IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/18285.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Price Theory of Money, Prospero's Liquidity Trap, and Sudden Stop: Back to Basics and Back

Author

Listed:
  • Guillermo A. Calvo

Abstract

Fiat money contains the seeds of its own destruction. It has no intrinsic value and, yet, it can be exchanged for valuable consumption and production goods. As Hahn (1965) shows, this situation puts fiat money's market value or liquidity premium at the brink of collapse. In this paper I will argue that (1) sticky prices, especially when staggered, provide output backing to fiat money, helping to sustain fiat money's liquidity premium and, thus, lowering the risk of a liquidity meltdown. I call this view the Price Theory of Money; (2) fixed-income assets linked to fiat money, especially if they are perceived to have low counter-party risk (like US Treasury bills, AAA bonds or Asset-Backed Securities) can take advantage of point (1) to become quasi-moneys; (3) this gives incentives to the private sector to create those assets; (4) however, unless protected by a Lender of Last Resort, the new assets' liquidity premium can quickly and massively evaporate in what I call (with a wink to the Bard) a Prospero's Liquidity Trap; (5) the latter lowers the market value of loan collateral and clogs the credit channel, bringing about a credit event or Sudden Stop, with severe output and employment consequences.

Suggested Citation

  • Guillermo A. Calvo, 2012. "The Price Theory of Money, Prospero's Liquidity Trap, and Sudden Stop: Back to Basics and Back," NBER Working Papers 18285, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18285
    Note: IFM
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w18285.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Arvind Krishnamurthy & Annette Vissing-Jorgensen, 2012. "The Aggregate Demand for Treasury Debt," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 120(2), pages 233-267.
    2. Jeremy C. Stein, 2012. "Monetary Policy as Financial Stability Regulation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 127(1), pages 57-95.
    3. Borio Claudio, 2011. "Implementing a Macroprudential Framework: Blending Boldness and Realism," Capitalism and Society, De Gruyter, vol. 6(1), pages 1-25, August.
    4. Guillermo A. Calvo & Carmen M. Reinhart, 2002. "Fear of Floating," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 117(2), pages 379-408.
    5. Guillermo A. Calvo & Alejandro Izquierdo & Ernesto Talvi, 2006. "Phoenix Miracles in Emerging Markets: Recovering without Credit from Systemic Financial Crises," Research Department Publications 4474, Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department.
    6. Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth S. Rogoff, 2014. "This Time is Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of Financial Crises," Annals of Economics and Finance, Society for AEF, vol. 15(2), pages 215-268, November.
    7. Ana Fostel & John Geanakoplos, 2012. "Tranching, CDS, and Asset Prices: How Financial Innovation Can Cause Bubbles and Crashes," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 4(1), pages 190-225, January.
    8. Guillermo A. Calvo & Fabrizio Coricelli & Pablo Ottonello, 2012. "Labor Market, Financial Crises and Inflation: Jobless and Wageless Recoveries," NBER Working Papers 18480, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Kiyotaki, Nobuhiro & Wright, Randall, 1989. "On Money as a Medium of Exchange," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 97(4), pages 927-954, August.
    10. Gorton, Gary B., 2010. "Slapped by the Invisible Hand: The Panic of 2007," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199734153.
    11. Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth S. Rogoff, 2009. "Varieties of Crises and Their Dates," Introductory Chapters, in: This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Princeton University Press.
    12. Calvo, Guillermo, 2012. "Financial crises and liquidity shocks a bank-run perspective," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 56(3), pages 317-326.
    13. Blejer, Mario I & Leiderman, Leonardo, 1980. "On the Real Effects of Inflation and Relative-Price Variability: Some Empirical Evidence," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 62(4), pages 539-544, November.
    14. Natalia Ramírez Bustamante & Ana Maria Tribin Uribe & Carmiña O. Vargas, 2015. "Maternity and Labor Markets: Impact of Legislation in Colombia," BORRADORES DE ECONOMIA 012610, BANCO DE LA REPÚBLICA.
