This event took place on Wednesday 25 February 2026. Video and full transcript are available on this page.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

• New organisation challenges fiscal balance as a policy objective and reframes economic constraints around real resources
• Launch event on Wednesday 25 February at Friends Meeting House, London, featuring an address by Professor Bill Mitchell

London, 17 February 2026 — 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.

Official Launch Event

MMTUK officially launches with a flagship public event in central London, where Patricia Pino will present her new paper, A Counter-Inflationary Job Guarantee for the United Kingdom. Professor Bill Mitchell will then respond and amplify the importance of this policy to the UK economy.

Date: Wednesday 25 February 2026
Time: 7:00–9:00pm
Venue: Friends Meeting House, 173–177 Euston Road, London NW1 2BJ

Speakers:

• Patricia Pino, MMTUK co-founder, UCL/IIPP PhD candidate
• Professor Bill Mitchell, University of Newcastle, Australia, co-founder of MMT

Chair:

• Randeep Ramesh, Lead Writer of The Guardian

Professor Mitchell is one of the world’s leading authorities on employment policy and Modern Monetary Theory. His address will put the case for a public guarantee of employment in the UK and how MMT reframes the policy options available to government.

Patricia Pino said: “A wider and more informed debate about the UK’s economic options is urgently needed. Economic discussion is dominated by inaccurate comparisons with household finances and a narrow fixation on debt and deficits.

Our analysis begins from a simple observation: when people who want to work cannot find employment, the economy is operating below capacity. Unemployment represents idle resources and lost output, not financial scarcity.

We want to shift the debate toward what actually constrains policy: real resources, price stability, and ecological limits. And to demonstrate that full employment should be treated as the central macroeconomic responsibility of government.”

Contact: Patricia Pino | contact@mmtuk.org | https://mmtuk.org

ENDS