Monetary aspects of Walras's law and the stock-flow problem

Abstract

Walras's Law is a tautology. It illuminates interrelations among supplies and demands for goods, services, securities, and money and among their supply/demand imbalances. The Law emphasizes that no one thing or group of things can be in excess supply or excess demand by itself. It thereby helps focus attention on the role in macroeconomic disorder, especially in depression, of a distinctively functioning object of market exchange—money. Yet complications arise, and Walras's Law has itself sometimes been called into question. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the very concepts that enter into the Law and into supposed difficulties. Distinctions between "notional" and "effective" supplies and demands and between stock and flow conceptions of quantities and imbalances require attention.