Imaginary worlds with volatile money

On Twitter, Noah Smith asks:

@ClicheGuevara But why don't we use stock shares as our medium of exchange?

— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) June 13, 2015

He answers his own question on his blog. I pretty much agree. It's interesting to imagine science fiction worlds where people do use volatile instruments like stock as their medium of exchange. Why would people in these worlds be willing to adopt volatile media while people in our world don't?

Liquidity, the world's best insurance policy against uncertainty

First, we need to understand why our world has a preference for stable media of exchange. As Noah points out, people don't know exactly when they are going to need to spend money, or how much. Any individual faces the dizzying fact that any of an infinite number of events could hit them at any point in time. People have many ways to cope with this chaos, one of which is to build up an inventory of assets that can be deployed to help deal with surprises as they occur. Liquid assets—those that can be sold quickly, at low cost, and spent along multiple pathways, will do a better job of this than illiquid assets—those that take time to sell, incur transaction fees, and lack multiple pathways.

A buffer stock of liquidity offers people the same set of services as actual insurance, say a policy issued by GEICO. A home insurance policy immunizes against a range of disasters that might befall someone's residence. So does liquidity, since it can rapidly purchase materials and labour. If home insurance is cheaper than holding an inventory of liquidity (the cost of which, as Noah says, is an inferior expected return), then people will skimp on liquidity. Unfortunately there are only a limited range of future disasters against which people can purchase insurance. Good luck getting GEICO to insure you against a zombie outbreak, for instance. If a zombie scenario is something that you put a non-zero probability on, then staying a little more liquid than you otherwise would may alleviate some of your concerns. Come outbreak, the ability to rapidly dispatch liquid assets in all directions will come in handy.

Back to the question of volatility. If people are trying to build a moat against uncertainty, what use would insurance be if it offered $20,000 in protection on Tuesday, $17,000 on Wednesday, and $23,000 on Thursday? For the same reason that people require a fixed amount of insurance rather than a floating amount when constructing their moats, they will want to invest in stable liquid assets rather than volatile liquid assets. You can't solve for uncertainty with more uncertainty.

Liquidity is a virtuous circle

Liquidity is a virtuous circle; as an asset gets more liquid it becomes more attractive as an insurance policy, which brings in more buyers, which makes it more liquid, which increases its value as insurance, and so on. Once everyone holds the most-liquid asset(s), they have joined what in essence is an economy-wide mutual insurance scheme. At this point it makes little sense for a merchant to accept less-widely held assets as payment. Not only will it be a nuisance to set up the infrastructure, but the merchant runs into the coincidence of wants problem. Because the merchant's employees are already paid in the most-liquid asset, should the merchant accept volatile assets as payment he/she will have to bear the cost of converting them back into the standard unit. To avoid these inconveniences, only widely-held assets will be accepted by the merchant. A payments standard has developed.

Merchants will also try to please customers by setting their sticker prices in terms of the liquid asset. This reduces the calculational burden imposed on customers. At this point the asset has become a unit-of-account, and a pricing standard has developed. Adoption as unit-of-account provides all sorts of extra benefits to owners of the standard unit. As a courtesy, grocers and other retailers will typically keep their prices fixed for a few days, or weeks, which means that anyone who owns the standard unit knows ahead of time approximately how much food they'll be able to purchase. The tendency for prices to be sticky in terms of the unit of account only increases the standard unit's usefulness as a universal insurance policy.

The fact that shares aren't the unit-of-account means that consumers who own them miss out on all the uncertainty-alleviating benefits of sticky retail prices. They have no clue what their purchasing power will be one minute hence, let alone the next day.

Worlds with volatile money

If we lived in a world where we didn't need liquidity to shelter us from uncertainty, then we might be more receptive to using volatile media of exchange.