    15. Guillermo A. Calvo & Alejandro Izquierdo & Luis-Fernando Mejía, 2008. "Systemic Sudden Stops: The Relevance Of Balance-Sheet Effects And Financial Integration," NBER Working Papers 14026, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. Jordi Galí & Tommaso Monacelli, 2005. "Monetary Policy and Exchange Rate Volatility in a Small Open Economy," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 72(3), pages 707-734.
    17. Obstfeld, Maurice & Rogoff, Kenneth, 1983. "Speculative Hyperinflations in Maximizing Models: Can We Rule Them Out?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 91(4), pages 675-687, August.
    18. Guillermo A. Calvo, 2005. "Emerging Capital Markets in Turmoil: Bad Luck or Bad Policy?," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262033348, September.
    19. John Kareken & Neil Wallace, 1981. "On the Indeterminacy of Equilibrium Exchange Rates," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 96(2), pages 207-222.
    20. Starr, Ross M, 1974. "The Price of Money in a Pure Exchange Monetary Economy with Taxation," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 42(1), pages 45-54, January.
    21. Calvo, Guillermo & Coricelli, Fabrizio & Ottonello, Pablo, 2012. "The Labor Market Consequences of Financial Crises With or Without Inflation: Jobless and Wageless Recoveries," CEPR Discussion Papers 9218, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    22. Friedman, Milton, 1977. "Nobel Lecture: Inflation and Unemployment," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 85(3), pages 451-472, June.
    23. Gorton, Gary & Metrick, Andrew, 2012. "Securitized banking and the run on repo," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 104(3), pages 425-451.
    24. Guillermo A. Calvo & Carmen M. Reinhart, 2000. "Fixing for Your Life," NBER Working Papers 8006, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    25. Guillermo A. Calvo, 2007. "Interest Rate Rules, Inflation Stabilization, and Imperfect Credibility: The Small Open Economy Case," NBER Working Papers 13177, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    26. Obstfeld,Maurice & Taylor,Alan M., 2005. "Global Capital Markets," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521671798, January.
    27. Carmen M. Reinhart & Vincent Reinhart, 2010. "After the fall," Proceedings - Economic Policy Symposium - Jackson Hole, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, pages 17-60.
    28. Guillermo A. Calvo, 2006. "Monetary Policy Challenges in Emerging Markets: Sudden Stop, Liability Dollarization, and Lender of Last Resort," Research Department Publications 4504, Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department.
    29. Obstfeld, Maurice & Rogoff, Kenneth, 1986. "Ruling out divergent speculative bubbles," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 17(3), pages 349-362, May.
    30. Aizenman, Joshua & Marion, Nancy, 2011. "Using inflation to erode the US public debt," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 33(4), pages 524-541.
    31. Uribe, Martin, 1997. "Hysteresis in a simple model of currency substitution," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(1), pages 185-202, September.
    32. Lucas, Robert E, Jr, 1980. "Equilibrium in a Pure Currency Economy," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 18(2), pages 203-220, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gita Gopinath & Jeremy C. Stein, 2018. "Banking, Trade, and the making of a Dominant Currency," NBER Working Papers 24485, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Guillermo Calvo, 2013. "Puzzling over the Anatomy of Crises: Liquidity and the Veil of Finance," IMES Discussion Paper Series 13-E-09, Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies, Bank of Japan.
    3. Aleksei Minabutdinov & Ilia Manaev & Maxim Bouev, 2014. "Finding The Nearest Valid Covariance Matrix: A Fx Market Case," HSE Working papers WP BRP 32/FE/2014, National Research University Higher School of Economics.
    4. Guillermo A. Calvo, 2019. "Liquidity Deflation and Liquidity Trap under Flexible Prices: Some Microfoundations and Implications," NBER Working Papers 26277, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Guillermo Calvo, 2013. "Puzzling over the Anatomy of Crises: Liquidity and the Veil of Finance," IMES Discussion Paper Series 13-E-09, Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies, Bank of Japan.
    2. Guillermo A. Calvo, 2016. "From Chronic Inflation to Chronic Deflation: Focusing on Expectations and Liquidity Disarray Since WWII," NBER Working Papers 22535, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Guillermo A. Calvo, 2013. "The Mayekawa Lecture: Puzzling over the Anatomy of Crises- Liquidity and the Veil of Finance," Monetary and Economic Studies, Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies, Bank of Japan, vol. 31, pages 39-64, November.
