David Hume was a British philosopher (1711-1776), Scottish as his friend Adam Smith. In economics, his main contribution is the quantity theory of money, a subject on which he reformulated what was previously enunciated by his predecessors on the subject, specially the School of Salamanca and John Locke. His ideas about the interest of money are based on the relative situations of supply and demand, as credit demand is heavily influenced by businesses’ expectations, thus relating the interest rate with the rate of profit.
Hume’s philosophy of self-interest and desire of accumulation as sources of economic activity had a great influence on Adam Smith and other classical economists.