Though checks' popularity is now waning in favor of electronic payments, checks were, for much of the twentieth century, the most widely used noncash payment method in the United States. How did such a relatively inefficient form of payment become so dominant? This article traces the historical...

This paper deals with the relationship between deflation and economic growth. Although there are numerous theories on the potential effects of deflation on real output, empirical evidence in this field is still scarce and partial. In order to explore the relationship between prices and output in...

This short paper sets out how leaving a monetary union is not the technical impossibility many have recently claimed. It has been done often in the past, and while possibly uncomfortable can be the best available option. Examples are given

The ongoing financial crisis is shaking central bankers' certainties about their mission, and a rethinking of such mission can greatly benefit from a non-finalistic reassessment of how central banking has evolved over the centuries. This paper does so by taking a functional, instead of an...

Money throughout the world has been operating without a defined denominator. Currency names identify nationality but not value. Equal work time is now and has been the center line of gravity of currency exchange rates since the IMF began publishing the data to see it, since 1948. Adoption of an...

The National Bank of Moldova, as well as a number of other central banks in the world, has formulated as basic objective the price stability, and otherwise limiting foreign exchange interventions. These interventions are carried out in strict accordance with the objectives of foreign policy and...

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...

In early monetary systems the unit of account was separate from the medium of exchange. Commodity prices and prices of coins were quoted in terms of a fixed quantity of metal that was embodied by an 'index coin'. Coins circulated at their metal value because coinage was imperfect and fixed...

Exploiting a neglected account of earlier macroeconomic thinking, the present study addresses continuing controversies over the revolutionary status of Keynes' General Theory, and the origins of the Great Depression that inspired it. Although G.D.H. Cole's reputation as a labour historian...