L. Randall Wray (Ed.). Credit and State Theories of Money: The Contributions of A. Mitchell Innes (Book Review‪)‬

L. Randall Wray (ed.). Credit and State Theories of Money: The Contributions of A. Mitchell Innes. Cheltenham, UK, and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. 2004. Pp. x +271. ISBN 1 84376 513 6. $US59.95. Institutionalist and Post Keynesian economists such as Randall Wray (1998) and Stephanie Bell (2000) began calling our attention to the Chartalist approach to monetary economics in the late1990s; they claim that this approach offers superior insight into the historical origins of money, its essential nature, and the design of monetary and fiscal policy. They find elements of Chartalism (from the Latin charta, ticket, token, piece of paper) in the monetary economics of Adam Smith, Keynes, Schumpeter, Polanyi, Abba Lerner, Dudley Dillard, Charles Goodhart and Hyman Minsky. This book presents the Chartalist version of the origins of money and its critique of orthodox monetary economics, focusing on the contributions of one of the early Chartalists, Alfred Mitchell Innes, a British diplomat and financial adviser.