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Economic historian Karl Polanyi has argued that where barter is widespread, and cash supplies limited, barter is aided by the use of credit, brokerage, and money as a unit of account (i.e. used to price items). All of these strategies are found in ancient economies including Ptolemaic Egypt.
However, competitive markets—as understood in formal economic theory—rely on much larger numbers of both buyers and sellers. A market with a single seller and multiple buyers is a monopoly. A market with a single buyer and multiple sellers is a monopsony. These are "the polar opposites of perfect competition". [13]
The coincidence of wants (often known as double coincidence of wants) [1] [2] [verification needed] is an economic phenomenon where two parties each hold an item that the other wants, so they exchange these items directly. Within economics, this has often been presented as the foundation of a bartering economy. [3]
A moneyless economy or nonmonetary economy is a system for allocation of goods and services without payment of money. The simplest example is the family household. Other examples include barter economies, gift economies and primitive communism. Even in a monetary economy, there are a significant number of nonmonetary transactions.
The amount of money in the economy is influenced by monetary policy, which is the process by which a central bank influences the economy to achieve specific goals. Often, the goal of monetary policy is to maintain low and stable inflation , directly via an inflation targeting strategy, [ 51 ] or indirectly via a fixed exchange rate system ...
Worried about the meaning of existence? You might turn to Raj Patel's book The Value of Nothing. Its title, however, isn't a reference to how much a vast supply of nothing might be worth, or how ...
Innes refutes the barter theory of money, by examining historic evidence and showing that early coins never were of consistent value nor of more or less consistent metal content. Therefore, he concludes that sales is not exchange of goods for some universal commodity, but an exchange for credit. He argues that "credit and credit alone is money ...
Although laissez-faire has been commonly associated with capitalism, there is a similar economic theory associated with socialism called left-wing or socialist laissez-faire, also known as free-market anarchism, free-market anti-capitalism and free-market socialism to distinguish it from laissez-faire capitalism.