I began this newsletter a little less than a year ago in February 2024. Since then I've shared 10 pieces, including a mix of deep dives, exploration of an idea, and short musings. This newsletter focuses on issues related to money systems and contending macroeconomic ideas of social significance, for an interested lay audience.

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The Outstanding Balance

Fresh insights on money, macro, and society

The Outstanding BalanceDanny Roberts

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Here are the pieces I'm most proud of from 2024.

The pieces I'm most proud of from 2024

In my first piece I explored a question that in some ways was central to a journey I've been on since about 2018: Why did money keep working just fine when it stopped being backed by gold? In many ways, the question itself reflects the common but mistaken assumption that during periods of time in the past when money did have some relationship to gold it was that relationship to gold itself that was the primary, or perhaps only, thing that gave that money any value. In the course of exploring this question, I had to turn my understanding of money on its head, and this piece was as much about that journey as it was about answering the question itself.

Why did money keep working just fine when it stopped being backed by gold?

The year 2021 marked 50 years in a world with no gold standard, when in 1971 US President Nixon suspended international convertibility of the US dollar into gold. Nor was the gold standard replaced with any other sort of commodity standard, like a silver standard or a wheat standard or

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Next, I shared some thoughts I'd been mulling over since the beginning of the 2021-2022 global inflation. This piece developed and played with a very simple mental model for understanding the impact of various policy options for distributing consumption losses during a shortage, and (at a lesser extent) its relationship to inflation. Who gets what in a shortage? provides a useful alternate lens through which to understand policy options in the face of shortages, especially temporary shortages.

Who gets what in a shortage?

In America, we aren’t accustomed to hearing much about shortages. But starting in 2020, we all began to hear a lot about them. First, there were toilet paper shortages. Then there were mask and PPE shortages. With many adjusting to staying at home, purchases of imported durable goods surged, and

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My longest, and possibly densest, piece of the year switched gears from high level understandings to the nuts and bolts of the US money system. What I'm most proud of in this piece is how much ground it covers while building up the context more or less from scratch—in about 15 minutes for a fast reader. If this is an entirely new topic for you, you may have to stop to look a few things up along the way, but once you've made it all the way through How the US money system works, you'll have a better understanding of the monetary system than many people whose jobs you'd really think would require them to understand this stuff.

How the US money system works

Understanding the nuts and bolts of how the US monetary system works might seem daunting. And I’m not going to lie, it kind of is. But by the end of this piece you’ll understand the basic details of its setup and operation. Every country’s monetary system is set up slightly

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Next, I wrote a piece about the somewhat counterintuitive relationship between the money that governments spend and the money that they collect in taxes. I made the case that while phrases like "taxpayer money" are perhaps the most common way to refer to public spending, phrases like that are based on a fairly fundamental misunderstanding of public finances. What's the relationship between public spending and taxpayers? explores the multiple layers of this question while giving the reader a mental model for public finances that's just as simple but in many ways much more accurate. I quite like this piece.

What’s the relationship between public spending and taxpayers?

Author’s note: Thank you for all of your support so far. I’m still just getting started, and I’m trying out different topics and styles. I’ve enabled feedback buttons for members, so you can use those to register your appreciation or displeasure, and as always feel free to reach out to

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More recently, I wrote a nice short piece about the strange way we allow the public to think of the US's national debt. In Many people think the national debt is their personal debt—and we mostly just let them, I show how a brief clip from a 1992 US presidential debate says a lot about the place the national debt holds in our collective psyche, and why it's totally wrong—and if anything almost exactly backwards. I like this piece in part because of how short it is.

Many people think the national debt is their personal debt—and we mostly just let them

I came across a clip the other day, from the 1992 presidential debate, in which George H. W. Bush is asked a question about the national debt. It’s short if you want to take a look. Most of the media commentary focused on the then-president’s response performance—the moment where

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Finally, I ended the year with another rather long piece about the US government's payment of interest. At times rather technical and full of supporting information, Think of interest as just another government spending program flips on its head the conventional conception of why government pays interest at all, shows why it is an active choice rather than a passive inevitability, and explains some of the operational details that underlie the practice. At times challenging, it leaves readers with an accurate but freshly unconventional perspective and much to think about.

Think of interest as just another government spending program

This piece covers government interest payments, and US government interest payments in particular, with the hope of offering the reader a fundamentally new way of understanding them. I will argue the payment by government of interest (on liabilities denominated in its currency) is best thought of as a government spending

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Other posts

The other four pieces I wrote this year are on the shorter side and touch on a wider variety of topics than the "money systems and macroeconomics" bread and butter of this newsletter. For completeness, here they are:

Film recommendation: Finding the Money

I’ve had a busy couple of months since my last piece, What’s the relationship between public spending and taxpayers?, and it will likely be another few weeks until I post again. In the meantime, I wanted to make a quick plug for a new film called Finding the Money which

The Outstanding BalanceDanny Roberts

On relating in the present to bursts of enthusiasm from the past

I noticed a pattern in myself that goes back a long time. I get really excited about something. I decide to spend time on it. I spend some time on it, and it’s fun and exciting. Then out of nowhere, and WAY too early, I get discouraged. I start to

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The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) is very short and worth a read

In times of turmoil, it is sometimes difficult to think over the sound of the yelling. The US has an election tomorrow that is widely seen as having very high stakes. Election season, and politics more broadly, always involve a bending and reshaping of individuals’ conception of reality to conform

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More eligible voters don’t vote than vote for either US party

Our media typically cover elections by zooming in on people who vote, treating this as the “100%” of which other vote counts are proportions. But it’s worth remembering that if you include everyone who is eligible to vote, the most popular “party” in every US presidential election since 1980 (and

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Finally, a thank you

To those who have encouraged me by reading—and especially engaging me with feedback and followup questions!—I want to send a sincere thank you. This newsletter is a passion project for me, and nothing motivates me more than knowing something I wrote helped someone stop and think about something in a new way. If you've read something that stuck with you, and you haven't reached out to me—please do!

Wishing you all a happy and healthy 2025! 🎉