By Felix Martin
Cash what's cash, and the way does it paintings? the normal solution is that folks as soon as used sugar within the West Indies, tobacco in Virginia, and dried cod in Newfoundland, and that today’s monetary universe advanced from barter. This name tells a background and explains the reality approximately funds: what it's, the place it comes from, and the way it really works. complete description
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Additional resources for Money: The Unauthorised Biography
Sample text
As with any excavation, the first question is where to dig. We have seen that if money is indeed the operating system on which we run our societies and economies, the challenge of getting an objective view is an imposing one. Locating a case in which the official monetary system took a holiday, as it did during the Irish bank strike, might have been easy enough; and through it we learned something about the extent to which money really depends upon the state. If we wish to delve more deeply, however, we need to achieve an altogether more radical triangulation: we need to explore a time and a place where money never existed.
Even when open balances were felt to require settlement, it was not usual for fei to be physically exchanged. ‘The noteworthy feature of this stone currency,’ wrote Furness, ‘is that it is not necessary for its owner to reduce it to possession. ’5 The stone currency of Yap as photographed by William Henry Furness III in 1903, with people and palm trees for scale. 6 This fei, it transpired, had been shipwrecked during a storm while in transit from Babelthuap many years ago. . . 7 When it was published in 1910, it seemed unlikely that Furness’ eccentric travelogue would ever reach the notice of the economics profession.
John Maynard Keynes was right about Yap. William Henry Furness’ description of its curious stone currency may at first appear to be nothing more than a picturesque footnote to the history of money. But it poses some awkward questions of the conventional theory of money. Take, for example, the idea that money emerged out of barter. When Aristotle, Locke, and Smith were making this claim, they were doing so purely on the basis of deductive logic. None of them had ever actually seen an economy that operated entirely via barter exchange.