Alexander W. Salter
Salter earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics at George Mason University and his B.A. in Economics at Occidental College. He was an AIER Summer Fellowship Program participant in 2011.
Articles
Ancient Human Activity and the Necessary Conditions for Indirect Exchange
Chartalists are right: debt preceded money. But that fact doesn’t do the work they think it does.
Do the Origins of Money Matter?
A whirlwind tour through alternative theories would seem to suggest one fits much more comfortably with a pro-liberty worldview than another.
Money in Illiberalism
A liberal society is governed by the principles of private property and freedom of contract, under the aegis of a nondiscriminatory rule of law. In such a society, money enables economic actors to coordinate their activities. Money allows producers and consumers to find common ground, as profit-and-loss accounting enables producers to compare various lines of…
Money in Liberalism
One feature of a liberal society is that its institutions, and especially its formal institutions with coercive backing, are bound by a nondiscriminatory rule of law, and work to protect the sanctity of property and contract for all persons. In such a society, the general laws of property, contract, torts, etc. govern the provision of…
The Institutional Character of Money
On the one hand, money is the language of commerce; money prices are the very medium of economic experience. On the other hand, there seems to be a deeper reality behind the monetary economy. In this scenario, real resource constraints, as described by Walrasian general equilibrium or Misesian evenly rotating economy, ultimately place bounds on…
Is Money Really a Veil?
My previous post was a crash course on the role of prices in a market economy. Importantly, prices are money prices. The vast majority of the time, producers accept the medium of exchange as payment for goods and services, and post prices denominated in the medium of exchange, which also makes the medium of exchange…
Let’s get back to basics. What is a price?
A price is an exchange ratio: you must give up a certain amount of one good in order to get another good. Barter economies have prices, which are expressed as ratios of the goods themselves. In money-using economies, prices are expressed in the economy’s medium of exchange, which frequently makes the medium of exchange the…
Nominal is Real; Real is Artificial
A basic tenet of macroeconomics and monetary economics is the difference between nominal variables and real variables. Nominal variables are expressed in current market prices. Real variables are adjusted to reflect the changing purchasing power of money over time (inflation or deflation). For example, the nominal interest rate is the rate that currently prevails in…
What the Fed Can’t Do
The American economy is still in the doldrums. It is growing and creating jobs at a snail’s pace compared to the years before the financial crisis. There are several reasons for this. But the actions of the Federal Reserve bear significant blame. For now, the public’s anger at the Fed’s questionable activities during and after…
The price of time and the price of money
When discussing the market for money balances, many reputable macroeconomics and money and banking textbooks say that the price of money is the interest rate. This ‘liquidity preference’ theory is misguided. The kernel of truth therein is that, in holding higher money balances, an individual is forsaking earning a nominal rate of return on assets…
