* The dictionary gives me "debt (n): a sum of money that is owed or due". To define (or even describe) money in general as debt with this definition is obviously circular.
* If you simply define "debt" as "money" then to define "money" as "debt" is obviously even more directly circular.
The point being made isn't really wrong or unhelpful. As you say, a person's bank account is a liability of the bank, so to say "I have money in a bank acccount" really means "the bank has an obligation to me", and a lot of "money" is like this. Not all, though: cash and bank reserves can't (in the modern world) accurately be described as debt in the sense of "somebody owing somebody money" (and it's debatable whether even an individual bank account is fully describable that way).
There is no easy, trivial definition of what money is. Probably the most general view is that it represents some sort of obligation or claim the person who "has the money" holds over others. That's a valid insight, but it's too general to be a definition as it's also satisfied by many things we don't generally think of as money, eg. train tickets or stocks.
The "money is debt" notion is, I think, an attempt to express this useful-but-too-general "claim or obligation" idea, but given people usually think of "debt" in a much more specific sense as "money owed" I don't think it's terribly helpful for people who are struggling with what money "is". At best, I think it would have to come with a lot more explanation of exactly what is meant by "debt" in this context, and would need caveats to avoid being overly broad.
[1] Obviously, there are knifes made not from steel, but I hope you get the point anyway.
I think more fundamentally, money is simply the capacity for goods and services to be exchanged between humans. Anything that facilitates a trade can be considered money. Just like how in physics, the best general definition we have of "energy" is simply the innate capacity for change in the universe.
If I stumble upon a gold bar in the forest, that's not a debt. It does, however, have the potential to get me what I want. I could, in theory, turn it into a debt, or I could just spend it immediately on a bunch of cows.
1. The definition differs significantly from what people usually call money. Gold bar is a gold bar, not money.
2. It makes anything money. I can barter a basket of apples to a fish -> apples are money. That makes it difficult to create useful and interesting observations about the thing we usually call money.
I think my definition is quite fundamental, and holds true all the way back to the beginnings of finance. We used to just trade directly - trading horses for maize, etc.
But then humans realized that having anything be money is inefficient, so we invented currency as a locally acceptable surrogate for whatever humans value. But it's still rooted in humans exchanging goods and services they find valuable, for whatever reasons.
A way to look at the problem, is to realize that what matters is the ability to make humans do something. ( I won't expand on why that matters). From there, the other observation is you can probably reduce the reasons humans act to a few affections like fear... desire ( and a couple of others).
I am not trying to explain why we should decompose things this way nor prove anything, just doing a quick exposition. Think of those affections as analoguous to physics fundamental forces.
Having said that, here is a couple of interesting things. Those primal affections work often together but are not the same. They differ in the kind of social relationships they establish between humans.
Crucially in that framework, debt is not money. It can be used to bootstrap money, but it does not establish the same relationship.
When I say money is a desire accumulator it means that having acquired it, I can rest assured that people will desire my money, and will do things out of their own "free will" to take it from me. That gives me leverage (The sentiment of free will is important for it to work, and correlates with the desire emotion).
The accumulator part is important because it allows to build an economy of desire, to transfer it over time , space and to mix it with other fundamental forces to great effects.
I am not sure what I wrote makes sense without a lot of background presentation but feel free to probe it !
The idea of money as debt is really around taxes. You need to pay your taxes in money issued by the country you live in. Let’s take a New Country (NC) with a Government called NCG with a currency called Token.
At the start of the year NCG created some Tokens and at the end of the year citizens of NC need to have Tokens to pay taxes with, but why would the NCG accept stuff it just created from thin air as having value? And the answer is before people pay taxes NCG can buy stuff using Tokens by saying people are going to want to eventually pay taxes with these so they aren’t just pieces of paper they are IOU’s Aka Money. So at the end of the year when people are paying the government of NCG formerly imaginary Tokens what they are essentially doing is cashing in IOU’s from the NCG.
Of course the idea of these Tokens having value takes on a life of it’s own, much like how Bitcoins can be perceived as valuable when they don’t actually do anything. But if a country fails it’s currency quickly becomes worthless.
Forget about NCG. Suppose you move somewhere without any government. Heinlein ran through this example as a thought experiment in _Time Enough for Love_. You open up a general store. Nobody has any money to pay you, so whenever someone wants to buy something, they have to trade something. You can't set prices because there's no currency unit (numeraire) to set prices in. So what you do is you offer to let people buy things on credit, knowing that they will later have stuff to trade you to satisfy the debt. All this requires is a book to track debts. That leaves you having to haggle at time of repayment what that thing in the past they bought was worth, in terms of what they have to trade for it now.
So, you as the owner print up "notes" and give them out to people, typically for larger projects, with contractual promise of repayment later. These can be called loans. They don't have to be for projects, though. You could give everyone some "notes" every month and keep track in a ledger that they owe you that back with interest, or maybe no interest if you think people using your notes will give you an advantage over your competition, the general store in the next valley over that everyone is sick of bartering with. Whatever the reason for handing out these "notes", you can then set all your prices in terms of the numeraire on these "notes" you hand out, so the person you loaned money to can buy stuff from you. The people you loan to can also buy stuff from other people using these "notes" as long as those other people also want to buy stuff from your general store.
Maybe the loanee starts up a farm with the loan. As the farm produces food, they sell the food to other people, and maybe they accept the "notes" back as payment for the food. The loanee can use the "notes" they received from the food they sold to pay back their debt to your general store. With interest, of course.
Trying to balance money supply with economic activity — and only the activity of people willing to use that type of money — is a challenge in such a small economy like that, with privately-issued currency. However, no taxes are necessary.
