Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Income ≠ Money ≠ Value ≠ Wealth


Steve Roth of 24 May:

The key (and I think hugely simplifying and clarifying) distinction:

money [is to] financial assets [as] energy [is to] barrels of oil.

In the vernacular we speak of oil as “energy,” but we know that they’re conceptually distinct. The energy is embodied in the oil. Just as it’s embodied in a rock at the top of a hill.

So... we speak of financial assets as "money," but we know they're conceptually distinct? We know they're different? Yeah, I agree with that. Most financial assets are NOT money. But that's not what Roth wanted to say:

Pieces of currency are just financial assets (legal claims, or credits) that have particular characteristics, properties. As do barrels of oil and rocks on top of hills. We’ve always called those particular types of financial assets “money,” and therein is rooted much of the confusion and miscommunication we suffer under, IMNSHO.

I friggin hate metaphors. Pieces of currency are just financial assets with the particular characteristic that we use them for money. If you like: All money is financial assets, but not all financial assets are money. That's fine, I guess. But this is not fine:

Add up the value of all financial assets, and that’s the money stock.

That is just plain wrong.


Roth of 21 May:

“money” should be technically defined, as a term of art, as “the exchange value embodied in financial assets.”

I replied:

To me, money is the medium of exchange, not the exchange value.

You can see I was focusing on the word "exchange". That could have been a mistake. Let me re-arrange Steve's definition of money just a little:

Money should be defined as the value embodied in financial assets, value that can be used for exchange.

That's a little less objectionable, maybe. But the thing about money that makes it special is that it is used for exchange. Money is the particular "embodiment" of value that is useful for exchange. And it's not that money "is" value, but that money "has" value.

"Value" is in the eye of the beholder. Things have value because we value them. Money has value because we value it, and especially because most of us value it similarly (so that it is widely useful for exchange). But value is one thing, and money another.


There's value in money, and there's value in other financial assets. Money is the particular financial assets that is generally used for exchange.

The trouble with thinking of all financial assets as money is that most financial assets are not generally accepted in exchange. You have to convert your financial assets into an exchangeable form before you can spend them: You have to convert them into money. Steve Roth says the same:

People can exchange various financial assets for currency-like financial assets when they need to buy real stuff, but that’s largely mechanical; its macroeconomic effects are trivial.

He says you have to convert your asset into money before you can spend it. Then he tries to minimize the significance of this with sweeping generalities that happen to be wrong. Remember the deleveraging a few years back? Everybody wanted to convert their financial assets into cash. The demand for financial assets fell sharply. And what happened? Asset values crashed. There was nothing "trivial" about that.

Yes of course, it was a unique situation. It was a situation that showed most clearly that not all financial assets are money.


Roth of the 24th:

I hear this kind of thing all the time. e.g. “Health-care spending is taking all that money out of the economy.” As you would say, “Nonsense!” ;-)

I remember that same complaint used against the space program, years back. The catch phrase was that they were throwing money into space. That was obviously incorrect; the money stayed on planet Earth. But the money was most certainly being thrown into circulation by the space program. It was not allowed to sit idle in anybody's "bathtub".

You can’t “take a dollar out” of the bathtub (except by paying off loans to the financial sector, paying taxes to the federal government, or reducing the equity allocation in your portfolio hence driving down stock prices).

If the bathtub is planet Earth? No, we don't take money off-planet. There's nobody out there to sell you things or accept payment. Not yet, anyway. But if the bathtub is the economy? Then yes, we can take dollars out of the "bathtub".

The economy is transaction. Failing to spend takes money out of the economy, just the same when you fail to spend as when the Federal Reserve fails to spend. Money-not-spent is money removed from the spending stream. Hoarding will do it, and if loans create deposits -- and if nothing happens with the money in savings, as some people say -- then saving is just the same as hoarding.

You can, however, reduce or increase the turnover of your stock of money in a given period. You can “hoard” or spend your money. Not-spending is indeed taking a dollar “out of the flow” (relative to the counterfactual of spending it) — reducing velocity.

Not sure about "reducing velocity". A dollar removed from the spending stream affects both GDP and the quantity of money in motion. Affects both the numerator and denominator of the velocity ratio. So I can't say what happens to velocity so easily.

Roth insists on keeping money all in one lump -- one "stock of money" -- which has a single turnover rate that you can change by spending more or spending less. But economists define several types of money: "monetary base, M1, M2, divisias, and all that" as Roth observes. He wants to sweep "all that" confusion away, and come up with something new. That's the wrong way to do economics.

Yet we seem to agree. Roth says: Not-spending is indeed taking a dollar “out of the flow”. Then he tramples the obvious:

But in aggregate, not-spending doesn’t “tuck it away” any more than spending it does. If you spend it, it just ends up tucked away in somebody else’s account.

That's not right. If I spend it, it ends up as somebody else's income. Income is money in circulation. You know, cash flow. Then, having received the income, they get to decide whether they'll be spending that money or saving it. If they decide not to spend it, they are tucking it away for later. But the economy is not just "having money". The economy is spending. If the money doesn't move, there is no economy.

Spending vs. not-spending doesn’t change the amount of money in the bathtub.

"Spending" is clean water, flowing into your bathtub. "Saving" is the soapy, wet, gray pool of filth you relax in.

10 comments:

Steve Roth said...

"So... we speak of financial assets as "money,""

NOOOO!

We speak of financial assets embodying money.

Maybe there's a better word than "embody..." Hmmm...

The Arthurian said...

Steve, you wrote: In the vernacular we speak of oil as “energy,” but we know that they’re conceptually distinct.

Just before that, you wrote: money [is to] financial assets [as] energy [is to] barrels of oil.

For the record, I was taking your "in the vernacular" sentence, and putting the word "money" in place of "energy", and "financial assets" in place of "oil".

Again: In the vernacular we speak of financial assets as “money,” but we know that they’re conceptually distinct.

See? I was testing your analogy to see if it made sense. From your reaction, I have to say it doesn't even make sense to you.

Oilfield Trash said...

Art
Do you think it is unreasonable to define money as funding liabilities created from information-insensitive assets, which can be converted at par on demand (meaning that the holder of the liabilities need not do any due diligence, just taking it on faith that the liabilities could be converted)

I think we can agree Currency, banking demand deposits (FDIC insured), and MM funds fit this definition, and each of them are liabilities created from financial assets.

You will notice I left off Treasuries, but you have this issue with maturity. So you have a powerful information-insensitive public liability in the private sector, which cannot be converted on demand. Can you call it money? Or for that matter any other public or private information-insensitive assets(Think MBS) which can create funding liabilities, that you cannot convert at par on demand.

I used to think no, but now I am not so sure. Currently financial markets use these assets to create funding liabilities all the time.

Shadow banks created information-insensitive liabilities for the Private Sector that were perceived as just as good as a demand deposit, and then levered the daylights out of them into longer, less liquid, lower-quality assets. Should they have been allow to do this IDK, my personal opinion is no; did the activity increase the money supply I would argue yes.

One of my basic principles of any stable monetary economy is the private sector’s ex-ante demand for liquidity at par is greater than the ex-post demand. The economy starts to destabilized when the private sector’s ex-ante demand for liquidity at par is equal or less than the ex-post demand. This means the financial sector is insolvent and requires a lender of last resort to prevent a run on the system.

The activity of the FED during the latest crisis seems to support this principle, with one important difference. The FED had to open its balance sheet to borrowers it didn’t regulate (Shadow Banks) because runs are self-feeding; you can’t stop them without the aid of somebody with the ability create a liability that will trade at par in real time.

So I would say all those financial assets in the bathtub are technically money if the Fed will put them on their balance sheet or accept them in Repo transactions. Which leaves me to reevaluate the debate on the FED ability to ultimately control the money supply? It seems they can, but would have to allow the runs to play themselves out.

