The following short review is contained in the Italian journal Moneta e Credito, vol. 67 n. 267 (2013), p. 344. It is translated from the Italian.

Having remained unpublished after the death of the author (who is said to have declined to publish it after the appearance in 1930 of Keynes’ Treatise on Money, intending to confront it on an equal footing), this important essay was published only in 1970 in the original German (and in 1990 in Italian, in the series of the Cassa di Risparmio di Torino) and is now being offered in English translation, which also includes the introduction by Fritz Karl Mann from the original German edition. The functioning of the monetary and financial system is known to be an important aspect of the Schumpeterian theory of development: this text is therefore crucial to integrate a full understanding of the theoretical construction of the great Austrian economist, as well as to provide material of considerable interest to a reconstruction of the debates on monetary theory in the thirties of the last century, a period of great interest in the history of economic thought.