tailieunhanh - History of Economic Analysis part 35

History of Economic Analysis part 35. At the time of his death in 1950, Joseph Schumpeter-one of the major figures in economics during the first half of the 20th century-was working on his monumental History of Economic Analysis. A complete history of humankind's theoretical efforts to understand economic phenomena from ancient Greece to the present, this book is an important contribution to the history of ideas as well as to economics. | History of economic analysis 302 5. CREDIT AND BANKING We know that the late scholastics were familiar with practically all the essential features of capitalism. In particular they were familiar with stock exchanges and money markets with lending and banking with bills of exchange and other instruments of So far as the phenomena to be interpreted are concerned the bank note is the only one that was added in the course of the sixteenth century thrusting into the background for about two centuries the oldest form of what came to be called bank money the transferable deposit even Hume as late as 1752 spoke of this new invention of paper. Yet the bank note at least in one of its early forms should not have struck him as a novelty the note that was a goldsmith s receipt for gold actually deposited was really nothing but a device for increasing safety and convenience in handling one s money and fitted in perfectly with older ideas. New however were the practices of which the bank note became the chief vehicle and the importance it acquired in consequence. Daniel Webster in 1839 made note issue the defining trait of a bank. These practices and the phenomena attending them quickly produced an interesting analytic development. The point to grasp is this. When beholding the nascent institutions of capitalism the scholastic doctors and their laical successors did not experience any difficulty in interpreting them and in fitting them into their metallist theory of money. This analytic task was facilitated by their command of the conceptual apparatus of the Roman law. Observing sales contracts that provided for deferred payment they readily analyzed them into a sale proper and a loan of money. The deposit of money being a depositum irregulare conferred ownership on the receiver of the deposit the scholastic fathers might even have deduced that the receiver was not bound in law or morals to keep deposits of this nature in a vault because he owed only tantumdem in genere