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The Articles By Menger ( 1998 ) Essay

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In this paper, we are critically appraising the articles by Menger (1892), Goodhart (1998), Rogoff (2014) and Yermack (2013) respectively. The first two papers focused on the origins of money and the theory behind this while the second two papers focused on the future of money. We will be comparing the conclusions of each author in their papers and giving commentary on them.

Menger (1892) argues that money didn’t originate because of government introduction, but instead that it emerged organically because the market required it. This is a direct contrast to Goodhart’s (1998) view that money was given authority by government and without this, trade would revert to barter, which aligns with Yermack’s (2013) conclusion that the privately generated Bitcoin is not a currency.

Menger (1892) claims that trade would not exist without money because of the excessive search costs to find a “double coincidence of wants” and therefore barter was too inefficient to have ever occurred.

He uses the term “saleableness” repeatedly in his paper when describing money and commodities and we must interpret what he means by this. He uses it to describe how a difference exists between all commodities in how easily one can trade with it. He talks about the almost infinite saleability of money and how this is a one-off occurrence.

Menger (1892) goes into detail of how some commodities are more or less saleable than others and this is where the paper gets very interesting. He gives examples of

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