Government Money with Portfolio Choice

The present chapter combines the circular flow approach to money (featured in the last chapter) with the stock approach. In the circular flow approach, money is a device allowing transactions between agents to take place and illustrates Keynes’s famous ‘transactions’ motive for holding money. In the stock approach, money is seen as a financial asset which agents hold for investment purposes, or more precisely, as a placement as French scholars and Joan Robinson (1956: 8) say. The quantity of money held depends, in particular, on the rate of interest that can be obtained on other assets — an approach associated with Keynes’s ‘speculative’ and ‘precautionary’ motives. Agents make a portfolio choice between money and other possible financial assets. For this reason, the model developed in Chapter 4 is called Model PC, for portfolio choice.