This chapter explains and evaluates Walras's treatment of markets for circulating capital and money in his last comprehensive model, and evaluates the model as a whole. It is shown that although he assumed that written pledges are used in the markets for certain commodities to eliminate disequilibrium transactions and production, he also assumed, regarding many of precisely the same commodities, that disequilibrium transactions and production occur in their markets. Moreover, he made the redundant and illogical assumption that there are markets for the services of nondurable goods as well as for the goods themselves. For those and for other reasons, it is concluded that the resulting model is not a functioning system.

the rigorous equations of desired money balances and of circulating physical capital into the system of general equilibrium. I have thus completely finished static economics: that is to say, I have completely solved the problem that consists in using as a point of departure given utilities and given quantities possessed of all the species of wealth by a certain number of exchangers, to establish rationally a complete equilibrium of economic society at a given moment (Walras to Hermann Laurent, March 24, 1899, in 1965, 3, letter 1396, p. 66).