Talk:History of money

message: This article is conspicuously missing many examples of early money, such as the cowrie shells, and bronze imitations, which are widely regarded as the first true, standardized money. This brief Nova overview of the history of money is vastly superior to the current article, and wikipedia should aim to surpass it: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/moolah/history.html --Qwasty 05:01, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Early comments

message: What does B.P. stand for? Can somone create a link and an explenation?
:BP means before present, I have added a link to the page explaining it. --PatClay 22:15, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: B.P?

message: In the article: 
"It is said that all gold found on earth (which forms approximately a single cube 20 m a side)".
Is that 20 meters or 20 miles?
:From above, it would be metres, and my understanding is that it would be more like 75 metres to a side in any case, but that depends if we are talking about bullion reserves, or all gold mined, but it is certainly not all gold on earth (including found but unmined reserves), it seems too small. Octothorn 12:28, 28 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: "Total world gold production from its beginnings in prehistory through 2000 was conservatively estimated to be 142,000 t (fig. 1). This cumulative production is equivalent to a cube of gold 19.4 m on a side." This is from the top of page 8, http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2002/of02-303/OFR_02-303.pdf Butterman, W. C. and Amey, Earle B. III, Mineral Commodity Profiles–Gold, Open-File Report 02-303, U.S. Department of the Interior: U.S. Geological Survey. Other parts of this publication use "m" to refer to meters, as in "Modern methods in France and elsewhere have increased this (beating a troy ounce of gold into thin sheets) to about 18 m2 and sometimes more."Jimtpat (talk) 01:27, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Gold amount

message: I've added references to the cowrie shells and imitations to the "commodity money" section of the article.  Feel free to elaborate on those if you have good historical sources (academic works, that is, not TV shows).  I don't otherwise understand the general complaints above and below, as there is extensive and high quality discussion of coinage, commodity money, barter, and credit money.  The credit money part is controversal, but not rubbish: More comments on that below.  
Perhaps these complaints reflect that the article should have a better introduction.  If people agree on this feel free to propose an introduction, or I will.
Meanwhile, I recommend removing the disclaimer that the article "needs attention" as it is an excellent, well above average article and readers shouldn't be discouraged from consulting it. --198.91.39.109 20:34, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Cowrie shells

message: In the last section the following claim is made: "Also the French word for money, Argent, derives from the Greek άργυρος, and translates also to silver."  Surely "argent" it is from Latin "argentum"?  Does anybody know the etymology for certain?
Rhyolite 23:46, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Etymology claims

message: The section on Credit Money in the article is largely rubbish.
There should be some mention of fractional reserve banking in the example section, since that's the only way a bank can lend out someone else's deposits. A 100% reserve would not permit the money to be loaned out without the permission of the owner.
The writer also neglects to mention that the writing of the cheque changes the ownership of the coins, so they are still only owned by one person - you should have them in your account when your cheque is cashed, since they no longer belong to you, so they should probably remain there for the short time until they are reallocated.
It is true that the loaned coins will probably wind up back in the bank again, allowing the reserve requirement to be met more easily, but those loaned coins being returned to not increase the levels of the reserves. I offer a (probably unnecessary) example.
Let's say that I am a very small bank. I have one dollar of deposits and the bank has a 50% reserve requirement, so I loan 50 cents of that dollar - the maximum at this reserve level, which returns to me as a deposit (best case scenario). 
I still have only one real dollar in reality, but I now have $1.5 in deposits against 50 cents in loan.  I can only lend another 25 cents before I meet my reserve limit. So I lend it, and it comes back in another deposit.  Now I have $1.75 in deposits and 75 cents loaned out, but still only one dollar in balance.  I can only lend 12.5 cents, etc.  In reality, I can only have a maximum of 1 dollar loaned out for every 2 dollars in hand. 
Ergo, that part of the Credit Money in this article is really about fractional reserve banking, is poorly written in either case, and should be either removed or moved to fractional reserve banking.
Also I propose the following for the opening paragraphs of that section...
:Credit money often exists in parallel with other money such as fiat money or commodity money.  Most of the western world's money is credit money derived from national fiat money currencies.
:A debt is not money. Debt can not act as a unit of account. All debts are denominated in units of something external to the debt, and so do not affect demand for money (one million dollars is not created when you write it on a cheque, for example). Nor can they be used as a store of value, since the credit is only a reference to money stored elsewhere. Hence credit money is not money, but is a reference to monetary units that already exist prior to the creation of the credit.
Octothorn 12:28, 28 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: There are many theories about credit money, and I can think of hardly any aspect of it where experts all agree.  Feel free to add any theories you think are missing and important, and to reword as theories anything you think is improperly worded as fact.   I agree with most of the additions proposed here, except that most of the statements of supposed fact, such as "debt is not money," should be stated as "many economists believe that debt is not money," or similar, if that is in fact the case.
198.91.39.109 20:34, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Credit Money 

