After the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, Austria adhered to an exchange rate policy of adjustably pegging the schilling to a basket of stable currencies. Over the years the basket changed according to the respective priorities of overall economic policy and eventually shrunk to a single...

This chapter summarizes the case for considering money as a legal institution. The Western liberal tradition, represented here by John Locke’s iconic account of money, describes money as an item that emerged from barter before the state existed. Considered as an historical practice, money is...

The loss of risk-free status for US Treasuries carries significant implications for cash management and collateral operations, the functioning of market interest rate floors, notions of “risk-free” in accounting, financial and portfolio modeling applications, and likely foreshadows an...

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies’ spectacular rise over the past years has attracted considerable public and academic interest. The important question arising in this context is whether cryptocurrencies can legitimately be regarded as money. This paper contributes to the current discourse by...

Against the background of modern-day monetary proposals, ranging from a return to the gold standard to the wholesale abolition of currency, this paper seeks to draw implications from David Ricardo’s Proposals for an Economical and Secure Currency for plans to reform the operation of central...

In the modern lexicon, money is pure instrumentality, a colorless medium that transparently expresses real value. Contrary to that trope, however, we can get “inside” money: we can reconnoiter it as a structure entailing value that is engineered by certain societies. Taking a...

How has the impact of wars affected our historical understanding of U.S. economic performance? While most economists believe the Federal Reserve has improved performance, the existing literature fails to account for exogenous shocks such as periods of war. This paper compares U.S. economic...

It is widely assumed that there are no close precedents against which to benchmark the internationalisation of the renminbi (RMB). This paper argues that this overlooks the PRC's own recent economic history. This paper shows that efforts to internationalise the RMB in the 1970s offer important...

We use the demise of silver-based standards in the 19th century to explore price dynamics when a commodity-based money ceases to function as a global unit of account. We develop a general equilibrium model of the global economy with gold and silver money. Calibration of the model shows that...

Global economic trade is often argued to be as old as trade. The question of the nature of the exchange is the issue. While tin from England may have reached Sumeria 4,000 years ago, or Phoenicians' ships entered the Africa area of Cape Palmas at about the same time, the problem of exchange is a...