Robert Triffin (1911-1993) was one of the main protagonists in the international monetary debates in the postwar period. He became famous with his book Gold and the Dollar Crisis, published in 1960, in which he predicted the end of the Bretton Woods system. In his analysis there, Triffin was...

The present work offers a review on two divergent schools of thought regarding the subject of money and highlights why understanding it is important to grasp the workings and nature of the concept of money. We adopt a spontaneous order perspective on social institutions, considering money as...

As geopolitical tensions in Europe began to devolve into World War I, international investors began selling stocks and securities on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), converting the proceeds into gold. A massive outflow of gold from the United States would have likely sparked a banking panic....

The Great Depression changed the institutions governing monetary policy. These changes included the departure from the gold standard, an opening of a a new avenue for monetizing government debt, changes in the structure of the the Federal Reserve System, and new monetary powers of the Treasury....

New France, like most European colonies in the New World, suffered from a persistent shortage of metal coins. As Quebec’s imports were limited by French mercantilist policies, their standards of living were constrained by their ability to export a few primary products (mostly fur, cod, timber...

The Global History of Currencies provides information on each currency-issuing country or territory. For each country, a brief history of the country is provided along with details on both coins and banknotes that have been issued in the country. The paper documents currency changes that have...

The paper seeks to throw light at two discrete phenomena that were deemed as decisive for the development of the ancient Hellenic world and for urbanization in that part of the world via the emergence of sovereign urban entities, the Greek poleis. Although distinct, they are two conceptually and...

What determines sovereign risk? We study the London bondmarket from the 1870s to the 1930s. Our findings support conventional wisdom concerning the low credibility of the interwar gold standard. Before 1914 gold standard adherence effectively signalled credibility and shaved 40 to 60 basis...

This paper answers three of the most frequently asked questions received in response to the paper crypt into crypto. We also received questions about stable coins, alt coins and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), which we’ll cover in a future paper

Since the XIX century, technological progress has allowed commercial banks to create ever greater amounts of broad money and credit starting from a unit of monetary base. Crucially, however, at the very low frequencies the relative amounts of the two aggregates created out of a unit of base...

Purpose The article examines Sheikh Ahmad Khatib Al-Minangkabauwi's initial concept of paper money, which in the early 20th century wrote Risala Raf'u Al-Iltibas. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses a qualitative approach based on the critical extraction analysis that can reveal a set of...

In a world where the means of exchange is convertible into the numeraire consumption good at a fixed rate, no one wants to hold money over time - and due to convertibility there is no means by which the Friedman rule can generate deflation. This is the environment we study in this paper in order...

How does international monetary leadership end? This paper examines the decline of the Sterling Area between 1945 and 1979 to understand the process of international economic disintegration. Using an original cross-national panel dataset, we conduct survival analysis which systematically...

This paper examines the question of what kind of money will govern the 21st century by examining the developments which characterise this landscape. On the basis of a review of the available literature and evidence, it is clear that certain technological innovations, such as the movement towards...

Since the inauguration of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin has been under pressure from competing tokens. As Bitcoin is a public open ledger blockchain coin, it has its weaknesses in privacy and anonymity. In the recent decade numerous coins have been initiated as privacy coins, which try to tackle...

Monetary history is largely a repeated narrative of currency debasement. Yet historic Venice (1172-1797), ruled by elite patricians, stands out as an example of relative monetary stability. This paper provides a historical case of Venice’s Zecca Mint which provided the elite patricians of...

Currently numerous market-driven cryptocurrencies challenge to dethrone the state-controlled supply of fiat money. The outcome hinges on the old question of whether privately produced money with or without government is possible. This paper revisits the issue by looking for insights in the...

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether encourage the owners of computing resources to bring ever-increasing levels of processing power to bear in validating the distributed ledger of cryptocurrency purchases and sales. Initial coin offerings (ICOs) involve the sale or other distribution of...

This article seeks to demonstrate that the invention of double-entry accounting, during the 13th and 14th centuries in the cities of northern Italy, was at the origin of the emergence of our monetary system: the credit money system. By showing the limits of the monetary histories that currently...

The procedure of tossing quantum coins and dice is described. This case is an important example of a quantum procedure because it presents a typical framework employed in quantum information processing and quantum computing. The emphasis is on the clarification of the difference between quantum...

This paper provides answers to two questions. The first question is which international monetary regime is best for economic performance? One based on fixed exchange rates: including the gold standard and its variants? Adjustable peg regimes such as the Bretton Woods system and the European...

Existing cryptocurrencies are too volatile to be used as currencies for daily payments. Stable coins, which are cryptocurrencies pegged to other stable financial assets such as the U.S. dollar, are desirable for payments within blockchain networks, whereby being often called the “Holy Grail of...

Theories of rules and discretion suggest that monetary policy rules are first best in terms of social welfare. However, if commitment is not feasible, delegating monetary policy to an independent and conservative central bank can be second best. Monetary policy in Germany during the past one...