Friday, November 25, 2011

"All money is debt"


You say: All red is color.

I say: We should be using green.

You say: Green is still a color, so there is no difference.

Posted by The Arthurian at 4:00 AM

4 comments:

Calgacus said...

From your following post: The phrase does not mean "money is the same as debt". It means "money comes into existence through the creation of debt" or something like that.

No, the phrase in essence means what you say it does NOT mean. It does not mean that money comes into existence through the creation of debt, in some indirect way. Of course money comes into existence throught the creation of debt, because the money is the debt. It's like saying when Arthur is born a person is born. Not every person is an Arthur, but every person named Arthur is a person.

Anything that you call "money", someone else calls "debt".

The red (credit/debt I presume?) / green (money?) / color classification does not map correctly to what us moneyisdebters are saying. Which is: there is no such thing as the green in this typology. There is no money which is not debt.

The correct typology is that green (money) is a type of color (debt). There is debt which is not money - red (some private debts). Red is not Green, but they are both colors. Private debt is not always, not necessarily, is frequently not money, but both private debt & money are types of debts.

It is not meant to bring the discussion to a grinding halt, but to put it on a firm basis, to clarify thought by conceptual reorientation & correct, useful definitions that make understanding easy.

It really pays a lot to think slowly here, because the modern mainstream is so utterly wrong & crazy, but omnipresent. The phrase must be interpreted as money (anything ever called money) is (using a common meaning of this word, that everyone uses many times a day) debt (according to the dictionary definition of debt). I've noted even the clearest, most valuable modern thinkers like Geoffrey Ingham, Randall Wray making errors or at least infelicitous expressions that wrongly criticize Minsky & Mitchell-Innes for using the word "is" correctly, while their criticisms do not. Even Homer nods.

November 28, 2011 at 5:51 PM
The Arthurian said...

Thanks, Calgacus.

November 29, 2011 at 2:42 AM
The Arthurian said...

"Anything that you call "money", someone else calls "debt". "

Anything I call money, YOU call debt :)

"Red is not Green, but they are both colors."

I can live with that.

The whole center of everything I think about the economy rests on my debt-per-dollar graph. You and Greg both I think have used the three words "money is debt" to dismiss that graph.

But I don't really think you are saying there is no difference between M1 money and TCMDO debt. The one is still more than 25 times the other.

November 30, 2011 at 4:11 AM
Greg said...

"The whole center of everything I think about the economy rests on my debt-per-dollar graph. You and Greg both I think have used the three words "money is debt" to dismiss that graph."


DIsmiss may be too strong a word in this context. I really think you are looking in the right place (private debt levels). My issue is I think M1 M2 etc etc are not as clear cut as they seem. This is a key point of MMT, as I see it. Standard "monetarist" language is woefully inadequate in my view. It is based on QTM concepts and moslty sees things as money stocks without seeing that these stocks are fluid and determined by flow direction. Taking a snapshot every few weeks cannot show you what a year long movie actually looks like.

November 30, 2011 at 7:58 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)