In the decade since the financial crisis, geographers and economists alike have enthusiastically re-engaged with different spatial aspects of the monetary-financial system. Yet, while an increasing number of these contributions are focused on the economicgeography of money and finance, I argue that monetary theory plays no more than a perfunctory role in this literature. Indeed, neither geographers nor spatial economists actively engage with the macrofoundations of modern credit theories of money. As such, the treatment of money in economic geography remains trapped between two opposing views, neither of which take “macro seriously”. Economic geographers proper tend to remain singularly faithful to the Marxist view of the urbanization of capital—famously embodied in David Harvey’s three circuits of capital. In opposition to this view is the contemporary canon of geographical economists that has enshrined the classical dichotomy, treating the spheres of money and production as analytically distinct. Effectively a branch of applied microeconomics, mainstream spatial economics thus has little to say about money and its spatial consequences. However, such a disengagement with regional macro-phenomena of money represents a break with the intellectual tradition of a long ancestry of spatial economists. This contention is illustrated by examining the monetary content August Lösch’s (1906–1945) lesser-known writings which contain overlooked spatial elements of credit theories of money, including the notion of a spatial non-neutrality of money, and the observation that money is created endogenously in a monetary-financial order that is inherently hierarchical. Viewed in this light, Lösch’s work of emerges as one of—in modern parlance—empirical macroeconomics (in particular, business cycle analysis in space) rather than its conventional reception as the microeconomics of location choice; above all, his work was fuelled by an ambition to complete “Ohlin’s dream” with regard to the regional integration of trade theory and international macro-finance.
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Lost in Monetary Space? Economic Geographies of Money and Finance without Macrofoundations
1. Lost in Monetary Space?
Economic Geographies of Money and
Finance without Macrofoundations
Prof. Dr. David Bieri
School of Public & International Affairs,
Department of Economics,
Global Forum on Urban & Regional Resilience,
VIRGINIA TECH, Blacksburg, USA | david-bieri.com | @space_economy
Universität zu Köln
5th Global Conference on Economic Geography – July 2018
2. Money and metropolis
“The metropolis has always been the seat of the money economy.”
— Georg Simmel (Die Philosophie des Geldes, 1930)
“The truth is that money and cities have always been a part of daily routine, yet
they are present in the modern world as well.
Money and cities are also multipliers, capable of adapting to change and
helping to bring about it. One might say that cities and money created
modernity; but conversely, […] modernity—the changing mass of men's lives—
promoted the expansion of money and led to the growing tyranny of the cities.
Cities and money are at one and the same time motors and indicators; they
provoke and indicate change.”
— Fernand Braudel (Afterthoughts on Material Culture and Capitalism, 1977)
“Capitalism is essentially a financial system, and the peculiar behavioral
attributes of a capitalist economy center around the impact of finance upon
system behavior."
— Hyman Minsky (Issues in Banking and Monetary Analysis,1967)
3. Colonial settlement,
("Isolierter Staat")
Emergent central place
("merchant republic")
Core-periphery contours,
emergent urban hierarchy
First wave of
suburbanisation, city
restructuring ("Streetcar
suburbs")
Economic growth and a new
urban form (“Rise of the
monocentric city")
Suburbanization
Spatial sorting and
the rise of the
polycentric city
Global cities (from "Edge
cities" to "Boomburbs")
Negligible regulation Increasing regulator, rise of fiscal
federalism
Strong (direct): Manager,
progressive regulatory state (Anti-
trust)
Strong (indirect 1): Partner,
facilitator
Strong (indirect 2):
"Too big to fail“, re-
articulation of
regulatory state
Weak (direct):
Deregulation,
“Washington
Consensus”
URBAN
HIERARCHY
REGULATION
Mutual fund (1774, NL); Inflation-linked bond (1780, USA)
Modern mutual
fund (1924, USA)
VC industry
(1940s, USA)
Hedge fund (1949, USA)
LBOs (1955, USA)
ATM (1967, UK)
MBS (1970, USA)
Black-Scholes
(1973, USA)
Pre-1800s: Stock exchange,
insurance company, central bank
ETF (1993, CA)
CDS (1994,
USA)
Algorithmic,
HFT >50% of
all trades
(2012)
FINANCIAL
INNOVATION
Financialisation
Money and metropolis
Bimetallism
Gold standard 1: Fixed
exchange rates, free banking
Gold standard 2: Specie standard,
fixed exchange rates, central
banking
Gold standard 3:
Gold exchange
standard, Interwar
period
Pre-convertible
Bretton Woods
Convertible
Bretton Woods
Post-Bretton
Woods 1: Managed
float
Post-Bretton Woods 2:
Free floating
Stage 1: Deposit
taking only
Stage 2: Bank liabilities as
means of payment
Stage 3: Inter-bank lending,
collective credit expansion
Stage 4: Central bank as "lender of last
resort", endogenous bank reserves
Stage 5: Liability management
with banks seeking both lending
opportunities and deposits
Stage 6: Securitization,
off-balance sheet credit
creation
Stage 7: Central bank as the
"dealer of last resort",
quantitative easing and
"monetization" of fiscal policy
MONETATRY
REGIME
BANKING
DEVELOPMENT
Blockchains
(2010s)
5. Ongoing “Methodenstreit” over space
• Uneasy historical relationship between spatial economics
and economic geography
• Contemporary dominance of Anglophone genealogy
• Yet “hysterisis” and “path-dependence” also characteristic of
heterodox origins story:
1. “Raumwirtschaftslehre” (von Thünen) vs. “Handelsgeographie”,
“Wirtschaftsgeographie” (Jannasch, Hettner, Waibel).
