Demand for financial assets and monetary policy: a restatement of the liquidity preference theory and the speculative demand for money

Keynes implicitly used the concept of duration to analyze the impacts of expected changes in the price of a perpetual bond and coupon payments that led to his “square rule.” Keynes’s result (“square rule”), derived from the breakeven condition, was just a simplification to illustrate the importance of expected interest changes on the total return of an investor’s portfolio, constrained to money and consols. Keynes’s world is not one of yield, but one of total return, where price and yield form the returns. This paper aims to show that the same breakeven method can be used, but instead of a simple two-asset model (money and a specific financial asset such as consols) this framework can be generalized to take into account a broad spectrum of financial assets including perpetuals, zero-coupon, coupon bearing securities for different maturities and investment horizons, and risk preferences to analyze the impacts of expected changes in interest rates on total expected return. By using Keynes’s breakeven condition and total return analysis, it is possible to generalize this argument for different types of securities (and not just consols) and it follows the approach of chapter 17 of the General Theory. In this paper, I update and extend Keynes’s analysis to allow for different holding periods (or investment horizons) and different financial instruments. When we take into account duration and convexity effects, and given rising expected changes in interest rate, we get an upward sloping demand for securities with short duration relative to investment horizon rather than a downward sloping speculative money demand schedule. In this framework, duration and breakeven analysis play a crucial role in the demand for financial assets as bank’s expectation on rate changes will generate a demand for short (or long) duration financial assets impacting asset prices.