#120 Marx and Credit Money w Simon Mouatt
Our guest is Simon Mouatt, Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Chichester Business School. We discuss his paper: ‘Can Sequential and Non-Dualistic Interpretation of Marx’s Monetary Thought be Synthesised with the Endogenous Money Paradigm?’ from ‘Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory’. Our discussion runs the gamut from Oil Shocks to the neurality of money to planned capitalist economies.
Comments (5)
It depends on how good the monetary totals info is... haven't looked at it in like 10 years :)
Fred Moseley's paper on non-commodity money MELT was the first thing I read on updating that stuff for today, I thought it was pretty good. Also, so I don't spam another comment, to make it here: surely one can check the temporality of inflation, prices, and money supply to see what is likely to be causing what? Unless it's a "cots cause babies" sort of situation.
A private bank can loan more than they have in deposits? Huh. Today I learned a thing. This was a great listen. I'm still not convinced this leads to money creation per se though. Surely an "I owe you £100 at some point in the future" is -£100 for the IOU giver and +£100 for the taker, assuming nothing else happens, that the taker can then act on. So even if a bank loans more than they have it should still add up, there'd just be more circulating because the bank has a negative amount on its books... maybe this (adding to circulating capital) is what is meant by endogenous money creation, and if so then I think I get it. Though if the IOU is never delivered on, *then* the taker will have spent money they didn't have and in effect created money on the whole. But I assume there are legal processes in capitalism to even things out again when this happens... where the original taker then has to add -£100 to their balance as they never received it.
The only non debt money today is essentially coin and paper notes or money created ex nihilo by a central bank. In the case of merchant notes in Marxs time, the one note can pass through multiple hands before it finally gets redeemed and cancelled out. So it operates as a debt between two parties and a means of payment for many. It's the same today but its credit money created by banks. Credit money gets destroyed when it is paid back today too. Banks dont need deposits to lend. They just need sufficient reserves to survive a bank run.
That was good. i''ll have to listen to it again.