Report From The Secret Committee On The Expediency Of The Bank Resuming Cash Payments

This book provides a comprehensive survey of the major developments in monetary theory and policy from David Hume and Adam Smith to Walter Bagehot and Knut Wicksell. In particular, it seeks to explain why it took so long for a theory of central banking to penetrate mainstream thought. The book investigates how major monetary theorists understood the roles of the invisible and visible hands in money, credit and banking; what they thought about rules and discretion and the role played by commodity-money in their conceptualizations; whether or not they distinguished between the two different roles carried out via the financial system - making payments efficiently within the exchange process and facilitating intermediation in the capital market; how they perceived the influence of the monetary system on macroeconomic aggregates such as the price level, output and accumulation of wealth; and finally, what they thought about monetary policy.

Legal scholars from Britain and the US have revised 11 presentations they made to the 14th British Legal History Conference on Parliaments, Juries, and the Law, held in Edinburgh in July 1999. Among their topics are the civil jury in modern Scottish legal history, Medieval Wales, English manorial courts, the origins of the confrontation right and hearsay rule, jury research in the English Reports on CD-ROM, forgery and the jury at the Old Bailey from 1818 to 1821, and malicious prosecution as a test case for the fate of the civil jury in late Victorian England. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR