We should perhaps consider ourselves as occupying the mental space that Keynes did after he completed A Treatise on Money, which catalogued the extraordinary expansion of liquid financial instruments during the early twentieth century but had left him uncertain about the meaning of all this. When several years later he wrote the General Theory, his mind was on the day’s most pressing questions, above all the dramatic collapse in output and employment that had occurred during the previous years. While he recognized that such volatility could only occur in a monetary economy, he nonetheless considered it justifiable to let finance drop “into the background” … The contributions presented here (presented first at a symposium on the Gordian knot of finance held at the University of Sydney, generously sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation), take a step back and linger with the more open-ended curiosity that drove Keynes’ earlier engagement with the institutional logic of financial claims. How has the knot of modern money been tied?.

 

(Konings, ‘The Modern Money Tangle: An Introduction’)