For instance, I sometimes wonder if the demand for dollar-denominated liquidity is less in Canada than in the U.S. since we Canadians have universal health care. With the nagging concern of how to pay for potentially life saving medical services solved for, we can economize on inventories of stable liquidity and seek out higher returns. Americans, who don't have such a product, probably need to hold larger dollar-denominated hoards in order to alleviate their queasiness about how they'll have to deal with future bodily harm.

Taking this idea to its limits, if an insurer were to introduce an "everything" insurance product (yes, this is science fiction), and it was cheaper than holding the standard liquid unit, then people would no longer need to self-insure against uncertainty by depending on the standard unit, typically central bank money and its banking derivatives. Instead, everyone would migrate their savings over to more volatile instruments like stocks, ETFs, or bitcoin, enjoying what Noah refers to as higher drift, or long-term returns. As long as GEICO is providing a low-cost universal salve against uncertainty, than people will be willing to shoulder all the inconveniences of fluctuating purchasing power insofar as it offers them a bit more drift.

With ownership of low volatility units (dollars, yen, etc) far less ubiquitous than before, and volatile asset (stocks, ETFs, bonds, etc) ownership much more prevalent, it might now make sense for merchants to incur the set-up costs of receiving volatile assets in payment. Furthermore, the fact that their employees will accept these volatile assets as salary, thus solving the coincidence of wants problem, will only accelerate the willingness of merchants to install the requisite infrastructure. After all, merchants can now pay their employees with the same ETF units that they receive from their customer, thus saving both commission expenses and the cost of incurring the difference between the bid and ask price. [1]

Information as a moat against uncertainty

In addition to liquidity and insurance, people can build their moats by acquiring more information. This is something I learnt from David Laidler. (If you want to learn about money via a fascinating detour through the history of monetary thought, you can't go wrong with these three books.) Knowledge allows individuals to better anticipate the future and plan accordingly, thus reducing the need for either liquidity or insurance contracts as hedges. If some cheap technology were to emerge that offered an infinite amount of free information (i.e. the internet?), then maybe people would cease amassing stable liquidity altogether. In this world, people's preferred solution to uncertainty would be to costlessly inform themselves and hold high return/high drift assets like stocks rather than stay uninformed and hold inferior, low return liquid assets.

Of course, we could also argue the opposite; that the internet has solved for one set of risks only to bring in a new set (identity theft, viruses etc), thus perpetuating the necessity of owning both GEICO insurance and liquid assets.

In sum, because our world lacks both infinite information and universal "everything" insurance policies, stable liquidity remain one of the cheapest ways to inoculate against uncertainty. The widespread prevalence of this monetary insurance across all strata of society has encouraged the development of a payments and pricing standards based on these assets. These standards further militate against the emergence volatile assets like bitcoin and shares as widespread media of exchange.


[1] I added this paragraph on June 19.

Real or unreal: Sorting out the various real bills doctrines

In the comments section of my post on Adam Smith and the Ayr Bank, frequent commenter John S. brought up the real bills doctrine. The phrase real bills doctrine gets thrown around a lot on the internet. To muddy the waters, there are several versions of the doctrine. In this post I hope to dehomogenize the various versions in order to add some clarity.

1. Lloyd Mints's version

We may as well start with Lloyd Mints's version, since he coined the phrase real bills doctrine back in 1945 on his way to denouncing the doctrine. Mints taught at the University of Chicago and mentored Milton Friedman. [1] Here is Mints:

The real-bills doctrine runs to the effect that restriction of bank earning assets to real bills of exchange will automatically limit, in the most desirable manner, the quantity of bank liabilities; it will cause them to vary in quantity in accordance with the "needs of business"; and it will mean that the bank's assets will be of such a nature that they can be turned into cash on a short notice and thus place the bank in the position to meet unlooked-for calls for cash. - A History of Banking Theory

Mints's RBD states that so long as only real-bills (short term liquid debt instruments created by merchants to finance inventory) are discounted by the banking system, an excess amount of notes can never be issued. When businesses require cash, they'll simply discount bills at a bank, and when that cash is no longer required, they'll pay back their borrowing. Even in a world *without* note convertibility into specie (a "fiat standard")  the real bills stipulation alone is sufficient to keep the price level anchored.

