Explains the functions of money and credit to young readers.

This widely acclaimed book argues that money is not the product of a simple deposit multiplier process. The impressive analysis includes discussions of the origins and nature of money and of the evolution of monetary institutions and theory. Unlike other recent works on 'endogenous money', this book incorporates liquidity preference theory within the analysis by carefully distinguishing money from liquidity and by showing how money, but not liquidity, is created on demand. This naturally leads to a role for liquidity preference in the determination of interest rates. Extensions then link money to financial instability, the expenditure multiplier, credit, saving, investment, development, deficits and growth. This controversial and provocative book will be essential reading for all economists and researchers concerned with monetary and macroeconomics. It will have particular appeal to post Keynesian economists.

This book offers a fresh and uniquely sociological perspective on money and credit. As basic economic institutions, money and credit are easy to overlook when they work well. When they malfunction, as they did in the new millennium’s global financial crisis, their importance becomes obvious and demands further investigation. Bruce Carruthers and Laura Ariovich examine the social dimensions of money and credit at both the individual and corporate levels, from the development of personal credit and a consumer society, to the role of government in the creation of money. In clear prose, they illustrate how the overall future of the economy is governed by the financial system and the flow of capital into, and out of, firms operating in particular industrial sectors, as well as the social meanings money itself acquires and the ways people distinguish between “dirty” and “clean” money. This accessible and engaging book will be essential reading for upper-level students of economic sociology, and those interested in how the bills, coins and plastic in our pockets shape the world we live in.

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.