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The veil of money is the property assumed by some economists whereby money is a commodity like other commodities – such as oil or gold or food – as opposed to its having special properties. [1]
An economist is a practitioner in the social science discipline of economics.
Money is any item or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts, such as taxes, in a particular country or socio-economic context. The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value and sometimes, a standard of deferred payment. Any item or verifiable record that fulfils these functions can be considered as money.
In economics, a commodity is an economic good or service that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them. Most commodities are raw materials, basic resources, agricultural, or mining products, such as iron ore, sugar, or grains like rice and wheat. Commodities can also be mass-produced unspecialized products such as chemicals and computer memory.
This question arises in classical political economy, where John Stuart Mill argues that money is unimportant, and that while money might disguise the true values in an economy, it would only do so for a limited period of time.[ citation needed ] This was used to argue against government intervention in political economy as a waste of time. The problem expanded, however, as money swung back toward credit-based issuance of notes. What money meant, or was equivalent to, became important as governments attempted to adjust interest rates rather than maintain the gold standard.
John Stuart Mill, usually cited as J. S. Mill, was a British philosopher, political economist, and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of classical liberalism, he contributed widely to social theory, political theory, and political economy. Dubbed "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century", Mill's conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state and social control.
A gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is based on a fixed quantity of gold. Three types can be distinguished: specie, bullion, and exchange.
In the 20th century the veil of money was used to describe questions of stability and the exchangeability of money for interest or commodity in a macroeconomic model. In essence, as long as money can be treated like a commodity, there is no stickiness between money and goods, or money and interest.
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics dealing with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. This includes regional, national, and global economies. Macroeconomists study aggregated indicators such as GDP, unemployment rates, national income, price indices, and the interrelations among the different sectors of the economy to better understand how the whole economy functions. They also develop models that explain the relationship between such factors as national income, output, consumption, unemployment, inflation, saving, investment, international trade, and international finance.
The veil of money and, as a related issue, the quantity theory of money have special importance in economic theory throughout the 20th century. Actually, 20th century economics can be interpreted as a sequence of theoretical answers to the question whether money is only a veil or not. Different theories can be judged by their implied ideas as to the neutrality of money. In the simplest models and in the simplest form of the quantity theory of money, money is completely neutral, that is, changes in the money supply do not affect anything real. However, in the more elaborated models the neutrality theorem was applied rather to long-run considerations. For both Milton Friedman and Robert E. Lucas money was not a mere veil in the short run, so money was assumed to have real effects in the short run. The mechanisms through which money could exert these real effects were radically different and so were the sets of assumptions these authors created to establish their models. For example, Friedman postulated adaptive expectations, while Lucas assumed his economic agents to be able to form rational expectations. For both of them, money was only neutral in the long-run – that is, money was not just a veil in the short-run – but the scope of countercyclical economic policy was radically curtailed in new classical macroeconomics. In the case of rational expectations the monetary authority is not able to carry out systematic countercyclical economic policy – that is, it cannot exploit the existing short-run Phillips curve. However, it can be realized that if any of the conditions necessary to the ineffectiveness of systematic economic policy is not met, economic policy can be effective again, so, money is not only a veil. [2]
In monetary economics, the quantity theory of money (QTM) states that the general price level of goods and services is directly proportional to the amount of money in circulation, or money supply.
Neutrality of money is the idea that a change in the stock of money affects only nominal variables in the economy such as prices, wages, and exchange rates, with no effect on real variables, like employment, real GDP, and real consumption. Neutrality of money is an important idea in classical economics and is related to the classical dichotomy. It implies that the central bank does not affect the real economy by creating money. Instead, any increase in the supply of money would be offset by a proportional rise in prices and wages. This assumption underlies some mainstream macroeconomic models. Others like monetarism view money as being neutral only in the long-run.
Milton Friedman was an American economist who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the second generation of Chicago price theory, a methodological movement at the University of Chicago's Department of Economics, Law School and Graduate School of Business from the 1940s onward. Several students and young professors who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell and Robert Lucas Jr.
