ABSTRACT
The gold-exchange standard was an adaptation to the credit economy, as it opened for bills in convertible currencies, and thereby private money. Information technology has consequences for money as a social institution. Institutional pathologies arise when there is a corruption of institutions, which make the social order dysfunctional. The Wicksell-Mises-Schumpeter conjecture, which stresses that credit money turned gold into a weak constraint, precedes Keynes's stress on bank money. It implies the existence of demand-driven credit money responding to the real economy, which during the classical gold standard turned gold into a weak constraint, but people still need a stable measure of value, to prevent financial crises. A monetary open access order involves more than fiat money. Marmefelt Thomas uses the concept of emergent money, which means that money is an emergent order, implying that the unit of account has to adjust to structural change in the economy.
