MMTUK Policy Research Group Launches

[James Keenan]

A new MMT-focused organization was launched in the U.K. last month. From the opening announcement:

MMTUK Policy Research Group officially launches this month as the UK’s first think tank dedicated to providing policy research and analysis grounded in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). The group builds on earlier efforts by the Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies (GIMMS), who have long advanced MMT education and research in the UK. The organisation fills a gap in UK policy discourse by placing unemployment and real resource capacity, not fiscal balances, at the centre of macroeconomic analysis.

MMTUK departs from conventional economic thinking in three fundamental ways.

• Fiscal balance is not treated as a policy objective. Government deficits and surpluses are understood as accounting outcomes of economic conditions, not targets to be pursued.
• The constraints on public policy are real: labour, skills, productive capacity, and ecological limits, rather than financial ratios.
• Ecological limits define the long-term boundaries of economic activity, but today the UK’s main binding macroeconomic constraint is unemployment.

MMTUK works across three core areas:

• Independent macroeconomic research on how the monetary system, fiscal policy, and real resources shape the UK economy.
• Public education and training to strengthen economic literacy and policy debate.
• Community outreach linking research to real-world issues such as cost of living, housing, health, climate, and employment.

An opening event was held February 25 in London with Bill Mitchell as guest speaker.

These publications look interesting:

• The Deficit Obsession is Costing Us a Clear View of the Economy, by Vincent Lopez, 20 Feb 2026

• A Counter-Inflationary Job Guarantee for the United Kingdom, by Patricia Pino, Phil Armstrong and Steve Laughton, 25 Feb 2026