Mints rightly declared that this version of the RBD was "completely wrong". After all, a central bank not constrained by convertibility might discount only real bills, yet by discounting at an unreal price, it would alter the purchasing power of the notes it issues and create either runaway inflation or deflation). The price level was indeterminate in Mints's RBD-world.

Mints singled out Adam Smith for being "the first thoroughgoing exponent of the real-bills doctrine". For the next forty years, Smith's reputation as a monetary theorist would be tarnished. [2]

2. Adam Smith's version

Though tarred and vilified, poor Adam Smith never actually conformed to the real bills doctrine as described by Mints. This has been pointed out by David Laidler in his 1981 paper Adam Smith as a Monetary Economist, one of the first efforts to rehabilitate Smith's reputation as a monetary theorist.

Smith lived in an era in which paper money was fully convertible into a fixed amount of gold. Mints's description of the RBD, on the other hand, applies to a fiat world. For Smith, the gold convertibility clause was sufficient to ensure that the economy needn't endure an excess amount of notes. After all, should banks as a whole issue more than was desired, the public would return the notes en masse for specie. This is the so-called reflux process.

That being said, Smith did mention real bills several times in the Wealth of Nations. He famously advises banks that they should only discount "real bills of exchange drawn by a real creditor upon a real debtor." (I go into some detail in my last post on the personal and historical reasons that may have motivated Smith to advocate this position).

Why limit discounts to real bills? When the banking system issues excess paper currency, gold convertibility ensures that this excess will soon reflux back to issuer. A bank that holds long term loans and bonds issued by speculators will be insufficiently prepared to meet the demands of reflux since liquidating such debts might take time. A bank that holds short term bills issued by credit-worthy merchants will be better equipped to meet redemption demands, and less likely to meet the same demise as that experienced by the Ayr Bank, a bank run that Smith personally witnessed.

Thus Smith's admonishment to only discount real bills wasn't a mechanism for anchoring the economy's price level—gold convertibility served this purpose. Smith's real bills stipulation was just good advice for individual banks: stay liquid and don't take on too much credit and term risk. This distinction has been aptly described by David Glasner in his paper the Real Bills Doctrine in the Light of the Law of Reflux, and for his part Laidler notes that "as advice to an individual bank, it's probably pretty sound, as a principle of
monetary policy under commodity convertibility it is relatively harmless..." [link]

3. The Bank Directors' version

Why did Mint's cast Adam Smith as his first thorough-going exponent of the RBD?

In 1797, some seven years after Smith had died, Britain went off the gold standard. (See this post for details). The pound soon began to trade at a discount to its pre-1797 gold value. In other words, the pound was capable of purchasing less gold. The Directors of the Bank of England found themselves accused of creating inflation, notably by the members of the 1810 Bullion Committee. One of the apologizers for the Directors, Charles Bosanquet, a pamphleteer, wrote a famous rebuttal in 1810 that insisted that by limiting discounts to "solid paper for real transactions," the Bank could not have contributed to a deprecation of the pound. According to Bosanquet, several factors outside of the Bank's control had caused the deprecation.

To help buttress his point, Bosanquet invoked the name of Adam Smith. Wrote Bosanquet: "The axiom, or rule of conduct, on which the Committee has been pleased to heap contempt and ridicule, respecting which they have declared that the doctrine is fallacious, and leads to dangerous results, was promulgated by, and is founded on, the authority of Dr. Adam Smith."

Bosanquet's appropriation of Smith's name was inappropriate since Smith implicitly assumed gold convertibility. But the damage had been done. From then on, economic historians like Mints would automatically associate Smith's name with the arguments of the Directors.

