Money and trust

Origins of arbitrage

“…Though there is evidence appearing in some of the earliest surviving Sumerian cuneiform tablets from Bronze Age Mesopotamia, millennia prior to the introduction of coinage, involving rudimentary use of commodity money – especially silver – in commercial activities (e.g. van der Spek and van Leeuwen 2019, ch.5) and extensive trade using ancient bills of exchange (e.g. Poitras 2016, p. 32), available sources are too obscure to produce even vague conclusions 3 .…”