Money, in this paper, is defined as a power relationship of a specific kind, a stratified social debt relationship, measured in a unit of account determined by some authority. A brief historical examination reveals its evolving nature in the process of social provisioning. Money not only...

Over the past two decades there has been a revival of Georg Friedrich Knapp's "state money" approach, also known as chartalism. The modern version has come to be called Modern Money Theory. Much of the recent research has delved into three main areas: mining previous work, applying the theory to...

The paper is devoted to an analysis of the Treaty on Stability Coordination and Governance (TSCG), also known as the "Fiscal Compact" Treaty signed between the EU member states in 2012. We argue than the TSCG, instead of helping to "repair" the institutional failures on which the Euro and the...

This paper examines the views of Hyman Minsky and Abba Lerner on the functional finance approach to fiscal policy. It argues that the main principles of functional finance were relatively widely held in the immediate postwar period. However, with the rise of the Phillips curve, the return of the...

The aim of this paper is to develop a structural explanation of the subprime mortgage crisis, grounded on the combination of two apparently incompatible financial theories: the financial instability hypothesis by Hyman P. Minsky and the theory of capital market inflation by Jan Toporowski. Our...

One of the main contributions of Modern Money Theory (MMT) has been to explain why monetarily sovereign governments have a very flexible policy space that is unencumbered by hard financial constraints. Through a detailed analysis of the institutions and practices surrounding the fiscal and...

This paper explores the rise of money and class society in ancient Greece, drawing historical and theoretical parallels to the case of ancient Egypt. In doing so, the paper examines the historical applicability of the chartalist and metallist theories of money. It will be shown that the origins...

The modern approach to the market as a place with autonomy depends on a certain view of money. According to that view, money is a neutral technology that expresses individual choices made about real goods and services. But the controversies over money that regularly arise in political...

Fears of deflation and long-term stagnation have become more commonplace since the Great Recession. Yet, within the mainstream, economists are divided into two camps: those who see the benefits of downward wage and price adjustment, as a private sector stabilizer, and those who fear deflationary...

This special issue of the PSL Quarterly Review includes some articles which appeared over the years in the first series of our journal (then entitled BNL Quarterly Review: see Roncaglia 2008). The articles published below have been selected among those that can help us to best understand the...