Green FF: Finding the Money

Co-presented by the Berkeley Film Foundation, Doclands, and The Film Collaborative 

Can a new economic theory revolutionize our ability to tackle the climate crisis?

An underdog group of economists is on a mission to instigate a paradigm shift, by flipping our understanding of the national debt — and the nature of money — upside down.

With a ‘debt ceiling’ debate and threat of default taking over headlines for the past six months in the US, many people find themselves asking – what is the national debt anyways? And why would the issuer of the US dollar ever need to borrow US dollars in the first place? With the enormous challenges of climate change and humanely caring for people on the horizon, the biggest obstacle presented is usually the question: ‘But how will we pay for it?” and “Where will we find the money?” According to Stephanie Kelton, face of the new economic theory known as “Modern Monetary Theory” or MMT, those aren’t the right questions to be asking a currency issuing nation. She asserts ‘Finding the money’ to pay for public priorities is never actually the problem — but real constraints are — namely real resources, labor, and inflation.

MMT bursts into the mainstream media, with journalists asking, “Have we been thinking about how the government spends money, all wrong?”

Top economists and politicians from across the political spectrum condemn the theory as “voodoo economics”, “crazy” and “a crackpot theory”. FINDING THE MONEY traces the conflict all the way back to the story we tell about money, injecting new hope and empowering democracies to tackle the biggest challenges of the 21st century and build the world we can envision.

Presented as part of Green Film Festival of San Francisco.