The series Quaderni di ricerca launched by the Laboratory of Research in Monetary Economics (RMELab), an institute of the Centre for Banking Studies (CSB) of Lugano-Vezia, Switzerland, founded with the view to exploring and proposing new lines of research in the field of monetary economics. One of the aims of this series of working papers is to present the reader with the main findings of a research programme in which bank money is given a prominent position. Another is to spark off a scientific debate over the principal issues in monetary economics. Further progress in our understanding of the laws of monetary economics is needed if we want to confront constructively and fight problems such as inflation, unemployment, exchange rate fluctuation and external debt servicing.
1. The Double Charge of External Debt Servicing, by Bernard Schmitt
This first working paper is symbolically devoted to the external debt problem and gives a foretaste of our approach and shows the way we tend to contribute to this urgent task.
2. World Monetary Disorders – Exchange Rate Erratic Fluctuations, by Alvaro Cencini
Why do exchange rates fluctuate? In this paper we shall attempt to show how the problem should be tackled in order to develop a solution that guarantees an intrinsic exchange rate stability.
3. Why the Net Interest on External Debt Weighs Double on LCDs, by Bernard Schmitt
What this paper purports to prove is that the sum of net interests paid by developing countries to the rest of the world runs to a total cost equal to twice its value.
4. What Future for the International and European Monetary Systems, by Alvaro Cencini
In the present system, fixed exchange rates have a cost that exceeds their advantages and makes them not viable in the long term. What is needed at the international level is a system in which exchange rate stability becomes an automatic result of its current mechanism, without any need for countries to intervene on the foreign exchange market or to limit their monetary sovereignty. This may be achieved through a reform allowing for the vehicular use of the unit chosen as the international currency, and based on the principles of bank money and multilateral clearing.
5. An Experience in Banking Departimentalisation – The Bank Act of 1844, by Xavier Bradley
the endogenous money approach enables us to consider anew the question of banking structures designed to prevent malfunctions in money creation. Analysing the shortcomings of the Bank Act of 1844 then allows to lay the basis for a system of departmentalisation at the level of the commercial banks. This would enable the banks to isolate credit for the creation of new incomes and credit for the loan of existing incomes to finance consumption and capital accumulation.
6. The Meaning of Bank Deposits, by Sergio Rossi
In an attempt to build a bridge between the liquid store of wealth and the means of payment conceptions of money, this paper suggests that Smith’s (1976) distinction between money proper and money’s worth may be useful in order to disentangle, at the conceptual level, the two principal functions that the thing called ‘money’ carries out within a
modern production economy.
7. Revisiting Hayek – The Nexus of Value, Knowledge and Politics, by Niklas S. Damiris
This is an essay in the history of ideas exploring the implications of Hayek’s complex body of work for doing social science.
I propose to examine Keynes’s genuine reasoning. I shall argue that his dismissal of ex ante and ex post analysis is not an oddity at all: it is in accordance with his theory of the effective demand and his rejection of the orthodox theory which considered employment as a variable determined within a comprehensive price system.
9. Economics and Mathematics, by Joseba Felix Tobar-Arbulu
We can define pure mathematics as the investigation, by conceptual (a priori) means, of problems concerning conceptual systems, or members of such, with the aim of finding (inventing or discovering) the patterns satisfied by such objects – a finding justified only by rigorous proof.
We will instead present a critical evaluation of the major theoretical features shared by these three analytical frameworks, with the explicit purpose of clearing the way for a new macroeconomic approach to macroeconomics.
11. Central Bank Money and Payment Finality, by Sergio Rossi
This paper investigates the question of payment finality at the interbank level, that is, in the monetary circuit involving banks and the central bank at the top of them.
12. Between Nations, the Interest Multiplier is Equal to 2, by Bernard Schmitt
In this paper we present an idea that is either utter nonsense or truly “revolutionary”. We claim that the interest payments effected by the debtor country, x billion dollars, increase its total debt stocks by the sum of x billion dollars while, at the same time, diminishing its official reserves by an equivalent amount, x billion dollars again. If this double effect proves to be true, the “interest theorem” is established.
The purpose of this paper is therefore to shed further light on the endogenous nature of money. Contrary to the
established post-Keynesian perspective – what we call here the evolutionary view – we argue that money has always
been endogenous, irrespective of the historical period.