2. Spatial turn of empiricial business cycle theory (Lösch)
3. Regional science, new urban economics and the post-war
quantitative turn (Isard)
4. Revival of political economic geography (regulation theory, Harvey)
5. New Economic Geography and “economic imperialism” (Krugman)
6. “Walrasian” bifurcation?
• After a “glorious half century”, economic geography as a
post-war scientific project is at a historic cross-roads.
• Dialogue between regional scientists, urban economists and
economic geographers increasingly polarised/siloed.
– Regional science, NEG and “new neoclassical urban economics”
[NNUE] have enshrined classical dichotomy, micro-economic “rigor”.
– Economic geography is steeped Marxian political economy (but
largely without “monetary content”, e.g. circuitist approach to money
and credit or MELT).
• Despite post-crisis surge, financial and monetary
geographies do not embrace monetary theory.
– Aspatiality of “monetary Walrasianism” (Hahn problem)
– Focus on accumulation: Spatial “money muddles”, “money
mischief” and “monetary controversies”
7. Tensions in spatial analysis
Money
and credit
Space economy
“Raumwirtschaft”
Economic order
and distribution
“Wirtschaftsformen”
Lösch
Isard
8. The region, distribution, and money
• German Political Economy and the “Systemgedanke”
– The “economic dialectics of enlightenment”: Liberty, rationality, and
economic order (Hegel vs Mill)
– August Lösch’s monetary theory and its implications for the spatial
non-neutrality of money
• The distributional consequences of the macrofoundations
of the monetary-financial order:
– Spatial variation of interest rates as monetary transmission channel
(e.g. administered prices of CB, GSEs vs local interest rates)
– Institutional design of money matters (Lutz’s “Geldverfassung”;
Buchanan’s “Constitutionalization of Money”)
– Contemporary relevance (FRB Interdistrict Settlement Accounts,
“TARGET2 balances”, Chicago Plan [100% Reserve Money], FinTech)
9. The microfoundations revolution
• Search for “micromotives” of “macrobehaviour” at heart of
key movement in (empirical) social sciences since 1930s
• Methodological individualism as research paradigm
– Economics: “Microfoundations” (from Keynes to the rational
expectations revolution of Lucas, and Schelling’s strategic interaction,
behavioural economics)
– Sociology: “Economic action and social structure” (from Weber,
Parsons to Granovetter, Coleman)
What can geographers contribute to the challenge of the
aggregation problem?
10. Lost in “monetary space”?
• The remit of post-crisis financial geography
– Geographies of financialization, inequality (Lee et al. 2009)
– Geographies of finance and the VoC literature (Peck and Theodore
2007; Dixon 2011; Engelen 2012)
• The end of geography after the end of the “end of
geography”?
– What is geographical about the new questions?
– No coherent theoretical framework on “spatialities of credit–debt”
(Sokol 2013, 2017)
• Kaleckian conundrum? “Confusing stocks with flows”:
– Marxian and other classical approaches focus on accumulation
– Spatial re-switching of capital (Harvey’s “spatial fix”); Sheppard and
Barnes’ (1990) The Capitalist Space Economy
11. “The end of geography”, again?
Source: O’Brian & Keith (2009)
2018: FinTech, RegTech
e.g. BCSB (2018), Bieri, Franzi
and Simundza (2018)
13. What are the (monetary) questions?
• What is money?
– Medium of exchange, unit of account, store of value
• What causes money to be established?
– Barter economy (monetary Walrasianism) vs. “endogenous money”
• What assets are likely to be used as money (narrow money
and near-money substitutes)
– Commodity money, fiat money, credit money (chartallism, metallism)
– Token money, uncovered bank deposits, money market certificates
• What are the private and social cost-benefits of money?
– Creditworthiness, frictions and risk premia
• What are the effects of changes in the quantity of money?
• How much control over money supply?
