Payment systems are among the mechanisms essential to the working of an exchange economy, and Rossi, an economist at the International Monetary Fund, devotes his book to a study of Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS), currently the preferred settlement system of central banks. This is because of their overall concern with risk in net settlement systems and a desire to reduce that risk - although, as Alfred Steinherr, the Chief Economist of the European Investment Bank, notes in his foreword, the