Category Archives: The Money Supply

The Einsteinian Context: Curvature and Relativity

Albert Einstein, Steven Weinberg, Lillian Lieber, Douglas Giancoli, Raymond A. Serway, Bernard Lonergan, Philip McShane, Peter Burley,

.1. Introductory

Graduate students seeking a thesis topic may expand this treatment of the Einsteinian context of Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics.  It should be of special interest to those having a strong background in theoretical physics and, thus, able to appreciate the analogies from physics.  “Similars are similarly understood.” (CWL 3, 288/313)

Philip McShane alerted us to the resemblances between Lonergan’s context of general macroeconomics and Einstein’s context of general relativity.

(Part Two entitled Fragments) belongs almost entirely in what I call the Einsteinian context of Part Three, in contrast to the Newtonian achievement of Part One; … [CWL 21, Index, 325]

A new science has emerged.  Lonergan has elevated conventional macrostatics to a macrodynamics explaining economic accelerations. (Continue reading)

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

The Road Up is The Road Down; The Mechanism of Rising and Falling  Prices

This post was originally entered on May 30, 2022.  We repeat it now because it is remains relevant.

“The road up and the road down is one and the same. (Heraclitus)
ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή

Archaeologists and scholars have not found the context of this isolated fragment of Heraclitus.  What “road” was he referring to, and was he was speaking literally or figuratively? I simply like the statement as an introduction to the ups and downs of distinct price-quantity flows, whether in a pure cycle of expansion or in a distorted cycle of inflationary boom and corrective slump. Continue reading

Concomitance and Credit;  A New Paradigm for the Federal Reserve Bank; Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics Drives Establishment Economics into the Shadows

The macroeconomics textbooks feature three key macrostatic models, all three of which are sublated by the purely relational field theory called Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics.  The textbooks’ three featured graphs are two momentary intersections of supply and demand curves plus the Phillips Curve correlation of unemployment and interest rates:

  1. the intersection of the supply and demand curves at a certain price of goods and services (the macrostatic AD-AS model),  
  2. the intersection of the supply and demand curves at a certain interest-rate, rental-price of money (the macrostatic IS-LM model),  plus,
  3. the now-debunked Phillips Curve correlation of unemployment and interest rates.

The key elements grounding the discovery and formulation of the immanent, field-theoretic intelligibility of the organic, unified, whole economic system include: (Continue reading)

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

The Wall Street Journal of Thursday, 8/25/2022 featured John H. Cochrane’s commentary entitled  “Nobody Knows How Interest Rates Affect Inflation.”  We would say, “In order to understand how interest payments from Smith to Jones should circulate in order to achieve price stability, continuity, equilibrium and realization of the economy’s potential, one must have a unified theory explaining the whole, organic, dynamic, pretio-quantital,economic process.  Then, within that theory one can know How Interest Rates Might Affect Inflation.”  (Click here, and here)  We would also assert that manipulation by the Fed of the rental price of money – the interest cost – can be counterproductive. (Continue reading)

 

A Merely Theoretical Possibility and Simple-Minded Moralists

(In the basic expansion) … There is the same automatic mechanism as before.  Prices fall.  This has the double effect of increasing the purchasing power of income and bringing about an egalitarian shift in the distribution of monetary income. The increase in purchasing power is obvious.  On the other hand, the egalitarian shift in the distribution of income is, in the main, a merely theoretical possibility.  The fall of prices, unless quantities increase proportionately and with equal rapidity, brings about a great reduction in total rates of payment.  Receipts fall, outlay falls, income falls. [CWL 15, 138-39] 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

Alexander William Salter’s “Fed Tapering Won’t Beat Inflation”

The Wall Street Journal of 10/29/2021 featured Alexander William Salter’s article “Fed Tapering Won’t Beat Inflation”.  Professor Salter is courageously tackling an important issue.  We respectfully suggest that he consider the following: Tapering is not reversing.  It is a negative acceleration but, still, a positive velocity.  Continue reading