– Endogenous money, “horizontalism”, base-multiplier “in reverse”
14. Themes in post-war monetary theory
• The neutrality of money
– Classical dichotomy
– Integration of price theory and value theory (Patinkin)
• Theories of demand for money (velocity of circulation and
income)
– Liquidity preference theory (Hansen, Tobin)
– Restatement of the Quantity Theory (Friedman)
– Credit theory of money (Gurley and Shaw)
• Theories of money supply, monetary control, and monetary
dynamics (inflation: SR vs LR Phillips curve and NAIRU)
• Monetary policy
• Theories of interest
– Real vs. nominal rates
15. Monetary themes in regional analysis
• Urbanisation and locational economies of financial industry
– Regional financial centres, agglomeration economies of
information, deposit concentration
• Finance-growth nexus of regional development
• Regional transmission mechanism of monetary policy
– Regional economic adjustment
– Interest rate differentials, structure of financial intermediation
– Regional flow-of-funds (incl. reserve flows)
• Regional balance of payments
– Classical “transfer problem” vs. monetary approach to BoP
• Geography of money and inflation
– Regional COLI differentials, spatial PPP
– Optimal currency areas
16. Beyond Harvey’s hegemony
• Little monetary content of contemporary regional studies,
economic geography, yet active research on financialisation.
• Marxian and other classical approaches focus on accumulation
• David Harvey’s (1982, 2017) faulty macro-economic premises:
– Debt as lack of money rather than money itself
– Fiscal policy as operationally dependent on bond sales (governments
controlled by bondholders)
– “Quantitative Easing” as increase of “money supply” instead of straight
asset swap
– No distinction between the monetary powers of sovereign governments
and IFIs (BIS, IMF, WB)
– Keynesianism as Samuelsonian neoclassical synthesis (Hicks-Hansen
IS/LM), culminating with Paul Krugman
17. Monetary macrofoundations
• Revisiting Peck and Theodore (2007)
– “Economic geography’s cautious stance vis-a-vis macro-institutional
and system-centric analysis”
• Money as social relation, quintessential “macrofoundation”:
– Absence of money in the Walrasian general equilibrium system.
– Distributional impacts of (international) monetary arrangements,
monetary policy
– Political economy of monetary governance, regulation
• Monetary ideas and institutions matter (“money interest” vs.
“public interest”)
How does the political economy of money matter for the
space-economy?
18. More macrofoundations
• Business cycles across different economic paradigms:
– Marxian: M – C – M’
– Keynesian: Y = C + I + G + (X-M)
– Monetarist: PY = MV (Quantity Theory)
– Flow of funds: sources of funds = uses of funds (endogenous
money)
• Re-theorising money and finance within economic
geography
– Taking history and institutions seriously
– Theorizing spatial aspects of the monetary-financial system
19. Back to the future:
Elements of
integrating Lösch and
Isard
20. Lösch’s monetary theory – I
• Fragments of a monetary approach to regional BoP
adjustment (Eucken’s legacy):
– “Die Lehre vom Transfer – neu gefaßt” (JNS, 1941);
– Die räumliche Ordnung der Wirtschaft (1940, 1944);
– “Theorie der Währung” (WWA, 1949)
• Monetary-financial arrangements matter for space-economy
– “Geldtheoretischer Systemgedanke”, importance of capital flows
throughout the urban hierarchy
– Functional and institutional variation as influential pathway for real-
financial linkages (e.g. regional version of “transfer problem”).
• Money and credit are fundamentally hierarchical in nature
– All money is credit money in a hybrid system with public and private
money (“inside” vs “outside” money)
– Lösch’s spatial system contains traces of a ‘old German credit view’,
proto-Keynesians (Hahn, Lautenbach, and Neisser).
21. Lösch’s monetary theory – II
• “Theorie der Währung” (1949) as fragments of a “spatial
credit theory of money”
– Analysis based on monetary aspects of transfer problem with
cash and bank money in a hierarchical monetary order.
– Elements of microfoundations (proto-”New Monetary Economics”).
– Primary focus on spatial effects (distance and distribution in space)
of movements of the purchasing power and of commodities and
prices.
– In absence of world currency, second part introduces partial
currencies and thus gradually approaches the most complicated
reality, proceeding from a partial currency, which is produced at a
certain cost, to bank and cheque money.
– Overall focus of discussion is distribution in space with respect to
price level movements and price fluctuation.
24. Regional flow of funds
Lösch’s early vizualization of the spatial flow of funds across Federal
Reserve Districts (via the Interdistrict Settlement Account) ...
29. “Was it all in Lösch?”
