Today, most money is credit money, created by commercial banks. While credit can finance innovation, excessive credit can lead to boom/bust cycles, such as the recent financial crisis. This highlights how the organization of our monetary system is crucial to stability. One way to achieve this is by separating the unit of account from the medium of exchange and in pre-modern Europe, such a separation existed. This new volume examines this idea of monetary separation and this history of monetary arrangements in the North and Baltic Seas region, from the Hanseatic League onwards. This book provides a theoretical analysis of four historical cases in the Baltic and North Seas region, with a view to examining evolution of monetary arrangements from a new monetary economics perspective. Since the objective exhange value of money (its purchasing power), reflects subjective individual valuations of commodities, the author assesses these historical cases by means of exchange rates. Using theories from new monetary economics , the book explores how the units of account and their media of exchange evolved as social conventions, and offers new insight into the separation between the two. Through this exploration, it puts forward that money is a social institution, a clearing device for the settlement of accounts, and so the value of money, or a separate unit of account, ultimately results from the size of its network of users. The History of Money and Monetary Arrangements offers a highly original new insight into monetary arrangments as an evolutionary process. It will be of great interest to an international audience of scholars and students, including those with an interest in economic history, evolutionary economics and new monetary economics.

This book covers the history of money and finance. It is the result of fifteen years of research by the author, Alexander Del Mar, in great libraries and coin collections of Europe. He traced the historical development in all ages of which any coinage or other numismatic remains exist. He reveals in the great states of antiquity that money was a pillar of the constitution, its usage, its meaning in different countries at different times and how private coinage originated. It describes it's physical component and the discussion about its value, whether the value of money constitutes the metal or paper from which it is made or its numerical relation, and what governmental body should control this.

Modern monetary economics has been significantly influenced by the knowledge and insight brought to the field by the work of Anna J. Schwartz, an economist whose career has spanned almost half a century. Her contributions evidence a broad expertise in international history and policy, and an ability to apply the results of her careful historical research to current issues and debates. Money in Historical Perspective is a collection of sixteen of her papers selected by Michael D. Bordo and Milton Friedman. Grouped into three sections, the essays constitute a number of Dr. Schwartz's most cited articles on the subject of monetary economics, many of which are no longer readily accessible. In the papers in part I, dating from 1947 to the present, Dr. Schwartz examines money and banking in the United States and the United Kingdom from a historical perspective. Her investigation of the historical evidence linking economic instability to erratic monetary behavior—this behavior itself a product of discretionary monetary policy—has led her to argue for the importance of stable money, and her writings on these issues over the last two decades form part II. The volume concludes with four recent articles on international monetary arrangements, including Dr. Schwartz's well-known work on the gold standard. This volume of classic essays by Anna Schwartz will be a useful addition to the libraries of scholars and students for its exemplary historical research and commentary on monetary systems.

The master teacher of American economic history covers money and banking in the whole of American history, to show that the meltdown of our times is hardly the first. And guess what caused them in the past? Paper money, loose credit, reckless lending standards, government profligacy, and central banking. When will we learn? When people understand the cause and effect in the history of these repeating calamities. In a complete revision of the standard account, Rothbard traces inflation, banking panics, and money meltdowns from the Colonial Period through the mid 20th century to show how government systematic war on sound money is the hidden force behind nearly all major economic calamities in American history. Never has the story of money and banking been told with such rhetorical power and theoretical vigor. Here is how this book came to be. Rothbard died in 1995, leaving many people to wish that he had written a historical treatise on this topic. But the the archives assisted: Rothbard had in fact left & nbsp several large manuscripts dedicated to American banking history. In the course of his career, meanwhile, he had published other pieces along the same lines, but they appeared in venues not readily accessible. Given the desperate need for a single volume that covers the topic, the Mises Institute put together this thrilling book. So seamless is the style and argument, and comprehensive is coverage, that it might as well have been written in exactly the format. The end result is Rothbards (and the Austrian Schools) answer to Friedman and Schwartz. Sections in this 500 page treatise: I. "The History of Money and Banking Before the Twentieth Century." This was Rothbards contribution to the minority report of the US Gold Commission and treats the evolution of the US monetary system from its colonial beginnings. II. "Origins of the Federal Reserve." This thrilling paper lay unpublished for a long time and only recently appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. It is easily the most comprehensive account in print. It names names and shows the constellation of interest group affiliations that led to its creation. III. "From Hoover to Roosevelt: The Federal Reserve and the Financial Elites." This previously unpublished paper goes into great detail on how the Morgan and Rockefeller financial interests shaped the political and behavior of the Fed. IV. "The Gold Exchange Standard in the Interwar Years." This large section has appeared in print but not in its full version. Rothbard elucidates the reasons why the British and US government in the 1920s re created the gold standard in a manner that was profoundly flawed and potentially inflationary (leading to the Great Depression). V. "The New Deal and the International Monetary System" This section appeared in a volume first published in 1976 and which is now very difficult to find. Rothbard argues that an abrupt shift occurred in monetary policy just before the US entered World War. He shows who benefited from the shift from dollar nationalism to dollar imperialism. He concludes with a smashing attack and expose of the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. From the introduction by Joseph Salerno: "Rothbard employs the Misesian approach to economic history consistently and dazzlingly throughout the volume to unravel the causes and consequences of events and institutions ranging over the course of U.S. monetary history, from the colonial times through the New Deal era. One of the important benefits of Rothbards unique approach is that it naturally leads to an account of the development of the U.S. monetary system in terms of a compelling narrative linking human motives and plans that often-times are hidden and devious, leading to outcomes that sometimes are tragic. One will learn much more about monetary history from reading this exciting story than from poring over reams of statistical analysis.

Finally, the authors outline the reforms necessary to create monetary, financial and banking systems free of the episodic inflation, devaluation, debt crises, and exchange rate volatility that have plagued the twentieth century.