The elaborate Chinese standard histories, which, if all translated, would fill several hundred thick volumes, provide illuminating information about many aspects of economic history. In this paper, I shall present a passage that enables us to estimate the gold stock of the Chinese at the beginning of the Christian era, a type of information rarely available.

In his History of the Former Han Dynasty, Ban Gu (writing about A.D. 80) has occasion to illustrate the stinginess of a usurping emperor, Wang Mang, and enumerates his wealth as follows:

At this time [A.D. 23], in the inner apartments of the Wei-yang Palace, ten thousand catties of actual gold were put into one chest and there still remained sixty chests. In each office for storage of the Yellow Gate and of the Intendant of Palace Parks and in the workshops of the Master of Recipes, there were also several chests. The Imperial Treasury at the Ch'ang-lo Palace and the Bureau of Equalization and Standards in the capital in addition stored very much cash, silk, pearls, jade, and valuables.

Economics, as it is frequently taught nowadays, consists largely of supply and demand curves. Within their graceful lines are contained the wisdom of the ages—the key to the past and the barometer of the future. If superimposed on one another, these curves have all the esthetic quality of dynamistic drawings. So completely have they dominated economic thinking that when a group of economists considered the possibility of founding an Economic History Association, their first impulse was to establish a demand curve. This was done, as Professor Heaton has intimated, by Miss Anne Bezanson, who canvassed the field. She discovered that four hundred people could be counted upon immediately to support a Journal of Economic History.

Problems persist despite efforts to solve them because those efforts are irrelevant, inadequate, or unsupported. A behavioral structure consisting of the philosophy of the system in which the problem resides, its institutions, administration, and the operation that implements its policies is devised to analyze persistent problems such as inequality, underdevelopment, and inflation. As a chronic problem in the United States and other capitalist economies, inflation reflects a contradiction within the behavioral structure. Its resolution requires reinstatement of perfect competition, which is improbable, or change of the philosophy, which is revolutionary and equally improbable; hence, inflation will persist regardless of the measures taken against it.

We examine the relationship between international trade and regional American credit markets. The evidence presented suggests that foreign payment flows had a significant effect on the level of interest rates in the East North Central, West North Central, Pacific, and Southern regions of the United States.