The nature of money under a commodity standard: exogenous or endogenous?

Abstract

The aim of the present article is to discuss the nature of money under a commodity standard. The notion of money supply endogeneity, endorsed by Post-Keynesian (PK) scholars within the institutional framework of modern credit economies, is extended to the case of a gold standard regime by recourse to the view of early classical economists, which highlights the endogenous determination of the supply of precious metals in a long-period position. This interpretation represents a more robust and natural extension of the PK approach than the neoclassical quantity-theoretic framework employed by several PK scholars to give account of the normal working of this monetary system.