ABSTRACT
The granting of credit comes first and collateral must be dispensed with, at least in principle, for however short an interval. The credit structure projects not only beyond the existing gold basis, but also beyond the existing commodity basis. The capital of an enterprise, however, is also not the aggregate of all the goods serving its purposes. The entrepreneur must have capital before he can think of providing himself with concrete goods. The function of the goods consists in serving a productive purpose corresponding to their technical nature. In any case the capital market is the same as the phenomenon that practice describes as the money market. In an economy without development there would be no such money market. If it were highly organised and its transactions were settled with credit means of payment it would have a central settlement bureau, a kind of clearing house or bookkeeping centre for the economic system.