    4. Guillermo Calvo, 2015. "The Liquidity Approach to Bubbles, Crises, Jobless Recoveries, and Involuntary Unemployment," Journal Economía Chilena (The Chilean Economy), Central Bank of Chile, vol. 18(3), pages 04-27, December.
    5. Stijn Claessens & M. Ayhan Kose, 2013. "Financial Crises: Explanations, Types and Implications," CAMA Working Papers 2013-06, Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.
    6. Thomas Philippon, 2015. "Has the US Finance Industry Become Less Efficient? On the Theory and Measurement of Financial Intermediation," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 105(4), pages 1408-1438, April.
    7. Ye Li, 2018. "Fragile New Economy: The Rise of Intangible Capital and Financial Instability," 2018 Meeting Papers 1189, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    8. Maurice Obstfeld & Kenneth Rogoff, . "Revisiting speculative hyperinflations in monetary models," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics.
    9. Maya Eden & Benjamin S. Kay, 2019. "Safe Assets as Commodity Money," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 51(6), pages 1651-1689, September.
    10. Borio, Claudio, 2014. "The financial cycle and macroeconomics: What have we learnt?," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 45(C), pages 182-198.
    11. Stijn Claessens & M Ayhan Kose, 2018. "Frontiers of macrofinancial linkages," BIS Papers, Bank for International Settlements, number 95, July.
    12. Sara Guerschanik Calvo, 2010. "The Global Financial Crisis of 2008-10: A View from the Social Sectors," Human Development Research Papers (2009 to present) HDRP-2010-18, Human Development Report Office (HDRO), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
    13. Roy, Saktinil & Kemme, David M., 2012. "Causes of banking crises: Deregulation, credit booms and asset bubbles, then and now," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 24(C), pages 270-294.
    14. Guillermo Calvo & Fabrizio Coricelli & Pablo Ottonello, 2014. "Jobless Recoveries during Financial Crises: Is Inflation the Way Out?," Central Banking, Analysis, and Economic Policies Book Series, in: Sofía Bauducco & Lawrence Christiano & Claudio Raddatz (ed.),Macroeconomic and Financial Stability: challenges for Monetary Policy, edition 1, volume 19, chapter 11, pages 331-381, Central Bank of Chile.
    15. Bruce N. Lehmann & David M. Modest, 1985. "The Empirical Foundations of the Arbitrage Pricing Theory I: The Empirical Tests," NBER Working Papers 1725, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. Ravi Balakrishnan & Stephan Danninger & Selim Elekdag & Irina Tytell, 2011. "The Transmission of Financial Stress from Advanced to Emerging Economies," Emerging Markets Finance and Trade, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 47(0), pages 40-68, May.
    17. Venky Venkateswaran & Randall Wright, 2014. "Pledgability and Liquidity: A New Monetarist Model of Financial and Macroeconomic Activity," NBER Macroeconomics Annual, University of Chicago Press, vol. 28(1), pages 227-270.
    18. Ebrahimi Kahou, Mahdi & Lehar, Alfred, 2017. "Macroprudential policy: A review," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 29(C), pages 92-105.
    19. Rocheteau, Guillaume & Wright, Randall, 2013. "Liquidity and asset-market dynamics," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(2), pages 275-294.
    20. Jean Pierre Allegret, 2012. "Responses of Monetary Authorities in Emerging Economies to International Financial Crises: What Do We Really know?," European Research Studies Journal, European Research Studies Journal, vol. 0(3), pages 3-32.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
    • E41 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Demand for Money
    • E44 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy
    • E58 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Central Banks and Their Policies
    • F31 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - Foreign Exchange
    • F41 - International Economics - - Macroeconomic Aspects of International Trade and Finance - - - Open Economy Macroeconomics
    • F42 - International Economics - - Macroeconomic Aspects of International Trade and Finance - - - International Policy Coordination and Transmission

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18285. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.