Exercising Currency Sovereignty Under Self-Imposed Constraints

A currency-issuing government is not revenue constrained. It is always able to purchase whatever is available for sale in its own currency. This simple reality is partially concealed by a variety of contrived hoops through which modern day governments require themselves to jump. There are at least two different ways in which we can see past the confusion. The easiest way is to stand back and look at the big picture, both from the standpoint of logic and by considering the monetary and fiscal authorities as two parts of the same entity, the consolidated government sector. For the eagle eyed, this approach may appear to overlook potentially consequential details in the way governments actually spend. In practice, the monetary authority plays one set of roles, the fiscal authority plays another, and many governments have introduced various restrictions on the way in which the two can interact. The present post begins with a bird’s eye view of government spending, and then turns to a more detailed consideration of the way in which self-imposed constraints and convoluted operational procedures complicate but do not undermine the sovereignty of a currency-issuing government. The case of the US government is taken throughout as an example, but much of the discussion is also broadly applicable to other currency-issuing governments.

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