Steve Roth ([email protected]) is a serial entrepreneur and the publisher of Evonomics.com. T. Sabri Öncü ([email protected]) is an economist based in İstanbul, Turkey. A slightly edited version of this article first appeared in the Indian journal, Economic and Political Weekly on 11 July 2020. “Financial Assets = Liabilities.” It’s one of the great accounting-identity truisms of economic understanding — both among traditional, mainstream economists, and even (especially) among many heterodox, “accounting based” practitioners. It seems obvious: When a company issues and sells bonds, it posts a liability to its balance sheet; the bond buyers hold financial assets on theirs.[1]The problem is, that truism isn’t even close to true. The most obvious

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