What is Money?

About the lecture

In this module, we look at money in more detail - what we mean when we talk about money, what purposes it serves and the way we measure it when constructing economic statistics. In particular, we will focus on: (i) what functions does money serve; (ii) money as transferable debt; (iii) how do we make payments in a modern financial system; and (iv) how do we measure the money supply in the UK.

About the lecturer

Professor Sir John Kay is a fellow of St. John’s College, Oxford. As well as this he also served as the first dean of Oxford’s Said Business School, the former Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and as a director of Halifax plc and of several investment companies. He specialises in the relationships between economics and business, and has written a number of books on this subject, including The Truth About Markets (2003), Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance (2015), and Radical Uncertainty (2020) co-authored with Mervyn King. In addition to this he writes about economics for a popular audience through a weekly column in the Financial Times.