Modern money: fiat or credit?

Even today, textbooks on Money, Currency, and Banking are more likely than not to begin with an analysis of a state of things in which legal tender "m oney" is the only means of paying and lending.... But logically, it is by n o means clear that the most useful method is to start from the coin-even if , making a concession to realism, we add inconvertible government paper-in order to proceed to the credit transactions of reality. It may be more usef ul to start from these in the first place, to look upon capitalist finance as a clearing system that cancels claims and debts and carries forward the differences-so that "money" payments come in only as a special case without any particularly fundamental importance. In other words: practically and a nalytically, a credit theory of money is possibly preferable to a monetary theory of credit.