Some Science of Money Updates, 2016

Abstract

Money is all ‘everyday’ money, Biblical issue and a pure concept to study. This is so that in its depth money is suspected in the literature to be a double controversial essence, i.e. (1) representative and (2) fiat, both of these rather philosophically and morally vulnerable. Thirdly, then historically sometimes one of these two dominated the other (e.g. representative money under primitive monetary systems and gold standard); other times it even seams that one of them (e.g. representative money, after the last World War) has disappeared and leaved the scene. Besides, there were international monetary systems (IMS) that came up and went off; the last one that was European (i.e. the EMS, 1979-1999) was followed by the unique ‘common currency’ of a multicountry region. Briefly, our proposal here is for revealing new issues and aspects that equally lie around, although less seen or even unseen, whereas they actually reflect both that we know more today than in the past and that money are likely to reiterate stories from the same past that keep familiar. Our findings might be: a third money concept zone, besides representative and fiat, i.e. money neutrality, the old story of barter, as pre-money, renewed, the famous gold standard, reviewed as the ‘top advanced’ barter episode, theories of international monetary system (IMS) and optimum currency area (OCA) face to face, and ultimately some more defies for the European common currency.