize that you had to work on cadavers. And so I figured out pretty early on that that wasn't going to be the path. And then I switched I was pre-law for a while. I was an accounting major for a good period of time. I got well into the upper division stuff and then I couldn't imagine myself as an accountant. I thought, what do you do? You sit in a room all day doing tax returns or something. It's just not, you know, it seemed antisocial. And so then it became finance and series of accidents. You know, you have that one professor who you stumble on and it just changes your life. And my trajectory changed to economics by accident, really.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you just think, you know, what do you do for a living where you have, you know, decent income and, you know, there's going to be a job.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source