"An economy which uses money but uses it merely as a neutral link between transactions in real things and real assets and does not allow it to enter into motives or decisions, might be called - for want of a better name - a real exchange economy. The theory which I desiderate would deal, in contradistinction to this, with an economy in which money plays a part of its own and affects motives and decisions and is, in short, one of the operative factors in the situation, so that the course of events cannot be predicted either in the long period or in the short, without a knowledge of the behavior of money between the first state and the last. And it is this which we ought to mean when we speak of a monetary economy.... Booms and depressions are peculiar to an economy in which . . . money is not neutral. I believe that the next task is to work out in some detail such a monetary theory of production. That is the task on which I am now occupying myself in some confidence that I am not wasting my time."        --- J. M. Keynes