A crisis is but a crisis when the long run outlook is definitively positive. Then a lower turning point must exist. This implicates a vision or, in the ideal case, a formalized theory of the money economy's possible end states. This theory has to provide an endogenous explanation of end states...

Money has been a part of human history for almost 3,000 years. Despite this, there is still no universal understanding of the ontological nature of money. In this paper, a new approach to the understanding of non-commodity money is proposed. Proceeding from the premise that money is a purely...

We set out a simple four sector macro model of the economy of the Roman Empire during a period of considerable economic prosperity. Our focus is on gold coins as currency and the seignorage which the government used to fund its activities. We solve numerically for a balanced growth...

This article addresses some of the recent proposals for the conduct of monetary policies in the post-bubble environment. Advocacy of higher inflation targets is analyzed, and the challenge of maintaining monetary discipline in the face of massive fiscal deficits and mounting government debts is...

This paper provides a search theoretical model that captures two phenomena that have characterized several episodes of monetary history: currency shortages and the circulation of privately issued notes. As usual in these models, the media of exchange are determined as part of the equilibrium. We...

Some economists have argued theoretically that the private minting of circulating precious metal coins would be inefficient: Due to information asymmetry, money-users would be chronically victimized by low-quality or underweight coins. An examination of experience with private mints during gold...

Contemporaries, and economic historians, have noted several features of medieval and early modern European monetary systems that are hard to analyze using models of centralized exchange. For example, contemporaries complained of recurrent shortages of small change and argued that an...

Debates about the nature and economic role of money are mostly informed by evidence from the 20th century, but money has existed for millennia. We argue that there are many lessons to be learned from monetary history that are relevant for current topics of policy relevance. The past acts as a...

Today all countries have fiat money issued by a central bank. There is no obligation by a central bank to exchange its money for gold or any other good. Central banks have the monopoly to issue central bank money and have the power to create their money out of nothing. Creating such a monetary...