Payments & Liquidity
In Memory of Bernard Schmitt: A Survey of His Quantum Monetary Approach to Macroeconomics
A memorial survey in the Review of Political Economy (2026) by Bradley, Carrera, Cencini, Gnos, and Rossi summarizing Bernard Schmitt's quantum macroeconomic approach. On the positive side, Schmitt defines money as a dimensionless numerical form issued by banks as an asset-liability through double-entry bookkeeping, becoming real income only when associated with production via wage payment; money is a flow created and cleared instantaneously, not a stock. He critiques Walrasian general equilibrium as logically over-determined because relative prices cannot be determined through direct exchange, and reads Keynes's effective demand through an identity between output value and income. On the normative side, he proposes a three-department national payments reform (money, income, fixed-capital ledgers) to prevent inflationary monetary over-emission, and diagnoses the international 'non-system' as lacking payment finality: importing countries effectively pay twice, generating pathological sovereign debt, duplication of key-currency deposits abroad, and speculative bubbles. Remedies include a supranational clearing currency operating over multilateral real-time gross settlement, or a single-country central-bank Bureau using counter-loans so net importers avoid sovereign debt formation while paying exporters fully.
Raf's lens
For payments people, the interesting part is Schmitt's argument about finality. He sees today's cross-border system as duplicating IOUs rather than completing a definitive transfer, a concern that still appears in RTGS and interlinking debates. His three-department reform is really an accounting control over what banks finance from each balance. The sovereign-debt claim remains contested and needs empirical testing.
Topics: quantum macroeconomics, monetary circuit, payment finality, international payments, sovereign debt, multilateral clearing, RTGS, endogenous money