The Directors' RBD is very much a manifestation of Lloyd Mints's RBD, which we already know was a poor guide for monetary policy. Years later, Walter Bagehot would write that when the Directors were examined by the Bullion Committee in 1810, "they gave answers that have become almost classical by their nonsense". If anyone deserved to be castigated as the first thoroughgoing exponents of Mints's real bills doctrine, it was the Directors and not Smith.

4. Antal Fekete's version

If you've spent some time wading through the online monetary economics community, you'll have run into Antal Fekete's real bills doctrine. This is an attempt to apply a warmed over version of Adam Smith's RBD mixed in with some Austrian free market economics.

The use of bills of exchange began to diminish in the late 1800s and today they are a relatively unimportant financial instrument, having been replaced in bank portfolios by commercial paper, bonds, mortgages, and other types of debt. Fekete tries to draw a number of broad based conclusions from this trend. The crowding out of real bills by non-real bills (longer term finance bills and government issued treasury bills), for instance, is seen by Fekete as the reason for the Great Depression and the creation of the modern Welfare state:

When real bills were replaced by non-self-liquidating finance bills, payment of wages has become haphazard. Employment was made touch-and go, hiring, ‘hand-to-mouth’. This threatened with unemployment on a massive scale, unless governments were willing to assume responsibility for paying wages. [Link]

Conversely, rehabilitating the real-bills system would end chronic unemployment and reduce the size of government. I only have a passing knowledge of Fekete's thinking — it really doesn't do much for me —so hopefully someone in the comments section can pick up the slack.

5. Mike Sproul's version

Of the modern reincarnations of the RBD, I'm far more familiar with Mike Sproul's version.

Mike's version is an application of modern finance to monetary economics. The price of a financial asset is determined by the discounted value of the expected flows of cash thrown off by underlying capital. Alcoa's stock price, for instance, will equal the sum of discounted earnings that Alcoa's machinery and employees are expected to generate. Transferring this idea to the monetary landscape, Mike says that value of modern central bank liabilities should be determined by the earnings power of the assets held by that central bank.

Like the other versions of the RBD, Mike's version shares a preoccupation with the asset side of a bank's balance sheet. But that ends their similarity. For instance, Mike doesn't have a fetish for actual real bills. I doubt he'd agree with the Directors that so long as they only discounted short-term mercantile bills of exchange, they'd never cause a decline in the value of the pound.

That's why I prefer to call Mike's RBD the backing theory. It's a very different beast from the RBDs of Mints, Smith, Fekete, and the Bank Directors, and to share the same name only adds to the confusion.

So there you have it. If you're going to have an argument over the RBD, make sure you know which one you're arguing about!

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1. Fischer Black received this letter from Milton Friedman on August 6, 1971: "With respect to your so-called passive monetary policy, here you are simply falling into a fallacy that has persisted for hundreds of years. I recommend to you Lloyd Mints' book on The History of Banking Theories for an analysis of the real bills doctrine which is the ancient form of the fallacy you express. Do let me urge you to reconsider your analysis and not let yourself get misled by a slick argument, even if it is your own. " Ouch. Play nicely, Milt. I get this via Perry Mehrling's book on Fischer Black.
2. Here's a video of Lloyd Mints in 1988 upon his 100th birthday.

Rudolph Havenstein, independent central banker during the Weimar inflation

Lars Christensen's excellent post about the necessity of having a monetary constitution includes an interesting point about central bank independence:

We want central banks to stop the ad hoc’ism. In fact we don’t even like independent central banks – as we don’t want to give them the opportunity to mess up things.

Central bank independence has become the standard approach to structuring the nexus between government service-provider and central bank liquidity-provider over the last fifty years. I think a degree of independence makes a lot of sense. Running a monopoly clearing house (which is really what a central bank is) while simultaneously operating other businesses and charities (which is what a government does) presents a tremendous conflict of interest.

