The history of money teaches much or it can be made to teach much. It is, indeed, exceedingly doubtful if much that is durable can be learned about money in any other way … From the history we can also see more vividly than in any other way, how money and the techniques for its management and mismanagement were evolved and how they now serve or fail to serve. It is from the past that we see how new institutions – corporations, trade unions and the welfare state – have altered the problem of maintaining price stability in the present and how changing circumstances – movement to a class structure in which fewer and fewer people are successfully taught to take less, the changing political interest of the affluent – have greatly complicated the task.

Capitalist society … is defined by the additional phenomenon of credit creation – by the practice, responsible for so many outstanding features of modern economic life, of financing enterprise by bank credit, i.e., by money (notes or deposits) manufactured for that purpose.