“Money is a little like an airplane – marvellous when it works, frustrating when it is immobilised, and tragic when it crashes.” Money is one of man’s great inventions, and it is a crucial part of the pervasive framework of a society organised along the lines of free markets – characterised by private property, the division of labour and free trade. It has become common practise to define money as the universally accepted means of exchange.
The quantity theory of money, dating back to contributions made in the mid-16th century by Spanish Scholastic writers of the Salamanca School, is one of the oldest theories in economics (de Soto, 2006, p. 603). In his book The Purchasing Power of Money (1911), Fisher gave the quantity theory, as inherited from his classical and pre-classical predecessors, its modern formulation. Fisher’s version, typically termed equation of exchange or transaction approach can be stated as: