The History Of Money And Monetary Arrangements

Today, most money is credit money, created by commercial banks. While credit can finance innovation, excessive credit can lead to boom/bust cycles, such as the recent financial crisis. This highlights how the organization of our monetary system is crucial to stability. One way to achieve this is by separating the unit of account from the medium of exchange and in pre-modern Europe, such a separation existed. This new volume examines this idea of monetary separation and this history of monetary arrangements in the North and Baltic Seas region, from the Hanseatic League onwards. This book provides a theoretical analysis of four historical cases in the Baltic and North Seas region, with a view to examining evolution of monetary arrangements from a new monetary economics perspective. Since the objective exhange value of money (its purchasing power), reflects subjective individual valuations of commodities, the author assesses these historical cases by means of exchange rates. Using theories from new monetary economics , the book explores how the units of account and their media of exchange evolved as social conventions, and offers new insight into the separation between the two. Through this exploration, it puts forward that money is a social institution, a clearing device for the settlement of accounts, and so the value of money, or a separate unit of account, ultimately results from the size of its network of users. The History of Money and Monetary Arrangements offers a highly original new insight into monetary arrangments as an evolutionary process. It will be of great interest to an international audience of scholars and students, including those with an interest in economic history, evolutionary economics and new monetary economics.

Modern monetary economics has been significantly influenced by the knowledge and insight brought to the field by the work of Anna J. Schwartz, an economist whose career has spanned almost half a century. Her contributions evidence a broad expertise in international history and policy, and an ability to apply the results of her careful historical research to current issues and debates. Money in Historical Perspective is a collection of sixteen of her papers selected by Michael D. Bordo and Milton Friedman. Grouped into three sections, the essays constitute a number of Dr. Schwartz's most cited articles on the subject of monetary economics, many of which are no longer readily accessible. In the papers in part I, dating from 1947 to the present, Dr. Schwartz examines money and banking in the United States and the United Kingdom from a historical perspective. Her investigation of the historical evidence linking economic instability to erratic monetary behavior—this behavior itself a product of discretionary monetary policy—has led her to argue for the importance of stable money, and her writings on these issues over the last two decades form part II. The volume concludes with four recent articles on international monetary arrangements, including Dr. Schwartz's well-known work on the gold standard. This volume of classic essays by Anna Schwartz will be a useful addition to the libraries of scholars and students for its exemplary historical research and commentary on monetary systems.

Since 1983 Hong Kong has pegged its currency to the US dollar through a currency board system that is unique among the world's advanced economies. In this first comprehensive book about Hong Kong's monetary system, Tony Latter draws on his considerable experience in central banking generally, and with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority in particular, to give a detailed account of how the system operates; why it was introduced; what are the important differences from other monetary regimes; and how it has performed. After a brief overview of Hong Kong's currency board system, two chapters explain the key features of mainstream monetary policy as practised in most economies and how the currency board differs. Then three chapters deal with the history of money in Hong Kong from the mid-1930s, describing the salient events and changes of the period up to the 1983 crisis and the consequent re-adoption of the currency board. Descriptions of the functioning of the system after 1983 and its evolution to the present day then follow. The book concludes with assessments of the performance of the currency board since 1983 and of the Hong Kong economy more widely. This book is designed both to inform lay readers and to provide substance for monetary economists. Given the key role of monetary policy in providing a stable foundation for a strong economy, the book is of importance for all business people in Hong Kong, while the more analytical sections provide essential reading for all students of economics.

This book covers the history of money and finance. It is the result of fifteen years of research by the author, Alexander Del Mar, in great libraries and coin collections of Europe. He traced the historical development in all ages of which any coinage or other numismatic remains exist. He reveals in the great states of antiquity that money was a pillar of the constitution, its usage, its meaning in different countries at different times and how private coinage originated. It describes it's physical component and the discussion about its value, whether the value of money constitutes the metal or paper from which it is made or its numerical relation, and what governmental body should control this.

"A History of Money - From Ancient Times to the Present Day is a highly readable account of the central importance of money in both everyday and business life. There are relatively few books on monetary history and those that exist tend to be narrow in geographical scope and historical focus. In his book, Glyn Davies takes a broad perspective and analyses the development and role of money in many of the world's nations from ancient to modern times."--Jacket.

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art research in the field of monetary and financial history. The authors comprise different generations of leading scholars from universities worldwide. Thanks to its unrivaled breadth both in time (from antiquity to the present) and geographical coverage (from Europe to the Americas and Asia), the volume is set to become a key reference for historians, economists, and social scientists with an interest in the subject. The handbook reflects the existing variety of scholarly approaches in the field, from theoretically driven macroeconomic history to the political economy of monetary institutions and the historical evolution of monetary policies. Its thematic sections cover a wide range of topics, including the historical origins of money; money, coinage, and the state; trade, money markets, and international currencies; money and metals; monetary experiments; Asian monetary systems; exchange rate regimes; monetary integration; central banking and monetary policy; and aggregate price shocks.

An objective and perceptive account of the literature of monetary theory, this volume, by a central banker who has studied monetary theory over the last quarter of a century, clearly shows how its inherent complexity is much enriched by the study of its history. In three parts Filippo Cesarano: focuses on the innovative ideas of distinguished economists who anticipated modern theories, elaborating on them along lines that suggest original research programmes examines the impact of expectations on the effectiveness of monetary policy, illustrating how different assumptions within the classical paradigm lead to diverse hypotheses and policy design investigates the role of monetary theory in shaping monetary institutions. Deserving of a wide readership among both academic economists and monetary policy practitioners, this collection of essays is key reading for students and researchers engaged with monetary theory and the history of economics and policy makers seeking to weigh up the assumptions underlying different theories in order to select the models best suited to the problems they face.