Old monetarism, new monetarism, and moneyness

Stephen Williamson had a good post recently in which he noted:

Central to Old Monetarism - the Quantity Theory of Money - is the idea that we can define some subset of assets to be "money". Money, according to an Old Monetarist, is the stuff that is used as a medium of exchange, and could include public liabilities (currency and bank reserves) as well as private ones (transactions deposits at financial institutions). Further, Friedman in particular argued that one could find a stable, and simple, demand function for this "money," and estimate its parameters. Lucas does that exercise here, and then uses the estimated money demand function parameters to measure the costs of inflation.

What's wrong with that? The key problem, of course, is that the money demand function is not a structural object. Some central bankers, including Charles Goodhart, figured that out. Goodhart's idea is a bit subtle, but there are more straighforward reasons to think that the parameters we estimate as "money demand" parameters are not structural. First, all assets are to some extent useful in exchange, or as collateral. "Moneyness" is a matter of degree, and it is silly to draw a line between some assets that we call money and others which are not-money.

I challenged him on how important moneyness actually is in new monetarist literature. Why, for instance, do so many new monetarist papers include some variable M if money is a matter of degree? You can't represent the idea "as a matter of degree" with a variable called M which by definition excludes all non-M assets. If you do so, you're already drawing lines between assets.

He never really responded to me. Steve, any thoughts? You've got the floor.

Comments

A way to make anonymous online donations

Paying for things online usually means giving up plenty of privacy. But this needn't always be the case. Last night I donated to a local charity via their website and didn't have to give up any of my personal information. The trick for achieving a degree of online payments anonymity? Not bitcoin, Zcash, or Monero. I used a product created by old fashioned bankers: a non-reloadable prepaid debit card. (I wrote about these cards here and here ). Had I used a credit card or PayPal, all sorts of parties would have gotten access to my personal information including the site owner, the payments processor, my bank, the site owner's bank, the credit card networks, my partner, and many more. To get a good feel for how many different parties touch an online payment, check out this graphic by Rebecka Ricks, which shows how PayPal shares your information. A powerful visualization by @baricks showing how PayPal shares your data: https://t.co/vd8w8d8xn6 ht @akadiyala Due to Europe...

Shadow banks want in from the cold

Remember when shadow banks regularly outcompeted stodgy banks because they could evade onerous regulatory requirements? Not any more. In negative rate land, regulatory requirements are a blessing for banks. Shadow banks want in, not out. In the old days, central banks imposed a tax on banks by requiring them to maintain reserves that paid zero percent interest. This tax was particularly burdensome during the inflationary 1970s when short term rates rose into the teens. The result was that banks had troubles passing on higher rates to savers, helping to drive the growth of the nascent U.S. money market mutual fund industry. Unlike banks, MMMFs didn't face reserve requirements and could therefore offer higher deposit rates to their customers. To help level the playing field between regulated banks and so-called shadow banks, a number of central banks (including the Bank of Canada) removed the tax by no longer setting a reserve requirement. While the Federal Reserve didn't go as f...

Cashing up the system

David Beckworth had a very interesting pair of posts outlining how QE would only have had a meaningful effect on the economy if the associated monetary base growth was permanent. One addendum I'd add on the topic is that even permanent expansions of the monetary base can have no effect on the economy. The best example of this is the "cashing up" of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) in 2006, an event that doesn't get the attention that it deserves in monetary lore. Banks typically hold deposit balances at their central bank in order clear payments with other banks. Because New Zealand's clearing and settlement system was suffering signs of stress in the mid-2000s including delayed payments, hoarding of collateral, and increased use of the RBNZ standing lending facilities, the RBNZ decided to 'flood' the system with balances to make things more fluid. This involved conducting open market purchases that bloated the monetary base (comprised of currency...

Typography

Search This Blog