For instance, imagine that General Electric was granted a monopoly to operate the U.S. clearing system. Wouldn't we worry that GE might use that clearing system to support its appliance or turbine manufacturing businesses? It might, for instance, require that those borrowing clearing balances submit GE securities as collateral but not those of GE's competitors, thereby giving GE an unfair financing advantage. Or why not have the clearing house give GE an interest free loan? Member banks can't leave the clearing house for another—it's a monopoly, after all—so there are no counterbalancing forces to discipline GE should it choose to abuse its clearing house duties.

A government is no less conflicted than GE in running a nation's monopoly clearing house. In recognition of this, we hive off central banks from government by establishing strict central bank acts and operating procedures.

But as Lars points out, we shouldn't make an idol out of central banking. Without a monetary constitution, independent central banks can screw up royally. The German Reichsbank from 1921-1923, which I wrote about in How To Stop a Hyperinflation, is a great example of this.

With prices rising at around 100% a year, Rudolph Havenstein, the President of the Reichsbank, was discounting bills at a mere five percent up until July 1922. By April 1923, Havenstein had increased the discount rate to 18%, and in September to 90%, yet by then prices were doubling every two days. Businessmen only had to take out a loan from the Reichsbank, buy and hold goods, stocks, gold, or US dollars, and when the loan was due, sell whatever had been bought for devalued reichsmarks in order to settle the loan. Even with the loan costing 90% per annum, returns on these assets were so many multiples higher that the profits on this trade were huge.

Havenstein and the board of the Reichsbank had adopted a theory that the mark was depreciating due to external circumstances. According to Laidler (1998), this theory went something like this. An adverse balance of payments (due in part to reparations requirements) was causing the reichsmark to fall in international markets. This resulted in higher local wages and prices, which created a shortage of money. The Reichsbank was only resolving the shortage by passively meeting the demand for credit. Conveniently, this theory absolved the bank's low interest rates of any responsibility for the inflation.

By the fall of 1923 Germans had had enough and voted in a government who promised monetary reform. But the government ran into a problem—they couldn't get control over Havenstein. Hjalmar Schacht notes in his autobiography Confessions of "The Old Wizard" that Havenstein was not on good terms with the government and despite indications that it wished Havenstein to retire, the Reichsbank President had resisted.

Havenstein was able to dig his heels in because in May 1922, the Reichsbank's Autonomy Law had come into effect. This law effectively enshrined the Reichsbank's independence from the government and installed Havenstein for life. Germans were effectively held hostage to a 66-year old independent central banker who refused to acknowledge his responsibility to raise interest rates in order to stop a hyperinflation. Its options limited, the government decided to try hacking around the Reichsbank by creating an entirely new currency, the rentenmark. Schacht was asked to run the bank that issued these notes, the Rentenbank. Liaquat Ahamed explains this unusual situation as it stood in mid-November:

Saddled with Von Havenstein, Stresemann had simply bypassed him by creating the independent Currency Commissionership outside of the Reichsbank [to manage the Rentenbank]. And so, when the new currency was introduced on November 15, 1923, Germany found itself in the curious position of having two official currencies—the old Reichsmark and the new Rentenmark—circulating side by side, issued by two uniquely parallel central banks. At one end of town was Schacht, operating from his converted broom closet; at the other, Von Havenstein, holed up and increasingly isolated and irrelevant in the Reichsbank’s imposing red sandstone building on Jagerstrasse. Although the Reichsbank had now stopped providing money to the government, its printing presses still continued to roll out trillions of Reichsmarks to private businesses. (Lords of Finance, Chapter 10)

As I wrote in my previous article, what stopped the reichsmark inflation cold by the end of November 1923 was not the debut of Schacht's rentenmarks on November 15 but an abrupt change in the Reichsbank's policy. This rapid reversal could only happen because of the sickness and sudden death of Havenstein on November 20th from a heart attack. Hjalmar Schacht immediately exerted his presence. He ceased the Reichsbank's acceptance of notgeld and tightened credit, thereby halting the mark's slide by the end of November, a week after Havenstein's death.

