Friday, January 4, 2013

contrived macronautic stymie

"government-issued fiat money will not be perceived as a source of private-sector wealth if the households owning that money are the same households that, first, receive all of the transfers or pay all of the taxes associated with future changes in the money supply and that, second, incur all of the opportunity costs associated with carrying the money stock between all future periods. We are used to the idea of Ricardian Equivalence implying that government debt is not net wealth. Essentially consumers internalise the government’s budget constraint. But that argument applies to outside money as much as government debt. We can replace initial values of debt and money by the discounted future stream of primary surpluses they support"