"Since the financial crisis of 2008-09, central bankers around the world have been forced to abandon conventional monetary policy tools in favour of unconventional policies such as quantitative easing, forward guidance, lowering the interest rate paid on bank reserves into negative territory,...

In 1913 and 1914, A. Mitchell Innes published a pair of articles that stand as two of the best pieces written in the twentieth century on the nature of money. Only recently rediscovered, these articles are reprinted and analyzed here for the first time