The paper examines some aspects of the monetary controversies which took place in several countries during the nineteenth century. In Brazil, advocates of the gold standard and monetary restraint, known as "metalistas", prevailed over "papelistas", whose major desire was monetary expansion and...

This article analyses the working of the gold standard, pointing out the inconsistencies of the traditional view, based on Hume’s specie flow-price mechanism, which ignores Adam Smith’s “law of reflux”, and the properties of a commodity-money regime. Avoiding the aprioristic and...