Category Archives: Monetary Circulation

Pointers Regarding Interest Rates and Inflation; The Delusion in Manipulation of Interest Rates

We encourage the reader to consult the following entries.

The Ineptitudes in Central Bank Operations

John H. Cochrane’s Article in the Wall Street Journal, Thursday 8/25/2022

Facing Facts: The Ideal of Constant Value of the Currency vs. the Fact of Inflation

The Road Up is The Road Down; the Mechanism of rising and Falling Prices

Stagflation Demystified

Paul Romer’s “Endogenous Technological Change” in Bernard Lonergan’s Framework

Here are a few brief selections from the above treatments:

Traditional theory looked to shifting interest rates to provide suitable adjustment.  In the main we shall be concerned with factors that are prior to changing interest rates and more effective. [CWL 15, 133) Continue reading

New Foundations in 30 Minutes

New foundations for a new science of macroeconomics are grounded in

  • a scientific, dynamic heuristic
  • the technique of implicit definition
  • precise, purely relational, analytic distinctions between abstract fundamental terms and relations from which a superstructure of complete explanation may be deduced
  • the relativistic, field-theoretic functional interrelations among interdependent, mutually-defining, explanatory functional flows

Continue reading

Circulations: Blood, Electricity, Water, Money

The method of circulation analysis … involves a minimum of description and classification, a maximum of interconnections and functional relations.  … Analytic thinking uses classes based on similarity only as a springboard to reach terms defined by the correlations in which they stand.  [CWL 21, 111]

… the introduction of the notion of the monetary function… takes a further step towards defining a circulation of money……..not a rotational movement……. rather a circular series of relationships of dependence of some flows of payments on other flows.  Money moves only at the instant of payment or transfer.  Most of the time it is quiescent. … it may also be dynamically quiescent, and then it is held in reserve for some definite purpose. … Money held in reserve for a defined purpose will be said to be in a monetary functionFive such functions are distinguished: basic demand, basic supply, surplus demand, surplus supply, and a fifth redistributive function. (CWL 15,  48)…….

Volume 15 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan is entitled Macroeconomic Dynamics: An Essay in Circulation Analysis. Lonergan analyzes and explains the economic process as a circulatory process; that is, as a dynamic organic process of interdependent circulatory flows of goods and services and their functionally-congruent payments.  It is to be understood and verified as a coherent set of flows implicitly-defined by their functional relations to one another. Continue reading

Modern Monetary Theory Is Backward; It Creates “Illegal” Superposed Circuits

Preliminary note: In this section we are addressing the proper understanding and management of the economic process in normal, non-pandemic times.  We affirm that the recent pandemic called for extraordinary measures.

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Unwittingly, first out of ignorance, more recently as necessitated by a pandemic, and most recently out of continuing ignorance, some nations, including the U.S., have wandered into the ultimate menace to the financial system, the spending without constraint blessed and recommended by unscientific. so-called Modern Monetary Theory. (Click here and here) The systematic result of MMT’s unconstrained printing of money, unjustified by corresponding, concomitant production of goods and services, is rampant inflation in prices for a) goods and services and/or b) financial assets.  (Continue reading)

The Ineptitudes in Central Bank Operations

This entry should be read in conjunction with the reading of The Road Up is the Road Down; The Mechanism of Rising or Falling Prices.  Also, in “the Road UP …”, note well the phrase “a merely theoretical possibility.”

Recently the Executive and Legislative Branches, through the agencies of the Treasurer and the Federal Reserve Board, have flooded the economic system with free money.  Much of the resulting surfeit of new money is detached from any productive contribution.  This free, intrinsically inflation-constituting money has had to sit or go somewhere and constitute an effect in circulations of the basic circuit, the surplus circuit, and the secondary market for stocks, bonds, housing, etc.  Thus, in order to understand the present inflationary situation, an explanatory “Essay in Circulation Analysis” is a present need.

Please keep in mind that Lonergan, in his purely theoretical essay, does not treat specifically the actual recent flooding of the money supply, and the associated ultra-low interest rates, in the two operative circuits and in the Redistributive Function.  But one can easily glean from his treatments the inflationary implications of this actual flooding and the manner of its correction.  Herein, as opportunity allows we graft onto his orthodox treatment comments regarding recent quantitative flooding.  We trust the reader to discern what are graftings and what are the underlying matters under discussion at that point. (Continue reading)

The Correlation of the Need for Money With the Magnitudes and Frequencies of Turnovers

A first task thereafter will be to correlate the need for more or less money in the productive process with the magnitudes and frequencies of their turnovers.  On that basis it will be possible to distinguish stable and unstable combinations and sequences of rates in the three main areas and so gain some insight into the long-standing recurrence of crises in the modern expanding economy. [CWL 15, 53-4 and 177] Continue reading

Senator Tom Cotton’s Article in The Wall Street Journal (12/2/2021)

In the Wall Street Journal of Thursday, 12/2/2021, Senator Tom Cotton had an article entitled ‘No’ on Jerome Powell at the Fed. Senator Cotton was correct regarding a) the possibility of worst-case and less-catastrophic scenarios of inflation, b) the possibility of inflation wiping out wage gains, and c) that the result of the Fed’s policies is to boost prices in both the basic consumables (point-to-point) circuit and in the Redistribution Function’s secondary stock and bond markets.

Senator Cotton, as always, is to be admired for his courage; but he and all in government and the private sector must learn the principles and laws of how the objective economic process actually works.  A lot depends on a knowledgable government acting in the best interests of the entire populace of free people. Some would say it’s a matter of the survival of human liberty.

As we’ve quoted many times, both inflation and deflation are swindles. (Click here and here and here and here) Continue reading

Scientific Generalization by Functional Analysis of the Network of Interdependent Rates

The non-Euclideans moved geometry back to premises more remote than Euclid’s axioms, they developed methods of their own quite unlike Euclid’s, and though they did not impugn Euclid’s theorems, neither were they very interested in them; casually and incidentally they turn them up as particular cases in an enlarged and radically different field. Continue reading

The Animal Organism and the Economic Organism

CONTENTS:

  1. THE STUDY OF ORGANISMS – ANIMAL AND ECONOMIC
  2. DETERMINISM AND INDETERMINISM – DISAGREEING WITH EINSTEIN
  3. CORRESPONDENCE IN THE CURRENT BASIC DYNAMIC, ORGANIC PROCESS; A DETERMINATE ALGEBRAIC FUNCTION OF THE FIRST DEGREE
  4. CORRESPONDENCE IN THE SURPLUS DYNAMIC, ORGANIC PROCESS; AN INDETERMINATE POINT-TO-LINE CORRESPONDENCE
  5. AVOIDING A VICIOUS CIRCLE OF CRITICISM
  6. THREE IMPLICITLY-DEFINED CIRCULATORY ORGANS
  7. THE TRANSITION TO SYSTEMATIZATION
  8. THE ROLE OF MIND IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE HUMAN AND THE ECONOMIC ORGANISMS

 .1. THE STUDY OF ORGANISMS – ANIMAL AND ECONOMIC:  (Continue reading)