Chartalism

Chartalism in Macroeconomics is a theory of money which argues that money originated with states' attempts to direct economic activity rather than as a spontaneous solution to the problems with barter or as a means with which to tokenize debt, and that fiat currency has value in exchange because of sovereign power to levy taxes on economic activity payable in the currency they issue.

Georg Friedrich Knapp, a German economist, coined the term "chartalism" in his State Theory of Money, which was published in German in 1905 and translated into English in 1924. The name derives from the Latin , in the sense of a token or ticket. Knapp argued that "money is a creature of law" rather than a commodity. Knapp contrasted his state theory of money with "metallism", as embodied at the time in the Gold Standard, where the value of a unit of currency depended on the quantity of precious metal it contained or could be exchanged for. He argued the state could create pure paper money and make it exchangeable by recognising it as legal tender, with the criterion for the money of a state being "that which is accepted at the public pay offices".

Constantina Katsari has argued that principles from both metallism and chartalism were reflected in the monetary system introduced by Augustus, which was used in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, from the early 1st century to the late 3rd century AD.

When Knapp was writing, the prevailing view of money was that it had evolved from systems of barter to become a medium of exchange because it represented a durable commodity which had some use value. However, as modern chartalist economists such as Randall Wray and Mathew Forstater have pointed out, chartalist insights into tax-driven paper money can be found in the earlier writings of many classical economists, for instance Adam Smith, who observed in The Wealth of Nations:

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