Steve Roth said...

And there's no such thing as "money in circulation" at any given moment. That pipe going out of and back into the money bathtub is instantaneous.

It's either in this account, or it's in that account. It's never in between, or in transmission.

There is not money out there on the highway as there are cars.

Money doesn't actually "move." There are only changes in the tallies on balance sheets. (Dollar bills are just physical tokens representing balance-sheet tallies. [See R Wray on the origins and nature of money.])

It's on this balance sheet, or it's on that balance sheet.

Accounting flow measures are just summations of all the instantaneous balance-sheet tally changes that happened over a period.

Divide that sum by the stock measured at some point in the period (or averaged over the period, or whatever) and you've got a meeasure of velocity.

How much of the stock of money turned over during the period?

Steve Roth said...

re: the oil energy money financial assets vernacular:

One thing I'm saying is that financial assets=money is wrong. You keep saying I'm saying that, and I'm not.

Financial assets are best understood as embodiments of money.

That conceptual distinction is the crux. Money and financial assets are different in type. It doesn't make any sense that one "is" the other. I would never say that.

The Arthurian said...

Oilfield: "Do you think it is unreasonable to define money as funding liabilities created from information-insensitive assets, which can be converted at par on demand (meaning that the holder of the liabilities need not do any due diligence, just taking it on faith that the liabilities could be converted)"

Sadly, I don't even know what that means.

Using credit (or, taking out a loan) creates two things: new money and new debt. The money is an asset; the debt is the offsetting liability. The money is soon spent into circulation, while the debt remains with the borrower. Anyway, that is how it looks to me.

I don't define money as a liability.

Oilfield Trash said...

Art

What is abstract, without reference to a specific object in time and place, must be given form through an act of representation.

geerussell said...

Money is an abstraction, a financial asset is a concrete instance (or as I would say a representation) of that abstraction, a recorded credit denominated in a unit of account.

Entities who are in possession of Federal reserve notes represent them as assets on their balance sheets a recorded credit in the unit of account, however they are offset as a liability on the FEDS balance sheet, which are offset with assets on the Feds balance sheet.

Assets=liabilities on balance sheets, so if Assets are a representation of money then one should be able to say liabilities are also a representation of Money.

Using credit (or, taking out a loan) creates two things: new money and new debt.

Taking out a loan creates an asset “the loan” and deposits “the liabilities”.

Or Money

Debt is nothing but a promise to pay.

The Arthurian said...

OT, I don't have trouble seeing that the value of assets is equal to the value of liabilities. I have trouble seeing that assets and liabilities have the same economic effect. If they had the same effect, they would not be written as a plus and a minus.

When you dig a hole and put the dirt in a pile, the volume of the pile is equal to the volume of the hole. But a pile of dirt is not the same as a hole in the ground.

Assets=liabilities on balance sheets, so if Assets are a representation of money then one should be able to say liabilities are also a representation of Money.

*IF* assets are a representation of money, then I expect to find liabilities of an equal amount, but, frankly, I would rather have the assets, thank you very much.

Using credit (or, taking out a loan) creates two things: new money and new debt.

Yeah, I know; and the dollar amount of the new debt is equal to the dollar amount of the newly created money. But they are TWO THINGS, as you say. As I say: a new use of credit creates both a positive (money) and a negative (debt). When the positive and negative are later combined, both cease to exist and the credit is no longer in use.

I guess I would say that money and debt are more like opposites than they are the same. But these are not satisfying definitions.

Oilfield Trash said...

Art

http://coppolacomment.blogspot.com/2014/06/sacred-cows-and-demand-for-money.html


Something to chew on. Frances is a wonderful writer. May help with those definitions.

"I guess I would say that money and debt are more like opposites than they are the same. But these are not satisfying definitions."

The Arthurian said...

Thanks, Oilfield. That is good. I have to read it again.