message: The Good article nomination for  has failed
:
Following WP:WIAGA,
:1a)  The prose in this article is not up to a "compelling" standard and many passages are difficult to follow.  The lead section, for example, contains grammatical errors, such as a missing space after a full stop.
:1b)  Lead section should be more focused, a true introduction to the structure of the entire article.  The article itself is well-structured, with each idea flowing naturally into the next.  The etymology section is out of place, as the article regards the history of the concept of money, not the word money itself.  Consider moving the majority to Wikitionary (where word etymology is recorded), and integrating revelant pieces into the main article.
:1d)  Jargon is frequently used without enough background for a lay-reader to understand it from context.  Some examples: "touchstone", "coincidence of wants"; compare with the sufficiently explained jargon "fiat" and "fractional reserve banking".
:2b)  Very few inline citations.  
:2c)  The main source the article appears to have drawn from is a [self-published paper].  This means it has not been peer-reviewed or fact-checked, and should be used only with caution and after comparing to other sources.  See WP:RS
:3) Coverage is sufficiently broad.  As a suggestion, the origins and history of modern financial entities (e.g. stocks and bonds, mortages, national debt) could also be included.
:6a) Images are well-chosen, placement and quantity are good. The license tag of the image "Blombosbeads3.jpg‎" is obsolete and should be updated.
 
jwandersTalk 20:01, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Wikipedia:Good articles|Good Article]] [[Wikipedia:Good articles/Nominations|nomination]] has failed 

message: The use of proto-money may date back to at least 75,000 B.P., when shell necklaces were made in Blombos Cave in South Africa.  These necklaces would have provided the basic attributes needed of early money.  In cultures where metal working was unknown, shell or ivory jewelry were the most divisible, easily storable and transportable, scarce, and hard to counterfeit objects that could be made.  It is highly unlikely that there were formal markets in 75,000 B.P (any more than there are in recently observed hunter-gatherer cultures).  Nevertheless, proto-money would have been useful in reducing the costs of less frequent transactions that were crucial to hunter-gatherer cultures, especially bride purchase, splitting property upon death, tribute, and intertribal trade in hunting ground rights (“starvation insurance”) and implements.   In the absence of a medium of exchange, all of these transactions suffer from the basic problem of barter -- they require an improbable coincidence of wants or events.
I deleted the paragraph above because of the bias inherant in the dating.  Nobody really knows for a historical fact of any dates prior to about 4000 B.C., and thus, although citations may be available, confirmation is impossible.  Jason Hommel 05:55, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Paragraph Deletion

message: There needs to be a short explanation of "proto-money" when the word is first introduced.
This is difficult to read: Chinese produces metal imitations of cowrie shells and metal tools that may have been the precursors of coinage..
Changed, PWC
The paragraph after The following example illustrates this. is not written in an encylopedic tone and needs to be amended. I suggested substituting you for a third person example. The story is altogether told too colloqiually. Addressing the reader directly is often a poor practice.
The paragraph beginning with The word money in Greek language is confusing; please clarify it. Rintrah 07:00, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok. I am reassured. I was beginning to worry because there was little action since I first encountered the article. The paragraph written with "you"s most desperately needs correction. Rintrah 17:22, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

text: Your correction to the "cowrie shells" section makes it much clearer and is much better written. Good work. Rintrah 17:25, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comments 

message: *Merge Social evolution of money repeats much information already contained in this article and seems to be based on a single reference. --SueHay 21:11, 10 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge from [[Social evolution of money]] 

message: The a article doesn't explain how money is created through debt. Brian Pearson 15:47, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Creation of money 

message: User Xicsies believes that the book of Revelation predicts that the "Mark of the Beast" will be a form of money, and that this should be included in the History of money article. User:Andrew c and I (--Wragge 14:37, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  The possibility that the mark of the beast is money is already mentioned in the Mark of the Beast article. And it is part of the history of money what the early Christian community (as long as any other community of course) believed about money. Xicsies (talk) 13:16, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  I agree you can find articles containing irrelevant passages with long lifetime, BUT, you can also find much more articles containing passages with long lifetime that are credible. This can easily be proved using statistics, so statistically your argument does not make sense, and statistically I am right. I recommend you to deal more faithfully with any long standing quote.Xicsies (talk) 13:16, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Give a source, or its original research. Carl.bunderson (talk) 22:11, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mark of the Beast? 