• “Ohlin’s dream” (1933)
1. Theory of international trade consistent with modern price theory
(not labour theory of value)
2. Situate trade theory within a General Theory of Localization
3. Analyze domestic and international factor movements
4. Describe mechanism of international trade variation and
international capital movements (i.e. shifts in purchasing power
and real FX rate as part of trade theory)
• Isard’s (1956) related dream (includes monetary aspects)
• Beyond Krugman’s (1995) critique of the German tradition
of spatial economics
– To what extent does Lösch anticipate (at least in principle) where
Krugman falls short?
30. Isard’s spatial “accounting view”
• Distinction between uses of the means of finance:
– E.g. productive credit (nonfinancial businesses) vs. consumptive
credit (households)
• Distinction between changes in flows and changes in stocks
– E.g. between income flows and wealth stocks, or between credit
flows and the stock of debt which they cause
• Distinction between the effects of assets and the effects of
liabilities:
– E.g. net capital flows vs. gross financing flows
• Isard’s “accounting view” is a prominent element of Methods
of Regional Analysis (1960), but disappears without trace
from latest version
33. Towards a “spatial credit view”
• “Holy Grail” of post-crisis economics to integrate real
economy with monetary-financial economy (cf. “Ohlin’s
dream”)
• Three major, interrelated accounting statements at frontier
of quantitative economic analysis,
– National income and product accounts (NIPA)
– The input–output tableaux, (I/O),
– Flow-of-funds accounts (FF)
• Complementing standard I/O relationships with monetary
stock-flow data
– Rise of post-Keynesian stock-flow-consistent (PK-SFC) models, but
no regional perspectives!
35. Central bank Gold, monetary base
Commercial banks Deposits Households,
consumers
Firms,
producers
Government
Goods, services
Wages, salaries
Public
expenditures
Taxes
Money, credit (funding flows)
Interest payments, savings (asset flows)
Private sector, NDFIs Securities
Hierarchyofmoney
Credit subsidies
Banking
Shadow
banking
Financial sector
Use Source
Ifin Sfin
Afin Lfin
Households
Use Source
Ih Sh
Ah Lh
Firms
Use Source
If Sf
Af Lf
Government
Use Source
Ig Sg
Ag Lg
for each sector, Ii + Ai = Si + Li such that:
Surplus Si - Ii = Ai - Li : non-financial sources net financial savings Money outflow Ai - Li > 0
Deficit Li - Ai = Ii - Si : financial sources product expenditures Money inflow Li - Ai > 0
Real transactions
Financial transactions
Price level of financial assets
Price level of current output
Spatial flow of funds view
Source: Bieri (2017a)
36. Regulatory-spatial dialectic
Source: Bieri (2017b)
Financial functions by spatial effect
Financial
integration
Financial
agglomeration
Suburbanisation
Monetary hierarchy
Central bank Payment system,
monetary policy
Transfer of
resources
Funding,
transfer of
resources
Depository institutions Funding,
transfer of
resources
Information flow Funding,
information flow
Outside of regulatory
perimeter:
NDFIs, market-based
intermediation
Information flow Risk management Funding
37. Beyond the “triple coincidence”
• Traditional “triple coincidence” in international finance
1. Capital flows as the financial counterpart to savings and investment
decisions (net flows)
2. GDP boundary defines decision-making unit
3. GDP boundary defines currency area
• 3 key elements of the Lösch-Isard challenge
– Capital flows as financing flows (gross flows)
– Economic region defines decision-making unit; monetary aspects of
the regional balance of payments (cf. “The Balance of Payments of
Small Area as an Analytical Tool”, Stolper & Tiebout [1954])
– Nature of currency area defines (spatial) transmission of shock from
unilateral transfer
40. Notes: Metro area extrusions are proportional to total losses from FDIC-supervised depository institutions from 2007—
2014 as a percentage of metropolitan GDP. Area shading reflects the total number of failed institutions per metro area
(light grey: 1-5 failures, black: 20-59 failures). Source: Bieri (2017b)
Geography of banking failures
41. Notes: Metro area extrusions are proportional to cumulative borrowing by depository institutions via the Federal
Reserve’s Discount Window from 2010—2012 as a percentage of metropolitan GDP. Area shading reflects the average
loan-to-value ratio for banks (credit outstanding as share to total collateral pledged) per metro area (ranging from light
grey: 3-5% LTV to black: 70-85% LTV). Source: Bieri (2017b)
Geography of liquidity strains
42. The geography of regulatory arbitrage
Notes: Extrusions are proportional to the volume of loan sales/securitisation as a percentage of MSA GDP. Area shading
reflects the relative share of private label securitisation by NDFIs (ranging from dark grey: 40-50% to dark red: 95-99%).
Source: Author’s calculations from HMDA microdata, BEA and Census Bureau data. Source: Bieri (2017b)
GSE loan sales by banks, 2006. Private loan sales by NDFIs, 2006.
44. REFERENCES – I
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