The point of this story is that independent central banking is not a panacea. Yes, it's probably a good idea to set limits in order to minimize the potential for conflicts of interest between government and the monopoly clearing house. But if an independent central banker is left to follow whatever ad hoc rule (or lack thereof), the consequences can be disastrous. A monetary constitution of the sort that Lars describes is one way to solve this problem. Even better is to open up the clearing house business to competition and choice. That way irresponsible central bankers can be disciplined by the same forces that discipline irresponsible grocers, farmers, salesman, and the rest of us great unwashed—just cease doing business with them.

Uncertainty and the demand for liquidity

In between my more practical posts, once every week or so I'll do something on the idea of moneyness. Economists have known for a long time that the concepts of uncertainty and money are intimately intertwined. George Costanza knows this too. He holds a bunch of cash to deal with all eventualities... until his wallet blows up. I'll show how we can just as easily replace money with moneyness in this two-step with uncertainty.

Uncertainty is an uncomfortable feeling one endures when thinking about an unforeseeable future. One of the ways to shield oneself from uncertainty is to devote a certain portion of one's portfolio to "money" – dollar bills, bank deposits, and such. Because these money items are liquid, it will be relatively easy for their holder to offload them in the future should some unanticipated eventuality arise. Holding money therefore alleviates discomfort about the future. This is the same sort of service that a fire extinguisher provides. Though someone may never need their extinguisher, it comforts its owner by its mere presence. On the margin, individuals are always comparing the present value of the stream of "security and comfort" that money provides to the consumption goods or durable assets that money can buy.

The link between uncertainty and the demand for money has a long heritage. We can find this idea early on in the Marshallian tradition, for instance. In 1917 Arthur Pigou, a student of Marshall, wrote that any person would be anxious to hold money "to secure him against unexpected demands, due to a sudden need, or to a rise in the price of something that he cannot easily dispense with." On the margin, people could either hold money, spend it on consumption, or exchange it for a capital asset. "These three uses," wrote Pigou, "the production of convenience and security, the production of commodities, and direct consumption, are rival to one another." (The Value of Money, 1917)

In 1921, Fred Lavington explicitly described this very same link between uncertainty and money.

the stock of money held by a business man serves not only to effect his current payments but also as a first line of defence against the uncertain events of the future. (The English Capital Market, 1921)

More explicitly, said Lavington, money provides its owner with a

return of convenience and security. His stock [of money] yields him an income of convenience, for it reduces the cost and trouble of effecting his current payments ; and it yields him an income of security, for it reduces his risks of not being able readily to make payments arising from contingencies which he cannot fully foresee. The investment of resources in the form of a stock of money which facilitates the making of payments is then in no way peculiar; it corresponds to the investment by a merchant in the office furniture which facilitates the dispatch of business, to the investment of the farmer in agricultural implements which facilitate the cultivation of his land, and indeed to investment generally. 

Like Pigou, Lavington emphasized the marginal choice between holding money, spending it on consumption, and investing it.

Resources devoted to consumption supply an income of immediate satisfaction; those held as a stock of currency yield a return of convenience and security; those devoted to investment in the narrower sense of the term yield a return in the form of interest. In so far therefore as his judgment gives effect to his self-interest, the quantity of resources which he holds in the form of money will be such that the unit of resources which is just and only just worth while holding in this form yields him a return of convenience and security equal to the yield of satisfaction derived from the marginal unit spent on consumables, and equal also to the net rate of interest.

The most famous adopter of this idea was Keynes, a friend of Pigou's and, oddly enough, Lavington's teacher.