message: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dfx7rfr2_211crx6c26k
Money-History, a very basic outside view point of money and its antecedents.
:It looks like a pretty fringe view, so probably not worth a link. If the view is worth a link, then you should be able to find a more professional/academic write-up.Cretog8 (talk) 15:04, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Read WP:EL. It is not my opinion. The policy states that you may not link to pages with which you are associated: "You should avoid linking to a website that you own, maintain or represent, even if the guidelines otherwise imply that it should be linked." As your user page points out, you are associated with the blog from which the Google Doc is taken. That is self-promotion. Ergo, you may not post that link on the page. Carl.bunderson (talk) 16:51, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

text: Thank you for your consideration. Carl.bunderson (talk) 17:04, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: added an external link

message: I was interested in looking up "money" because of its function as an abstract conceptualisation of value made concrete.  I'm won't even try and say more! LoL I just wanted to see when the concept first emerged.   When did the break with other forms of exchange and valuation e.g bartering happen and how did this relate to economic activity and "civilisation" generally?  The dates etc given in the various articles here on Wiki differ widely and it seems that the subjects are being considered without reference to underlying concepts.  For instance the article on Money identifies the use of gold bars by the Egyptians as a form of money when it is not at all clear that that was their function.  Money, I would argue, is NOT simply an exchange item, it's a vehicle for valuation and converts real value (concrete and intangible) into  objectivised and absolute value (abstract and tangible).  The article on Economy dates the emergence of these ideas back to Aristotle in around 500 BC yet in Money the origins of money are put thousands of years earlier.  It is very hard to see how the substance of a concept (money) can predate the existence of the concept itself.  LookingGlass (talk) 07:54, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Conflicting articles??  

message: Add articles here:
*Shelling out - The origins of money
II | (t - c) 10:35, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Resources for improving the page 

message: Good work Carl Bunderson, for quickly reverting the recent edits made by someone, trying to inject what could be viewed as religious opinions or beliefs ... for lack of a better term, into the article. skip sievert (talk) 05:08, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, Skip. :) Carl.bunderson (talk) 05:17, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Recent religious editing

message: Term is barely used today and various subsections are normally assigned to the other types of money. This is an accurate description of the term which the editor who insists on pushing this POV changed. The original diff here.
:The term Representative money was used in the past "to signify that a certain amount of bullion was stored in the Treasury while the equivalent paper in circulation" represented the bullion. REF:William Howard Steiner, Money and banking, p.30, H. Holt and company, 1941. According to Robert A. Mundell what is called token or representative money represents a claim on a commodity, for example gold or silver certificates. However, he dismisses John Maynard Keynes' division of representative money into “fiat money” and “managed money” because it fails to recognize there is a continuum between commodity money and token money.REF:Robert A. Mundell, The Birth of Coinage, Discussion Paper #:0102-08, Department of Economics, Columbia University, February 2002. 
:Someone more committed to keep economics articles NPOV really has to deal with this, it's getting me very frustrated. CarolMooreDC (talk) 12:02, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I just added section WP:OR tag and after clean up the Representative money article will cut this down to the couple sentences it merits and add credit money section which is sorely lacking. CarolMooreDC (talk) 15:57, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I just deleted that whole section as redundant to the section titled the same thing, before it. Why it was there is unknown. The section was repeated twice, to bad effect the second time. The smaller sourced section is still there before the deleted one. The long and rambling second section is now gone. It was o.r. in the sense of not being accurately sourced for the information given in general. skip sievert (talk) 16:27, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Representative money section WP:UNDUE

message: I removed a section on oche-as-money which was uncited, as well as a section mentioning jewelry-as-money where the cited article only mentioned jewelry as early trade goods.  Here the cite doesn't support the conclusion given in the article.
The uncited sentences which follow also share the same problem of conflating trade with money.
The next sentence looks to Marcel Mauss for support, but the Google Books extract that I read doesn't support the broad conclusion stated in the WP article.  The next sentence for which David Graeber is cited, starts with an unsupported premise "When barter in fact did occur..." and concludes with an "...it was usually between either complete strangers or would-be enemies."  These seems to contradict other sources on the emergence of money.  I will try to verify that article's conclusion is supported by the Graeber text, but it someone can do so sooner, please comment here. patsw (talk) 12:55, 5 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Emergence of Money 

