Research Topics

Money, in this paper, is defined as a power relationship of a specific kind, a stratified social debt relationship, measured in a unit of account determined by some authority. A brief historical examination reveals its evolving nature in the process of social provisioning. Money not only predates markets and real exchange as understood in mainstream economics but also emerges as a social mechanism of distribution, usually by some authority of power (be it an ancient religious authority, a king, a colonial power, a modern nation state, or a monetary union). Money, it can be said, is a “creature of the state” that has played a key role in the transfer of real resources between parties and the distribution of economic surplus.

In modern capitalist economies, the currency is also a simple public monopoly. As long as money has existed, someone has tried to tamper with its value. A history of counterfeiting, as well as that of independence from colonial and economic rule, is another way of telling the history of “money as a creature of the state.” This historical understanding of the origins and nature of money illuminates the economic possibilities under different institutional monetary arrangements in the modern world. We consider the so-called modern “sovereign” and “nonsovereign” monetary regimes (including freely floating currencies, currency pegs, currency boards, dollarized nations, and monetary unions) to examine the available policy space in each case for pursuing domestic policy objectives.

This working paper is also available in Spanish and Catalan.

During the past two decades of economic stagnation and persistent deflation in Japan, chronic fiscal deficits have led to elevated and rising ratios of government debt to nominal GDP. Nevertheless, long-term Japanese government bonds’ (JGBs) nominal yields initially declined and have stayed remarkably low and stable since then. This is contrary to the received wisdom of the existing literature, which holds that higher government deficits and indebtedness shall exert upward pressures on government bonds’ nominal yields. This paper seeks to understand the determinants of JGBs’ nominal yields. It examines the relationship between JGBs’ nominal yields and short-term interest rates and other relevant factors, such as low inflation and persistent deflationary pressures and tepid growth. Low short-term interest rates, induced by monetary policy, have been the main reason for JGBs’ low nominal yields. It is also argued that Japan has monetary sovereignty, which gives the government of Japan the ability to meet its debt obligations. It enables the Bank of Japan to exert downward pressure on JGBs’ nominal yields by allowing it to keep short-term interest rates low and to use other tools of monetary policy. The argument that current short-term interest rates and monetary policy are the primary drivers of long-term interest rates follows Keynes’s (1930) insights.