Comments on: Thatcher’s handbag and the meaning of money http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/2010/03/10/thatchers-handbag-and-the-meaning-of-money/ "We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down" - Aneurin Bevan, 1953 Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:06:07 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: The meaning of Thatcher’s handbag « Though Cowards Flinch http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/2010/03/10/thatchers-handbag-and-the-meaning-of-money/#comment-18535 Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:12:43 +0000 http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/?p=2585#comment-18535 [...] for me, it’s a symbol of monetary flat-earthism: When John McFall refers to Thatcher’s notion of [...]

]]> By: freethinkingeconomist http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/2010/03/10/thatchers-handbag-and-the-meaning-of-money/#comment-5835 Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:26:01 +0000 http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/?p=2585#comment-5835 Despite this being a very learned and interesting article, I don’t really accept your interpretation of what money ‘is’, and not for the first time find huge similarities between yours and the Right’s nostaligia for a time when money meant something ‘real’ (gold, proper trade, not all this false stuff that has somehow sustained 160 years of extraordinary expansion)

Money is whatever people treat as money. This is what stumped the monetarists in the 1980s with the endlessly stretched definitions making a fool of their attempt to control it. Money is not just what comes out of QE, it is whatever a bank creates. You or I could create money just now, or credit, and use GilesOwesPaul notes to sustain a little economy.

All this florid stuff about dialogues and the capitalists fooling the workers into thinking X when they should be thinking Y seems a bit beside the point, for me.

How things are measured is also highly arbitrary. Since Kuznets we measure things “as a % of GDP” but that is just one very useful thing. The value of transactions in the real economy is about 50 times that of GDP. The value of wealth is much more. Stocks, flows, transactions, value adds are all mished up. The nominal value of derivatives is a largely meaningless number. If you or I agreed to swap a billion sterling for a microsecond, nothing much has happened. But you could make an ignorant journalist’s hair stand on end, and get him to start railing about the financial world gone mad.

Underneath it all is the real economy, and in many cases Redwood is right about that. Just not when we are in a depression.

]]> By: paulcockshott http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/2010/03/10/thatchers-handbag-and-the-meaning-of-money/#comment-5832 Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:10:54 +0000 http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/?p=2585#comment-5832 You should check out Randall Wray’s blog making these points well
http://demandsideblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/l-randall-wray-and-bit-deeper-into.html

]]> By: Tom M http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/2010/03/10/thatchers-handbag-and-the-meaning-of-money/#comment-5819 Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:57:51 +0000 http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/?p=2585#comment-5819 “We need, again in Habermasian terms, to reclaim modernity on our own terms”

Proposals welcome…

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