message: I think this stuff about goldsmith banking is nonsense, I could not find any evidence for it. There are just some anti-Semitic stories circulating in the internet, trying to stress the role of goldsmiths in the history of banking, because "Goldsmith" is a common jewish name - and so people get the impression that it was all a jewish invention ... Forget this! Forget the idea that every goldsmith in the Middle-Ages had a big safe and lots of gold in it. This would have been much too risky. Forget the idea that a "goldsmith" worked only with gold - he worked as well with silver, copper and other materials, so there was no need to store more gold than he actually made use of.
This stuff about goldsmith bankers should be deleted.
--Klingsor (talk) 18:00, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: There actually appear to be plenty of reliable sources that could be used to cite this section. Yworo (talk) 23:15, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

text: I don't know how widespread this was, but some pawnbrokers (the Rothschilds for example) became bankers precisely because goldsmiths were forbidden to practice banking. Zyxwv99 (talk) 03:30, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Goldsmith bankers 

message: Modern money (and most ancient money) is essentially a token — in other words, an abstraction. Paper currency is perhaps the most common type of physical money. However, objects of gold or silver present many of money's essential properties -- Largehole (talk) 18:02, 4 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: two sentences removed from introduction

message: The allegedly Greek word in this section is not Greek. Not least because it has a Latin letter in it (the accented sigma, which perhaps is supposed to be an alpha?). It's not clear to me what the word is supposed to be anyway. A link to something like the Perseus on-line version of the Liddell and Scott lexicon would help.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eponymous-Archon (talk • contribs) 15:07, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Early usage 

message: The first sentence contains a major error. It reads,  
:  "The history of money begins around 2500 years ago with the first minting of coinage in about the seventh to sixth century BC" 
This is patently false.  The history of money is not synonymous with the history of coinage.  It is widely accepted that money originated as a unit of account in the public sector temples & palaces of bronze age Mesopotamia.
Sources:
*  The Archaeology of Money by Michael Hudson
*  The New Economic Archaeology of Debt by Michael Hudson 
*  Role of Accounting in Civilization's. Economic Takeoff by Michael Hudson
* Creating Economic Order: Record-Keeping, Standardization and the Development of Accounting in the Ancient Near East (ed. with Cornelia Wunsch), (CDL Press, Baltimore, 2004).
*  Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East (ed. with Marc Van De Mieroop) (CDL Press, Baltimore, 2002).
*  Urbanization and Land Ownership in the Ancient Near East (ed. with Baruch Levine) (Cambridge, Mass: Peabody Museum (Harvard), 1999).
*  Privatization in the Ancient Near East and Classical Antiquity (ed. with Baruch Levine) (Cambridge, Mass: Peabody Museum (Harvard), 1996).
Vilhelmo (talk) 04:35, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree, and the problem is not only with the first sentence. For example the commodity money section still assumes that barter preceded commodity money. Alæxis¿question? 11:08, 13 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  ATTENTION! ERROR - The History of Money is NOT the History of Coinage 

message: :In this view, money emerged first as credit and only later acquired the functions of a medium of exchange and a store of value.
It should somehow be mentioned, that since the invention of paper money in China this "credit" was in fact a deposit (aka. "fund"), but no loan. The invention of loans came much later, after the money producing monopolists (i.e. banks) wanted to earn interest. However, nowadays the word "credit" usually means loan. This is probably also an issue of the English language because there is no common word used like fund (or "accompt"). So therefore I'd change the sentence: In this view, paper money emerged first as funds and only later acquired the functions of a medium of exchange and a store of value. That's exactly what happend in old China. It's quite unfortunate that in English the word credit is used for both loan and fund. Interestingly this may also be the reason why credit cards are much more popular in the English speaking regions. Language makes the people, deeply influencing their way of thinking - and their behaviour, too. --178.197.224.225 (talk) 18:15, 8 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Funds versus loan 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: There's a problem with this part of the Emergence of Money section. Davies's book is supposed to be the source on the existence of barter in 9000 BC but I've just checked the part of it dedicated to barter (pp 9-18) and there's no mention of it there (and has no concrete examples of barter anywhere else, for that matter). So either this information was taken from another source or it's not sourced at all. While the references look formidable, they lack page numbers which makes it hard to find what exactly do they say. Alæxis¿question? 12:43, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: In the end I found where Davies talks about money in that period and made changes accordingly. Alæxis¿question? 19:07, 16 June 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Barter in 9000 BC? 

