In this working paper I will examine the intellectual history of an alternative to the orthodox
approach to money and credit. Charles Goodhart has usefully distinguished between what he
called the orthodox “Metalist” and the heterodox “Chartalist” approaches. The first focuses on
money as a medium of exchange, which in the past derived its value through a link to precious
metal. This is not meant to imply orthodoxy excludes the other functions of money, or to claim
that modern orthodox economists would want to return to a gold standard. Rather, the focus on
money’s metallic origins as a cost-minimizing medium of exchange frames thinking about the
nature of money.
Many orthodox policy prescriptions follow fairly directly from this vision, in particular
the view that money’s value is linked to its scarcity. The advantage of the gold standard was
precisely the imposed scarcity, while the problem with fiat money is that it can be “dropped by
helicopters,” as in Friedman’s famous analogy. Hence in the absence of linking money to gold,
we must find another way to constrain its supply so that the money supply just matches demand
at a stable price.
The second approach is much more consistent with the legal view of money. It could be
said that “money is a creature of law” with emphasis on the link between money and contracts;
for example, whatever is defined as legal money can be delivered to settle contracts.2
Legal
tender laws normally require that the State’s own currency must be accepted. Hence, it
highlights the important role played by “authorities” in the origins and evolution of money. In
the Chartalist approach, the State (or any other authority able to impose an obligation) imposes a
liability in the form of a generalized, social or legal unit of account—a money—used for
measuring the obligation. This does not require the pre-existence of markets, and, indeed,
almost certainly predates them. Once the authorities can levy such obligations, they can name
what fulfills this obligation by denominating those things that can be delivered, in other words,
by pricing them. This resolves the conundrum faced by methodological individualists and
emphasizes the social nature of money and markets—which did not spring from the minds of
individual utility maximizers to replace barter, but rather were socially created.