Readings in Money and Banking: Selected and AdaptedPhillips, Chester Arthur
General
Readings in Money and Banking: Selected and Adapted
Phillips, Chester Arthur
Banks and banking; Banks and banking -- United States; Money
Second, Professor Fisher ... seeks to establish a causal relation
between the amount of money in circulation (M) and the amount of
deposits (M') which, in my judgment, is wholly unfounded. He has
developed this in his paper in the _Royal Statistical Journal_. The
error consists in supposing that a man's deposit account at any time
varies with the amount of money in his possession. Rather, the deposit
account varies with a man's wealth. The rich man does not carry much
more money to pass from hand to hand than the man of moderate means.
Monetary habits in the community require a certain level of circulation
for all persons, but the deposits of an individual may soar above the
common level without regard to the money he keeps in circulation. His
bank deposits are rather a measure of the saleable goods he has sold,
"coined into means of payment."
Third, I well recognize the high position Professor Fisher occupies in
the mathematical school of Walras and others; but has he not made an
error in stating the essence of the price relation in his mathematical
symbols? So far as I understand him, he seems to deny the fundamental
value-concept (on which there has hitherto been general agreement) that
price is a ratio between goods and gold. In furtherance of that idea, he
thinks that, before individual prices can be arrived at, the general
price level must be ascertained. Now, in my exposition using the
ratio-concept, I explained in detail how the general level of prices
might be affected by causes affecting the gold side of the ratio.
Therefore, I did not neglect to account for the general level and that
too without doing violence to the accepted value-concept. But the
ratio-concept (which Professor Fisher seems to deny) allows the forces
acting on goods also to affect the general level of prices as I have
shown. In my opinion, he wrongly works from a general level of prices to
particular prices; while I hold that particular prices, or actual
quotations, are the bases from which all averages, or price levels, are
always and inevitably computed. Moreover, in his diagrams, the level of
prices he used was the one computed from individual quotations. Hence
his whole reasoning on the conformity of the statistics to the terms of
his equation is vitiated. Indeed the better agreement he finds--after
elaborate statistical computations--between the elements and their
result on prices ...--is due, I think, to relying on an equation which
is nothing more than a statement that the whole is equal to the sum of
its parts....
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