ABSTRACT
The supply of money provides the key to the understanding of many different kinds of monetary phenomena. The subject is beset by paradox at every stage. At the most elementary level, it is tied up with the question of the origins of money (also considered at the beginning of chapter 7 below), which has never received a satisfactory answer. The problems arising out of the supply of money are quite different for the two types of money introduced in chapter 1. For the first type, specie, they are at first sight somewhat intractable. For the second type, scriptural money, the aggregate of monetary transactions automatically maintains the supply of money.
