Notes on an Environment with Debt-Settlement Intermediation

These notes concern a model of an economy where the following four things happen in an equilibrium. + Fiat money is useful as a medium of exchange. Consequently it has value. + Some trades are also financed by the issuance of private IOUs, and money must be used to pay these off. + Besides there being transactions in which money is exchanged for a good, there are also transactions in which money is exchanged for an IOU that has not yet matured. That is, the IOUs are a form of circulating debt--- a privately issued analogue of government bonds. + Relative to maintaining a fixed supply of fiat currency, efficiency can be increased by having a monetary authority that engages in some pattern of transactions that causes the quantity of fiat money to fluctuate.