Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: Existing Literature: A Brief Tour -- Chapter 3: What is Money? -- Chapter 4: The Origin of Money as the Ability to Obtain Goods and Services -- Chapter 5: Money as the Ability Vis-à-Vis Other Concepts -- Chapter 6: Money as the Ability and Some Related Issues -- Chapter 7: Money as the Ability and inflation -- Chapter 8: The Causes of Inflation -- Chapter 9: Some After Thoughts and the Question of Economic Polices.

The book goes beyond the usual understanding of money—physically, electronically or virtually expressed in term of monetary units like dollars, pounds, gold coins, or bitcoins—and discusses how money is best conceptualised as the ability of a person/party to obtain goods and services from another person/party. This ability may originate from the access of a person/party to money in usual sense (e.g. dollars, pounds) but also via force, social norms, mutual negotiation, altruism, trust or due to human biological characteristics. As the ability to obtain goods and services from others depends on the context — what functions as money in a time and place may not function as money in another time and place — as such money has no universal type or representation. The book explains inflation as the increased need to acquire money, that is the need to employ more physical and mental labour to create the ability to obtain a wide range of goods and services. This book provides an explanation of the post covid price hike and the cost of living crisis by taking this new theory into consideration, which will be of interest to academics, researchers, policy makers and students studying finance, monetary economics and inflation. Mehdi Chowdhury is the Deputy Head of Department of Accounting, Finance and Economics, at the Business School at Bournemouth University, UK. He has PhD in Economics from the University of Nottingham, UK. He has researched on international migration and refuge crisis. His current research focuses on the economics of money following the post-covid changes to the world economic order.