June – August 2009
a twenty-lesson course by
Professor Antal E. Fekete
Part One: The Origin of Money
1. The Axiom of Declining Marginal Utility
2. Direct versus Indirect Exchange
3. The Dual Nature of Money
4. Arbitrage
5. The Disequilibrium Theory of Price Formation
6. A Critique of the Quantity Theory of Money
Part Two: The Origin of Interest
7. The Two Sources of Credit: Saving and Clearing
8. The Propensity to Save and the Rate of Interest
9. Exchanging Wealth and Income
10. The Productivity of Capital versus Time Preference
11. The Market Process Determining the Rate of Interest
12. The Structure of Capital Markets
Part Three: The Origin of Discounting
13. The Bill of Exchange
14. The Propensity to Consume and the Discount Rate
15. The Market Process Determining the Discount Rate
16. The Marginal Productivity of Social Circulating Capital
17. The Discount House and the Acceptance House
18. The Rise and Fall of Commercial Banking
Part Four: The Fall of and Rise of the Gold Standard
19. The Error of Ludwig von Mises
20. Adam Smith’s Real Bills Doctrine
Volume II: Further Readings
The Rise and Fall of Commercial Banking
Illicit Interest Arbitrage: Borrowing Short to Lend Long
The Bond Market
The Bill Market
Self-Liquidating Credit
The Origin of the Bank Note
The Bill of the Goldsmith
The Principle of Capitalizing Incomes