New light on the prehistory of the theory of banking and the School of Salamanca

As is known, Murray N. Rothbard was one of the theorists who defended with the most creativity and coherence the need for free banking subject to general legal principles, in other words, banking with a cash ratio of 100 per cent of demand deposits. Likewise, he was one of the first theorists to stress the great influence which the theoretical contributions of the Spanish scholastics related to the University of Salamanca in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were to have as the direct predecessors of the Austrian School of Economics.2