Because, partly on reasonable and partly on instinctive grounds, our desire to hold Money as a store of wealth is a barometer of the degree of our distrust of our own calculations and conventions concerning the future... The possession of actual money lulls our disquietude; and the premium which we require to make us part with money is the measure of the degree of our disquietude. (The General Theory of Unemployment, 1937)

The link between uncertainty and money isn't confined to the Marshallian and Keynesian traditions. Erich Streisler (1973) quotes Carl Menger in Geld:

The amount of money which is used in actual payments constitutes only a part, and indeed a relatively small part, of the cash necessary to a people, and . . . another part is held (in order that the economy may function without friction) in the form of various reserves as a security against uncertain payments, which in many cases in fact are never realized.

William Hutt, an Austrian "fellow traveler", described the prospective yield from money in a 1952 paper called the Yield from Money Held. According to Hutt, the value of money assets was "affected by reason of their being demanded for their 'liquidity,' i.e. for the medium of exchange services that they can perform." These monetary services that money assets provide are prospective – even though money isn't being used, much like a fire engine when there were no fires, it isn't lying idle. "The essence of all these services is availability," wrote Hutt.

Modern Austrian Hans Herman Hoppe provides a very sharp linkage between uncertainty and money holdings.

the investment in money balances must be conceived of as an investment in certainty or an investment in the reduction of subjectively felt uneasiness about uncertainty. ('The Yield from Money Held' Reconsidered, 2009)

Nor is the Auburn side of the Austrian school the only to note linkage. Steve Horwitz, a free-banking Austrian, also gives expression to the link between money and uncertainty:

The connection between Hutt and Menger lies in recognizing that the availability services that money provides flow from it being the most saleable good. To be available to be exchanged for anything at any time requires that the good have the degree of saleability that Menger describes. The nature of Hutt's availability services is that they are a subjective return to holding an item that others also subjectively value a great deal, thus permitting the item to be easily exchangeable. When one chooses to hold wealth in the form of money, one is simply purchasing these availability services. (A Subjectvist Approach to the Demand for Money, 1990)

We also find the link between uncertainty and money among monetarists. In their 1971 paper The Uses of Money, Brunner and Meltzer noted that in a world of perfect certainty, information is available for free. This effectively eliminates the main reasons for the existence of money. However, by relaxing the assumption of certainty, “transactors possess very incomplete information about the location and identity of other transactors, about the quality of the goods offered or demanded, or about the range of prices at which exchanges can be made.” Rather, they must acquire information about these characteristics. Because knowledge acquisition takes time and energy, individuals may alternatively:

search for those sequences of transactions, called transaction chains, that minimize the cost of acquiring information and transacting. The use of assets with peculiar technical properties and low marginal cost of acquiring information reduces these costs. Money is such an asset.

David Laidler, also a monetarist, describes the money as a "buffer against costly consequences of market uncertainty and inflexibility".

If money holding is a cheap and reliable buffer, then agents will find that it pays to remain relatively uninformed about the processes affecting the variability of their net receipts, and will be relativley unwilling to undertake any costly measures that might render them either more predictable or controllable. If, on the other hand, money holding itself is a costly or unreliable source of insulation from such uncertainty, then the expenditure necessary to acquire and utilise extra information is more likely to be made. (Taking Money Seriously, 1990)

It's clear from this wide variety of quotes that many economists have considered money holdings to be uncertainty-alleviating. It's not a big step to replace the concept of "money" with "moneyness". The idea here is that by selling less-liquid items for more-liquid items, individuals can increase their protection from uncertainty. All assets can be ranked on a scale according to their liquidity/moneyness, and as a corollary, by their ability to "lull our disquietude".

On the margin, people are constantly comparing the package of services provided by each asset in an economy, where each package consists of the real services the asset provides, its pecuniary returns (interest, capital gains, or dividends), and finally the extent to which that asset's moneyness shields the holder from uncertainty. This means that in trying to defray their worries about a cloudy future, people seek out the quality of moneyness rather than a specific instrument called money. This quality, or property, is never fully concentrated in one hypothetical asset called "money" but can be found unevenly distributed over the economy's entire range of goods.

To get up to speed, here are two previous posts dealing with the idea of moneyness
1. Why moneyness?
2. What is a non-monetary economy?