And the stuff that the foregn workers buy with their wages?
The knock-on goods and services that are generated by American import money?
The point is that every economic metric is an estimate. And money is the least definable of all the metrics. Every day people accept payment on different terms.
> > But the point is that the availability of money does change. The world
> > of the credit card and home loans approved over the phone and
> > asset-backed securities is a different world from the world of bank
> > notes and specie that Marx talked about.
>
> Yes, but don't ever underestimate the capacity of the credit system
> to pump out loans, even in the old days. You think the Dutch bought
> tulip bulbs with real money?
Well, first of all, what is "real money? What are you - a goldbug now? You can hardly compare the credit instruments of the 1600s Holland to modern America. Seriously, Doug.
> > Hang on! "The problems of capitalism" is pretty broad. At some level
> > the Marxian crisis IS a shortage of the circulating medium - too much
> > "medium" in the hands of people who horde it and too little "medium"
> > in the hands of people who produce things and need to buy them.
>
> That's a distributional issue, not an issue of the aggregate quantity
> of money.
A "distributional issue" - well, isn't increasing the money supply about increasing the probability that it will be distributed?
Besides, since when is money just automatically "distributed"? Does credit simply "distribute" itself?
Again I say, for the products of labor to be distributed rationally, information about those products must be me saved and distributed. Money does that. Obviously it's important how efficiently that happens.
Seriously, it's one thing to say that the monetarists are wrong as a matter of prediction, but WHAT they are analyzing is important.