THE easiest way to get an economist to laugh sardonically is to compare a country’s finances to those of a family. It is both simplistic and wrong, they will argue, for politicians to say that a country “must live within its means”.
But in a new working paper* from the National Bureau of Economic Research, Patrick Bolton and Haizhou Huang make a different comparison; between the finances of a government and those of a company. A business can finance itself in three ways: through internal funds (its revenues); through borrowing; and through equity (the issuance of new shares). In the first two cases, it is easy to see the analogy with a nation state; governments can raise money from taxes or borrow in the form of government bonds.
But the paper’s most striking idea is that the national equivalent of equity is fiat money. Governments are able to issue money that can be used to settle debts and pay taxes—the term “fiat” comes from the Latin for “let it be done”. Equity…
The Economist: Finance and economics
