Line in the sand

Over at the Free Banking blog, Kurt Schuler has two good posts on where to draw the line between money and other assets. While Schuler likes to differentiate between the monetary base (deposits at the central bank + currency) and other assets, he points out that there are a number of other popular spots to scratch out a line. The monetarists, for instance, settled on M2. I seem to recall that in America's Great Depression, Murray Rothbard let the cash surrender value of life insurance policies slip over the line into money supply territory. There are a thousand-and-one places to draw the line.

Schuler notes that rather than drawing a sharp line between money and other assets, one can also recognize a spectrum of "moneyness." Anyone who's read this blog knows that I'm amenable to this idea. Before we can ask where do we draw the line? we need to ask how do we draw the line?. Either treat money as a set of distinct goods, or treat each good as more or less money-like. By money-like, I'm referring to a good's role as a medium-of-exchange, not its role as a store-of-value or unit-of-account.

I've tried to convey these two approaches in the graphic below. I don't think either approach is better than the other, but we should be consistent. Depending which one you choose, you'll probably be able to see the economy from a different perspective, and different perspectives can be helpful.

Rothbard and the monetarists took the first approach. Between which discrete goods should the line be drawn? Should bank deposits make it past the line or not? How about shares?

Rather than placing a line between discrete groups of goods, the second approach draws a unique line across each individual good. This line demarcates each good's monetary qualities from its non-monetary qualities. All goods are money, but some are more money-like than others. Cattle (i.e. commodities), for instance, are simultaneously capital/consumption goods while also having monetary properties. Even beer (consumer goods) has a degree of moneyness since specialized producers, wholesalers, and retailers hold bottles in inventory for the purposes of resale.

In his discussion of moneyness, Schuler invokes the same classic 1956 W.H. Hutt paper that I've mentioned before. According to Hutt, money throws off a constant stream of services, the essence of which is availability. Just as an unused fire extinguisher provides its owner with constant comfort, the availability of money in one's wallet provides a steady flow of relief. Hutt described this idea as the yield from money held. But Hutt's is still an expression of absolute money, not moneyness, for his choice of words implies that only money-proper yields availability services and all other goods be damned. I find it useful to convert Hutt's expression from one of absolutes to one of degrees by rephrasing it as the money-yield from goods held. Beer, cattle, houses, stocks, banknotes, and bank deposits all throw off availability services, though the size of this stream varies according to each good's marketability, or liquidity. Because this service is valuable, a premium gets built into the price of a given good, or a liquidity premium.

Continuing his discussion of moneyness, Schuler also brings up the Divisia index, a technique of aggregating monetary assets championed by William Barnett. Rather than simply summing up quantities of so-called money, a Divisia index is a weighted monetary index. A component's contribution to the index is determined (in part) by its degree of monetary usefulness. How are monetary services computed? A liquid asset's interest rate is compared to the rate yielded by an illiquid zero risk benchmark bond. The more interest that is foregone in holding the given liquid asset implies that larger monetary services are being offered to compensate the asset holder. In other words, the lower its interest rate, the more money-like the asset, and the larger a component's contribution to the Divisia index.

This is a fascinating approach. Theoretically, I'd go even further than Barnett in extending the continuum of moneyness beyond financial assets to stocks, houses, cows, and beer. Here the computations get difficult. Barnett uses market-determined interest rates from debt markets to determine each Divisia component's monetary services. But the return from a stock comes primarily in the form of expected capital appreciation, not interest, so teasing out a stock's monetary services by comparing it to some illiquid interest-yielding benchmark bond would probably prove to be difficult. The same goes for houses, and it gets harder to compute moneyness the further we wade into markets for commodities and goods.

Even if we arrive at some aggregate amount of money services, I'm not yet sure what it would be useful for, and for whom. In thinking about degrees of moneyness, my preferred application would be  liquidity spreads rather than liquidity aggregates. Being able to see the risk premium of a given asset via credit default swaps is certainly useful, at least to financial market participants. One would imagine that knowing an asset's liquidity premium—how that premium fluctuates over time and how it compares to other assets' premia—would be just as helpful as knowing its risk premium.

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?

