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The so-called corporate "roll up" lies at the conjunction of finance and monetary economics. For those monetary economists who aren't familiar with the term, a roll-up is a company that tries to consolidate an entire industry by serially acquiring competitors, usually using its own stock as currency. Valeant Pharmaceuticals, currently in the midst of a battle to take over botox-maker Allergan for $53 billion, is one of the more well-known roll-ups in the world of finance these days, having acquired around 75 companies in the specialty pharmaceutical niche over the last six years. But there have been many others over the years who have pursued the roll-up strategy. Plenty of analysts dislike the corporate roll-up. They criticize it for not creating value organically but merely accumulating other people's castaway businesses. Roll-up equity is generally viewed as ridiculously overvalued and destined to implode. Valeant, for instance, has been variously descr...

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 ...

Stephen Williamson catches a lot of flack on the net. Some is undeserved, some is deserved, but a big chunk is probably due to the fact that he and his fellow New Monetarist s have a communications problem. People don't understand what they're up to. So here's my attempt to bring Steve down to earth and explain to the world the importance of the research being done by him and his colleagues. I'll go about this by adding a bit of historical context. After a quick tour of the history of monetary thought, readers will be able to see where in the greater scheme of things the New Monetarists fit. Now Steve doesn't know much about the history of economic thought - he thinks it's unimportant. So in a way, I'm explaining not just Steve to the world, but Steve to Steve. One of the big problems in economics is how to deal with two significant but divergent streams of economic thought - monetary theory and real theory (ie. microeconomics). Put differently, there's...

On November 15 @ 5:37 PM, Wordpress.com tweeted that it would be accepting bitcoin as payment. Over the next twenty-four hours, the price of bitcoin steadily rose on Mt. Gox , the major bitcoin exchange. See chart below. This is a great illustration of the idea of a liquidity premium . All assets carry a liquidity premium. This premium will be smaller or larger depending on an asset's ability to be easily bought and sold, or its liquidity. The idea of liquidity is straight from Carl Menger, who figured things out back in 1872 ( pdf ). Keynes also knew this, read Chapter 17 of the General Theory. (This is one of those great examples of Austrians and Keynesians agreeing). Other words for liquidity include saleability and marketability. In short, the more marketable an asset, the larger its liquidity premium, which in turn means a higher price. Illiquid assets have small premiums and lower prices. In announcing the acceptance of bitcoin, Wordpress has added yet another avenue for th...

David Glasner had some recent posts ( here and here ) on Ludwig von Mises and Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT). Bob Murphy pushed back here with a good rebuttal. But David's general point still stands: what necessarily forces a central bank that has adopted the practice of lending at a rate below the natural rate to ever cease this practice? Why does there have to be an inevitable bust? I consider myself an Austrian in that one of my favorite economists is Carl Menger. I've also written a thing or two for the Mises Institute, my most recent being on Menger and Leon Walras and how the two would have differed on the phenomenon of high frequency trading. On the other hand, when it comes to macroeconomics, I remain a business cycle agnostic. I'm willing to be converted though. All you've got to do is answer a few questions of mine. Say a central bank decides to reduce the rate at which it lends below the natural rate. Businesses can come to it for cheap loans -- and...

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 clas...

Lord Keynes at the Social Democracy blog has an interesting post on Carl Menger.called Menger on the Origin of Money . As I point out in my comments, Lord Keynes is mistaken in trying to recruit Menger to the chartalist side of the metallist vs chartalist debate. Menger always was a pure metallist: So while Menger believed that the state might adopt metals as money, it could not legislate into existence a worthless item as money. The state could construct a system of coinage and thereby perfect an existing metallic monetary system, but not create a system based on intrinsically worthless materials.