Excerpt from Money and Currency in Relation to Industry, Prices, and the Rate of Interest There are so many books upon money that the author of a new one needs to offer a word of justification. This book differs from others in several important respects. While it is intended to be a complete exposition of the science of money, aiming its appeal at the understanding rather than at the prejudices of men, its unique characteristics, if it possess any, will be found in the deep practical significance it discovers in the phenomena of price, in its analysis of the demand for money, in its exposition of credit as related to prices and the rate of interest, and in the clearness it gives to the concepts of commodity money, fiat money, and credit money. This book deals with money as an independent economic entity, and seeks to bring out the fact that "price" in the world of business is a more important word than "value." Economists have too generally assumed that money, being only a medium of exchange, can be left out of calculation in a scientific explanation of the phenomena of production and consumption. They reduce trade to terms of barter, assuming that men work for goods and that they exchange goods for goods. Money cannot thus be set aside. It is itself an economic good, one of the most important in the entire list; and changes in its value exert a powerful influence on the production and distribution of wealth. Indeed, the welfare of society is influenced more by changes in its value than by changes in the value of any other commodity. As is pointed out in Chapter VI, the maladjustment of prices caused by a change of relation between the money demand and the money supply is equivalent to a new alignment of values. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.