Introduction -- Part I: Guggenheim Prize Lecture -- The Myth of Money as a Veil -- Part II: Financial History -- British Investment Trusts 1868 to 1928: Portfolio Diversification and the Beginnings of Institutional Investment -- Early Reflections on the Democratization of Organized Markets and...

The early scientific literature which developed with the emergence of organized speculation on financial and commodity markets in the second half of the nineteenth century built on the identification of several categories of traders, from professional and amateur speculators to rentiers and...

The idea that speculation exacerbates commodity and stock price volatility dates back at least from the second half of the nineteenth century when an extensive literature emerged to which Marshall contributed. The essence of his arguments, originally applied to commodities and subsequently...

<title>Abstract</title>This paper argues against the distance which has been growing between economic history and history of economic thought (HET). Two examples, drawn from the history of monetary theory, are provided of how neglecting the historical background may lead to erroneous interpretations and...

<title>Abstract</title> We review Keynes's constant concern with commodity prices, both as speculator and as theorist, arguing that it was never divorced from his view on market instability. We also look at Kahn's contribution on buffer stocks, which brought to fruition the original intuition by Keynes,...

[fre] La question posée est de savoir si une marchandise peut être choisie arbitrairement comme étalon monétaire. L'analyse distingue la fonction de l'étalon monétaire et la fonction du numéraire. Ricardo a soulevé la question des caractéristiques que doit avoir la marchandise choisie...