The continuing objective of the Economic Research Council, of which 1 have the honour to be President, is to promote education in the science of economics with particular reference to monetary practice. The council has been working to achieve this objective by various means since it was founded, as the Joint Council for Economic and Monetary Research, in 1943.My predecessor as President, the late Lord Beeching, once wrote that economics as a subject has only a small core of established iheory, but the effects of it spread outwards into many other fields of thought and activity. This book is about money. We have little choice but to think about money in our daily lives: and we transact business not only with money-but increasingly with credit. So where, one may ask, does money stand in economic theory and practice? And has monetary theory a place in that small core of established theory?