Money Quotes

“For a century or more, the “civilized” world regarded as a manifestation of its wealth metal dug from deep in the ground, refined at great labor, and transported great distances to be buried again in elaborate vaults deep under the ground,”
― Felix Martin, Money: The Unauthorised Biography

“If money is in essence transferable credit—rather than a commodity medium of exchange, as the academic economists insisted—then fundamentally different factors explain the economy’s demand for it. Meeting demand for commodities is a simple matter of ensuring a sufficient supply on the market. When it comes to transferable credit, however, volume alone is not enough: the creditworthiness of the issuer and the liquidity of the liability come into play. And both these factors are determined not technologically or physically but by the general levels of trust and confidence.”
― Felix Martin, Money: The Unauthorized Biography

“From the moneyless economics of the classical school there evolved modern, orthodox macroeconomics: the science of monetary society taught in universities and deployed by central banks.

From the practitioners’ economics of Bagehot, meanwhile, there evolved the academic discipline of finance—the tools of the trade taught in business schools, used by bankers and bond traders.

One was an intellectual framework for understanding the economy without money, banks, and finance. The other was a framework for understanding money, banks, and finance, without the rest of the economy.

The result of this intellectual apartheid was that when in 2008 a crisis in the financial sector caused the biggest macroeconomic crash in history, and when the economy failed to recover afterwards because the banking sector was broken, neither modern macroeconomics nor modern finance could make head nor tail of it.”
― Felix Martin, Money: The Unauthorised Biography

“The monetary standard had always been flexible: indeed, that was precisely what the perennial struggle between the sovereign and his mercantile subjects had always been about. The value of money depended not on the stuff that the coinage was made of but on the creditworthiness and authority of the sovereign who stood behind the tariff that specified the nominal value of the coin.”
― Felix Martin, Money: The Unauthorised Biography

“Seek as they might, not a single researcher was able to find a society, historical or contemporary, that regularly conducted its trade by barter.”
― Felix Martin, Money: The Unauthorised Biography

“An IOU which remains for ever a contract between just two parties is nothing more than a loan. It is credit, but it is not money. It is when that IOU can be passed on to a third party—when it is able to be “negotiated” or “endorsed,” in the financial jargon—that credit comes to life and starts to serve as money. Money, in other words, is not just credit—but transferable credit.”
― Felix Martin, Money: The Unauthorized Biography

“On the one hand, there was the primeval institution of the sacrifice and the egalitarian distribution and communal consumption of its roast meat—a ritual expression of tribal solidarity before deity probably inherited from the most distant Indo-European past.9 This was the institution that governed the “long-term transactional order.” On the other, there were the conventions of reciprocal gift-exchange and of booty distribution. These were the rules that governed the “short-term transactional order,” concerned not with cosmic order and harmony between the classes but with the more mundane matter of ensuring that the everyday business of primitive society—drinking and hunting when at peace; rape and pillage when at war—did not dissolve into chaos.”
― Felix Martin, Money: The Unauthorized Biography