the Bay Area premiere of FINDING THE MONEY as the Closing Night Film for the Green Film Festival of SF.
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.
FINDING THE MONEY follows Stephanie Kelton on a journey through the controversial Modern Money Theory or “MMT”, as Kelton provocatively asserts the National Debt Clock that ticks ominously upwards in New York City is not actually a debt for us taxpayers at all, nor a burden for our grandchildren to pay back. Instead, Kelton describes the national debt as simply a record of the number of dollars created by the US federal government (the issuer of the US dollar) currently being held in our pockets, as assets, by the rest of us.
MMT bursts into the mainstream media, with journalists asking, “Have we been thinking about how the government spends money, all wrong?”
But 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 around the world to tackle the biggest challenges of the 21st century: from climate change to inequality.
Co-presented by the Berkeley Film Foundation, DocLands, and Filmmakers Collaborative SF