The Domestic Monetary System: Banking and Central Banking

All “modern money” systems (including those of the “past 4000 years at least” as Keynes put it) are state money systems in which the sovereign chooses a money of account and then imposes tax liabilities in that unit. It can then issue currency used to pay taxes. In this chapter we return to our analysis of the operation of today’s monetary system, examining the denomination of IOUs in the state money of account.