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I was hoping that the participants in the "money supply" thread
would have continued this thread by raising other, related questions
for discussion. After all, it was a pretty lively thread with a lot
of participation, wasn't it? Very thought-provoking posts as well, imo.
Anyway (in hopes of jump-starting this thread again). I have a couple
of questions related to this issue which have not been raised yet:
1) In terms of our discussion of commodity money, no one has yet
raised the distinction between "esoteric" and "exoteric" that was
advanced by Alain Lipietz in _The Enchanted World: Inflation,
Credit and the World Crisis_ [London, Verso, 1985]. What do others
think about the usefulness of that distinction in terms of
(both theoretically and historically) analysing the relationship
between commodity money and credit money?
2) Within the context of Uno-theory, to what extent can the issue of
commodity money be considered in terms of "stages theory" rather
than "basic theory"? Or, expressing the question somewhat
differently, within the context of Uno-theory can the "results"
arrived at in "basic theory" be modified (or even negated?) in
stages theory? My reading of the recent book by Makoto & Costas
[_Political Economy of Money and Finance_, NY, St. Martin's
Press, Inc., 1999] suggest that they tend to analyse the
relationship between commodity money and credit money in
historical and contingent ways. Thus, do they view this as a
subject which can only be understood in the richness of historical
detain rather than in basic theory alone? Also: is there a
similarity in _this_ regard between the way they have analysed
this question and the way in which Lipietz did and Robert Guttmann
[_How Credit-Money Shapes the Economy: The United States in a
Global System_, Armonk, NY, M.E. Sharpe, 1994] did (RB was
influenced by regulation theory)? (RB above should be RG).
In solidarity, Jerry
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