W.H. Hutt (not Jabba)

David Glasner recently posted on the economist William Hutt and his book A Rehabilitation of Say's Law:

Hutt’s insight was to interpret Say’s Law differently from the way in which most previous writers, including Keynes, had interpreted it, by focusing on “supply failures” rather than “demand failures” as the cause of total output and income falling short of the full-employment level. Every failure of supply, in other words every failure to achieve market equilibrium, means that the total effective supply in that market is less than it would have been had the market cleared. So a failure of supply (a failure to reach the maximum output of a particular product or service, given the outputs of all other products and services) implies a restriction of demand, because all the factors engaged in producing the product whose effective supply is less than its market-clearing level are generating less demand for other products than if they were producing the market-clearing level of output for that product. Similarly, if workers don’t accept employment at market-clearing wages, their failure to supply involves a failure to demand other products. Thus, failures to supply can be cumulative, because any failure of supply induces corresponding failures of demand, which, unless there are further pricing adjustments to clear other affected markets, trigger further failures of demand. And clearly the price adjustments required to clear any given market will be greater when other markets are not clearing than when they are clearing.

Debt, generations, savings, and economic categorization or the "Borges Problem"

I didn't comment much on the great debt debate, stirred up a Krugman post called Debt Is (Mostly) Money We Owe to Ourselves, but followed it quite closely.

Nick Rowe taught me (here, here, here, and here), and Bob Murphy clarified (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), that present generations can indeed take resources from future generations via debt issuance.

I also learnt via Daniel Kuehn here and here that if you use a very unintuitive definition of "generations", than this is not the case. Basically, you can swap the meanings of terms to argue your way out of a tight spot.

My comment is from a Murphy post:

I’ve learnt that the method by which one aggregates individuals into groups, and the labels that one attaches to such groups, can have an important influence on a debate’s ability to reach resolution. If people are aggregating differently, and using non-standard words for their categories, then the debate will degenerate into shouting matches.

In a comment on a post called Why "saving" should be abolished, Nick describes this as the Borges Problem, which I rather like. Says Nick,

Let me first do one general response:

 There are lots of different ways we can divide up the world into categories see Borges on "animals" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledge%27s_Taxonomy

 Which would be the most useful way to divide up income, and define saving?

 Which of these 3 definitions of desired saving is the most useful?

Nick later on:

Notice also that the recent debate about the burden of the debt was also an example of the "Borges Problem". Do we divide the future up into time periods or into cohorts? We get very different results depending on how we categorise the world. And sometimes the categories we use are chosen by someone long ago who had a totally different purpose and/or a totally different theory to ours. Our way of seeing the world gets distorted by the dead hand of historical ways of seeing.

Yes! I did notice that. It caused me a lot of confusion. Nick also notes that the solution is to choose the most useful categorization out of all possible options, and proceeds to advocate a different category to which we should attach the word "savings". Interesting stuff. I'm not sure how Nick proposes we solve for "usefulness" though. Isn't the fact that almost everyone uses the same term for a given categorization a good enough claim for usefulness?

Here's another Rowe comment on Kuehn's blog which is relevant:

Put it another way: there's more than one way to aggregate. We shouldn't let our theories of what is happening in the world be determined by the choices made by long-dead National Income Accountants.

Anyways, in my comment on Nick's savings post, I proposed a more useful (at least to me) Borgian response to the categorization problem. Instead of categorizing the world on the basis of flows, categorize it as a series of balance sheets, or stocks. The result is that consumption, investment, and savings are all attached to entirely different bins (and more intuitive ones, to me at least) than in a world composed in terms of flows:

Nick, I agree with you that the conversation on debt was mainly about categorizations and the lack of standardized terms associated with categorizations. That made it very frustrating to follow.

So I am all in favor of standardizing terms, as you advocate in this post. 

I noticed you originally introduced C and I as flows and A and M as stocks. Then when you brought in the individual's economy, you introduced not a stock of antique furniture, but a flow of antiques, and not a stock of money, but a flow of money. Presumably you did this to preserve stock flow consistency.

The idea of a flow of antiques or money is very unintuitive to me. Why not go the other way? Not flows of consumption and investment, but stocks? Thus you have and individual's goods C, I, A, and M, which are all stocks. Sum them all up and you have S (the noun form of S, not the verb). This S can rise or fall. As a solution to the Borgian categorization problem, this configuration makes more intuitive sense to me.

