1st Edition

Ownership Economics On the Foundations of Interest, Money, Markets, Business Cycles and Economic Development

    224 Pages
    by Routledge

    220 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book presents the first full-length explanation in English of Heinsohn and Steiger's groundbreaking theory of money and interest, which emphasizes the role played by private property rights.

    Ownership economics gives an alternative explanation of money and interest, proposing that operations enabled by property lead to interest and money, rather than exchange of goods. Like any other approach, it has to answer economic theory's core question: what is the loss that has to be compensated by interest?

    Ownership economics accepts neither a temporary loss of goods, as in neoclassical economics, nor Keynes's temporary loss of already existing, exogenous money as the cause of interest. Rather, money is created as a non-physical title to property in a credit contract secured by a debtor's collateral and the creditor's net worth.

    This book is an edited English translation of a highly successful German text, and offers the first book-length treatment of a theory which has received much interest since its first appearance in articles in the late 1970s.

    Ownership Economics: an introduction Frank Decker  Ownership Economics: On the Foundations of Interest, Money, Markets, Business Cycles and Economic Development Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto Steiger  Preface to the first German edition of Ownership Economics  1. Possession and Ownership: use of goods versus economic activity  2. The blindness of the great schools of economics towards ownership  3. The economic core of the ownership system: interest, money and property assets  4. The market as the result of the ownership-based economy  5. Issues associated with ownership in developming and transformation countries

    Biography

    Gunnar Heinsohn is Professor Emeritus at the University of Bremen, Germany.

    Otto Steiger, who passed away in 2008, was a Professor at the University of Bremen, Germany.

    Frank Decker is an economist based in Sydney, Australia.