message: It's not clear how this passage is related to the topic of the article. Okay, trade existed in 15,000 BC and in 9,000 BC and in 3,000 BC, so what? It must've been quite a different trade compared to the modern one. Does it mean that money existed as well to facilitate that trade? If yes, it should be explained clearly in the article. It's hard to examine the provided sources since no page numbers are given and the second reference is a matryoshka one with four links to google books (actually there was also another one to Stephen King's Shawshank Redemption which I've just deleted).
I propose to remove this passage as it's not relevant to the topic of this article but would be happy to salvage something from it. I'll also try to look at the sources and try to see if they have something to do with money. Alæxis¿question? 13:00, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I've examined two sources, 'Measurement in navigation...' and 'The Complete Archaeology of Greece' and haven't found any assertions about the money in the Neolithic. Alæxis¿question? 14:57, 13 June 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  What does obsidian trade have to do with money? 

message: Couldn't find which source states that this was the earliest means of storage and it's not even clear what was stored there. It seems unlikely since silver and gold had been in use before those times and probably had had to be stored somewhere. I suggest to remove the passage unless its relevance is established and sources fixed. Alæxis¿question? 13:12, 1 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Money boxes 

message: I would like to draw all editors attention to this article by Tim Harford -- who writes the Financial Times's Undercover Economist column -- which summarizes Julius Jordan & Denise Schmandt-Besserat work. 
Julius & Denise are the 2 main players in anthropology involved with early forms of cuneiform accounting and clay tokens used as money.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39870485  — Preceding unsigned comment added by ChristopherTheodore (talk • contribs) 21:02, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Very nice. Here's one that offers some more context (in order to trash a book) https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/15/a-travesty-of-financial-history-bank-lobbyists-will-applaud/ Michael Hudson is an economist and a founding member of ISCANEE (International Scholars Conference on Ancient Near Eastern Economies), an international group of Assyriologists and archaeologists that has published a series of colloquia analyzing the economic origins of civilization. Wingsail (talk) 00:57, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cuneiform Accounting 

message: The history of money 103.30.198.139 (talk) 08:37, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  English 

message: original of money 196.249.96.40 (talk) 21:23, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  bank 

message: In this topic it is written that bank notes (and presumably, subsequent kinds of money) have a certain values. This is incorrect. These forms of money represent value, but these bits of paper and cheap metal discs and the electronic signatures in carefully protected files of money accounts) do not have values by themselves. So that when the money system of a country collapses, this money representative value gets lost.¬¬¬¬ ([[User talk:Macrocompassion]) 15:27, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: You are conflating two distinct meanings of the word. You may propose other wording if you wish. SPECIFICO talk 17:04, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Value representation of non-intrinsic-value metal and paper and digital money. 

message: objectives of money 208.131.188.174 (talk) 18:56, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Money  

message: The article thoroughly mixes several definitions of money, without warning the reader that they come from very distinct and often opposite economic theories.  It also gives undeserved weight to some marginal theories, like "Austrian Economics" and Graeber's theory of "Debt money".  It should be reorganized and sectioned according to said schools. Jorge Stolfi (talk) 12:05, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ideological confusion 

message: The article assumes without evidence that prehistoric tally sticks were records of debt. (That is probably taken from Graeber's "money frmo debt" theory.)  But tally sticks can be used to count many, many other things. Jorge Stolfi (talk) 12:11, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tally sticks 

message: The article states that the shekel was "both a coin representing a specific weight of barley, and the weight of that sack of barley."  But according to this article, the shekel was a unit of weight for metals, equivalent to about 11 grams -- like the modern "troy ounce".  Thus a "silver shekel" was 11 grams of silver, usually in the form of a coin (a round ingot with government seal guaranteeing weight and purity); a "gold shekel" was 11 grams of gold.  Neither "represented" anything; their value was the value of the metal.  If there was a unit of weight of barley also called "shekel", it must have been a lot more than 11 grams... Jorge Stolfi (talk) 16:29, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: It does seem absurd to claim that barley was worth its weight in silver - or even bronze, copper or iron. That paragraph ends with a citation "Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, pp. 52–55.", but that source makes no such claim. It does mention on page 260 that once, as a result of war, "prices rose so high that a shekel of silver could buy but half a sila of oil, half a sila of grain...", a sila being about half a gallon. This online calculator indicates that half a US gallon of barley would be in the region of 1.1 kg, so in a notably extreme situation, silver was worth 'only' a hundred times its weight in barley. That text was inserted in a large edit in 2017. NebY (talk) 16:57, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

text: I've removed the sentence since it was not supported by any source. Alaexis¿question? 20:09, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  The shekel was not a token for barley