Essentially the company pays it’s employee an IOU Token that can be redeemed at the company store or for housing etc. In this case it’s the willingness to trade goods for these tokens that give them value rather than Taxes, but it’s the same deal. After the value has been established people are willing to take out loans in script etc. But just like your example the company doesn’t inherently value having script just maintaining the illusion that script is worth something.
Money is the token used to repay the debt, but the token is created because someone else has gone into debt. They in turn will need to obtain money which is the debt of someone else somewhere up the chain. (Even if it's bank reserves and cash, in well functioning modern economies they're injected by the central bank monetising existing debt, usually government debt.)
It's probably more strictly true to say that having money is the credit extended in the credit/debt relationship, but they're two sides of the same coin.
This is liable to be debated: but for example, gold is pretty worthless and the mechanism by which it was appraised as valuable, at least the explanation I find to be the most compelling, is the Chartalist position. Wherein the government issues the currency, but demands it back in the same currency units as tax. Otherwise, gold is sort of just a social status luxury good which you pay a lot of money for but is worthless in any other context. Prior to currency you could pay tax in various commodities or as corvée labor - it does however indicate an intrinsic and continuous debt to the state.
Now if we look at the anthropological record the pretensions that people were bartering before the advent of currency disappears, and it appears that it was actually a system of credit/debt - of favors within a community. And that's where the issue arose. How do you guarantee an extension to a foreign party? A traveler or a soldier? And that appears to be when barter was deployed. I think this is an important aside here because it really does underline what money was intended for a guarantee. Of course there are other aspects like portability and storage that also contribute to the nicety of currency.
Finally to the point, China was actually the first known culture and eventually nation to have deployed fiat currency, and it emerged from credit-derived checks. Those debts were transferred from one person to the next informally.
"Tallies weren’t just used for loans, but for any sort of contract—which is why early paper contracts also had to be cut in half and one half kept by each party. With paper contracts, there was a definite tendency for the creditor’s half to function as an IOU and thus become transferable. By 806 AD, for instance, right around the apogee of Chinese Buddhism, merchants moving tea over long distances from the far south of the country and officials transporting tax payments to the capital, all of them concerned with the dangers of carrying bullion over long distances, began to deposit their money with bankers in the capital and devised a system of promissory notes. They were called “Flying Cash,” also divided in half, like tallies, and redeemable for cash in their branches in the provinces. They quickly started passing from hand to hand and operated something like currency. The government first tried to forbid their use, then a year or two later—and this became a familiar pattern in China—when it realized that it could not suppress them, switched gears and established a bureau empowered to issue such notes themselves."[0],[1]
[0] Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber
When you obtain a loan from the bank, you are conveniently paying back in the form of fiat currency, which you have earned through your labour. But if you fail to meet the payments, then the real debt emerges - the collatoral (your house, car, etc).
In this sense "debt" is just reinterpreted as "owing an agreed resource" which, for the most part, is conveniently valued in USD/EUR/etc.
The short film "Money as debt" was the eye-opener for me. It's probably still available on youtube somewhere. I urge anyone looking for a light-hearted, but apparently factual, introduction to start there.
In the modern economy where commercial banks create deposits through loans, the borrowers don't owe anyone money other than the interest payments on the loan, paying the loan destroys the deposits that were created through the debt. The borrower owes products and services, not money, to the holder of the liquid claim on that debt. The borrower gives up his products and services willingly because he must pay his debt with money.
I guess different people think differently, but when I find myself tied in knots trying to think about interest rates, inflation and the banking system, I find it helpful to remember that money is an asset, and is subject to the same basic principles (eg, supply and demand) as any other asset. Of course, it's really just the other side of the same coin - money is an asset to one person and a liability to another.
In other words, your money is someone else's debt.
In programming lingo I like to think about money as something akin to promises or futures. Something that 'has value' strictly in its current context, and even then only as a 'promise' that will yield when exchanged. With the property that the longer you have it, the less it will yield. Which is a necessary condition for the currency underpinning your economy, to force people to move it around instead of holding.
When you look at it this way, getting rid of any excess I don't immediately need by getting something else (stocks, ETFs, property, whatever) seems like a total no-brainer.
There was a time when a whole lot of money was literally in the form of gold and silver coins. Explain to me how a physical gold coin in my hand is literally debt?
Explain to me how bitcoin is literally debt?
And, you don't get to claim that those are exceptions. You said that all money is literally debt. I'm pretty sure that claim is simply false.
With Bitcoin it is quite obvious. The strange part is that these assets have no corresponding liabilities, nobody has to accept them. The best you can do is speculate that people will accept them in the future.
Bitcoin is a literally a distributed ledger, so it's very much debt.
Gold and silver aren't strictly debt because they also happen to be commodities that were used for their aesthetic properties. However, it's use as money is a system of keeping track of credits and debts.
And, can you explain, if a bitcoin is debt, to whom is the debt owed?
This doesn't seem to work for a dollar bill in my hand though?
But yes, products can sometimes become accidental foreign currencies when they satisfy all the key properties, even if they’re not printed by a national bank. Casino chips for example. Disney dollars. Etc.
> a hundred years ago it would have been a promise to pay you ~1/20 oz of gold.
so 100 years ago, it represented a debt of 1/20 oz of gold.
"This bill is legal tender for all debts"
Makes it pretty clear to me.
The moment when bills become money in meaningful sense is when they end up in circulation. And they end up in circulation, when - you guessed it - central bank lends them to banks. The bills are a liability of a central bank, thus they are a note which says that central bank owes that amount to holder, thus they are debt. Yep, I agree, this is confusing and requires very careful thinking.
Pre-1971 it was a claim on a defined amount of precious metals. Historically, precious metals and specifically gold were the sole non-debt currency, because it's a dense store of value whose custody you don't necessarily have to entrust to a 3d person.