Next Reading Group Meeting (9/14)
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009At our previous meeting we treated Smith’s theory of money more closely, departing from his “violent metaphor” of a “waggon-way in the air,” to take up “Daedalian” questions about if and how a gold (or gold and silver) standard operates in The Wealth of Nations. We were delighted to find Smith a proponent of regulation. We thought about trust, bills of exchange, and we briefly treated Innes’ abstraction of money as credit-debt. Innes, described a “money crank” by one of our participants, makes another appearance at our next meeting.
Reading Assignment
John Maynard Keynes and A. Mitchell Innes are paired here for as representatives of state and credit-centered critique.
- A. M. Innes, “The Credit Theory of Money”
- J. M. Keynes, A Treatise on Money, Vol. I, chap. 1, “The Classification of Money”