Spin-off #5

In spin-off #4 I used David Glasner's phrase "liquidity services", thinking it means the things liquidity can do for you. Never gave it a thought. When I read #4 later, the phrase stood out as something undefined. It makes sense to me that it refers to the things liquidity can do for you. But I don't know what Glasner was thinking. So I have to deal with this small matter even though it is a small matter indeed.

(By "liquidity services" I do not mean the company of that name or the services provided by that company. In addition, my intent is to mean not what I mean by the phrase, but what Glasner means, as my purpose is to evaluate his thinking without imposing my meanings upon his words.)

In his Price of Money post, Glasner says every asset has two prices, one to buy it and one to rent it. Then he defines the "rental price" as

the price one pays to derive services from [an] asset for a fixed period of time.

Later, when he applies the concept of rental price to money in particular, he makes a parallel statement:

the price that one has to pay ... to derive the liquidity services provided by that unit of currency.

So I don't think Glasner uses the term "liquidity services" to mean anything other than the useful things you think liquidity can do for you in some situation. He could as easily have said "the price that one has to pay ... to derive the liquidity" provided by the money. So I think my interpretation of "liquidity services" is adequate. And now I can evaluate Glasner's remarks:

You don't have to "derive" liquidity services from money. If you have the money, you have the liquidity. If you have the liquidity, you can do the things that having liquidity allows you to do.

If you have the money, everything else takes care of itself.