And later:

N: "but if we think of income as a flow, then thinking of C and I as stocks is going to create problems."

 Me: You start out with the C and I that you have produced in your stock of assets, hold this C and I until you find someone who'll exchange for them with the M they have in their stock of assets. Now they are holding C and I and you are holding M. So here income isn't a flow, it's just a trade, an instantaneous swap of assets held in a portfolio.

 How much of economics is taken up by definitional debates and confusion? You'd think there would be a universal set of definitions for economic terms somewhere so these issues don't pop up. When I read William Hutt's books I'm always pleased because he uses his first chapter to explicitly define every term he'll be using.

and once more *phew*:

N: "Will those trades all take place in an instant, with some buying and some selling a stock of antiques? Or will those trades happen slowly over time, as people buy or sell a flow of antiques, and slowly get back to their long run desired stocks? That depends. If antiques are a small part of your wealth, and the market is frictionless with all antiques identical and so zero search costs (obviously not, for antiques). Each person would instantly buy or sell a stock of antiques to get back to his personal desired stock. Otherwise, there will be a flow of trades. If antiques are a large fraction of your wealth, you may only buy and sell slowly, in a flow."

 me: Ok, thinking in a world with stocks, (an infinite series of balance sheets), trades still happen in an instant, even if you introduce search costs. You hold the antique on your balance sheet until you don't. The antique is in your hand up until the moment it enters the hand of the buyer.

 Introducing frictions means that someone can have the intention of selling that antique and will need to incur costs to search out someone to trade. But it doesn't mean the process must be a conceptualized as a flow. Rather, the intention of selling an antique just moves the antique to a different part of an individual's balance sheet. It continues to lie in the asset column of their balance sheet, but is moved from long-term assets to current or liquid assets. Introducing search costs means that instead of an interval of two balance sheets before a swap occurring, the interval is some number larger than two.

My rough final thoughts are that thinking in terms of stocks, not flows, introduces a number of important categories that flow-based economics ignores because it is focused on flows. The most important of these is a stock of non-durable consumption goods. In flow-based economics, it's always been odd to me that factories produce, and we instantaneously use up, consumption goods.

A stock based world also is terribly confusing way to go about things, because the word savings in a flow-based world is attached to a different category than that which it is attached to in a stock based world, much like how in the Great Debt debate the word "our children" can be attached to either a period of time or a cohort.

Mises, Smith, and the origins of money

Lord Keynes continues to squabble with the Austrians on the origins of money in two separate posts, one on Adam Smith and the other on Mises's regression theorem.

The combativeness on the blog is unproductive, but I left a few comments anyways.

On Smith:

I don't really disagree with your claims, although I think you have to read the full Wealth of Nations in order to appreciate Adam Smith's theory of money. For instance, you are quoting from book 1 chapter 4, but Smith also has a very interesting (and much more extensive) chapter describing the complex workings of the system of bills of exchange, so he was by no means focused on gold and silver as money (See book 2 chapter 2). In this way he was different from Menger, who never discusses credit. Like Henry Dunning Macleod (who I see someone has already quoted), Smith was comfortable with credit as money.

 The existence of Henry Dunning Macleod, as well as George Berkeley and James Steuart, disconfirms the thesis that classical and neo-classical economists were uniformly metallists. All advocated to various degrees a credit theory of money. Jevons credits Macleod for laying the framework for marginal utility calculus, so he was surely neoclassical.

 The "origins of money" debate is interesting but I don't know how important it is. I think it's perfectly logical to adopt a Mengerian metallist approach and a Macleodean credit approach, modifying each just enough so that they can be amalgamated. Let the anthropologists take care of the chronological order of things.

On Mises:

But there is a severe flaw underlying Mises’s whole intellectual program in producing his Regression Theorem: the truth of the assumption that money only has indirect utility.... The view that money only has utility through its exchange value is also held by neoclassicals... This idea held by Austrians and neoclassicals should be rejected."

 I think you'll find that a number of Austrians already reject this. William Hutt's paper on the Yield from Money Held is a good example.

 http://mises.org/daily/3449

There are plenty of problems with Hoppe's article, but it is a good example of what I am talking about. Hutt was a fellow traveler of the Austrians and his paper is very popular in Austrian circles.

See an earlier post on Menger and the origins of money.