CHAPTER20

Money

In This Chapter

  • From barter to bills: the evolution of money
  • What happened to the gold standard?
  • Understanding the money supply
  • How money is created

From the earliest days of barter more than 10,000 years ago to the complexity of our modern economy, with its need to manage a nation’s money supply, humans are clearly an enterprising species. We have been clever in fulfilling the necessities of our survival, devising all manner of instruments and mechanisms to achieve our individual and collective goals.

This chapter begins by discovering the earliest forms of exchange and how money became a vital part of the development of economies ...

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