States of Indebtedness:Global Bond Markets, Public Debt, and the Crisis of Reproduction between the United States and Japan

Brandon Webb and Matthew Penney use Japanese state debt to show how both mainstream economics’ fiscal panic narratives and Modern Monetary Theory’s (MMT) closed economy model fail to account for how the monetization of public debt fuels speculative finance, redistributes wealth upward, and undermines social reproduction. A Marxist account of money does far better and points towards the need for a different, non-fetishized social form.