ABSTRACT
Always and everywhere, monetary systems are hierarchical. One way that economists have tried to get an analytical grip on this empirical
fact is to distinguish money (the means of final settlement) from credit (a promise to pay money, or a means of delaying final settlement).1 This is fine so far as it goes. But in one sense it doesn’t go far enough because it posits only two layers of the hierarchy. And in another sense it goes too far because what counts as final settlement depends on what layer we are talking about. What looks like money at one level of the system looks like credit from the standpoint of the level above.
