Modern Economic Problems Part 6

The issue of paper money in some cases grew out of the practice of debasing metal. However this may have been, governmental paper money may be looked upon as money for which a seigniorage of one hundred per cent is charged. The gain of seigniorage from paper money is greater and is just as easily secured as that from coinage of metals.

Governmental paper money is called "political money," in contrast with commodity money. However, all coins that contain an element of seigniorage, or monopoly value, are to that degree "political money."

The typical paper money is irredeemable; that is, it cannot be turned into bullion money on demand. It is simply put into circulation, usually with the "legal-tender" quality. Money has the _legal-tender_ quality (as the term is used in the United States) when, according to law, it must be accepted by citizens as a legal discharge for debts due them, unless otherwise provided in the contract. The prime purpose of making money legal tender is to reduce the danger of dispute as to payments; but another purpose often has been to force people to use a depreciated money whether they would or not. The purpose of the issue of political money is usually to gain the profit of seigniorage for the public treasury, and often it has been the desperate expedient of nearly bankrupt governments. Governmental paper money differs from bank notes in that its value does not necessarily depend on the promise of redemption by the issuer. It differs from promissory notes and bonds in that its value is not based on the interest it yields, but mainly on its monetary uses. The issue of paper money may save the government the payment of interest on an equal amount of bonds. The promise to receive paper in payment for taxes or for public lands may help to maintain its value by reducing its quant.i.ty, but nothing short of its prompt redemption in standard coins makes it truly redeemable.

-- 10. #Irredeemable paper money.# The most notable examples of paper money in the eighteenth century were the American colonial currencies, the continental notes, and the French a.s.signats. In all the American colonies before the Revolution, notes or bills of credit were issued which were in most cases legal tender. Parliament forbade the issues, but to no effect. Without exception they were issued in large amounts and without exception they depreciated. The continental notes were issued by the Continental Congress in the first year of the war (1775), and for the next five years. The object at first was to antic.i.p.ate taxes, and it was expected that the states would redeem and destroy the notes, but this was not done. The notes pa.s.sed at par for a time, but depreciated rapidly as their number increased. It has been estimated that the country had less than $10,000,000 of coin before the war, and when, in 1780, over $200,000,000 of notes were in circulation they were completely discredited: hence the phrase "not worth a continental." Specie then quickly came back into use. A few years later the leaders of the French Revolution, failing to learn the lesson of the American experience, issued, on the security of land, notes called a.s.signats in such enormous quant.i.ties that they became worth no more than the paper on which they were printed. The paper money issued under the English bank restriction act of 1797-1820 is especially notable because it gave rise to the controversy which did much to develop the modern theory of the subject. Parliament forbade the Bank of England to redeem its notes in coin because the government wished to borrow the coin the bank held. The result was the issue of a large amount of bank money not subject to the ordinary rule of redemption on demand. It was virtually governmental paper money. The notes depreciated and drove gold out of circulation, and it was not until 1821 that specie payments were definitely resumed.

The United States, under the Const.i.tution, did not try legal-tender paper money till 1862 when paper notes (called greenbacks, because of the color of ink with which the reverse side was printed) were first issued, later increased to a total of about $450,000,000. Other interest-bearing notes were issued with the legal-tender quality and circulated as money to some extent. Greenbacks depreciated in terms of gold, and gold rose in price in terms of greenbacks until, in June, 1864, it sold at 280 a hundred. Fourteen years elapsed after the war before these notes rose to par, in terms of gold (in December, 1878), and they became legally redeemable in gold January 1, 1879. This was called "the resumption of specie payments."

Almost every nation has at some time issued political money. During the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, France, through the medium of its great state bank, made forced issues of notes of a political nature, which only slightly depreciated. Many countries--Russia, Austria, Portugal, Italy, and most of the South and Central American republics--have had or still have depreciated paper currencies.

At once, at the outbreak of the great war in 1914, the governments of the warring nations began to exercise a strict control over the issue of paper money, sought to gather into the public treasury all the specie, and to give paper (either governmental notes or bank notes) practically a forced circulation, making it almost the sole circulating medium. The values of the paper moneys have fallen in all the countries, especially in Germany and Russia. In such cases the money partakes somewhat of the characters both of bank notes and of political money. Resorted to in desperate extremities, political money has usually proved to be a costly experiment. A result usually unintended is the derangement of business and of the existing distribution of incomes. The rapid and unpredictable changes in prices gives opportunity for speculative profits, but injure legitimate business. This incidental effect on debts and industry offers the main motive to some citizens for advocating the issue of paper money. It is peculiarly liable to be the subject of political intrigue and of popular misunderstanding. It is this danger, more than anything else, which makes political money in general a poor kind of money.

-- 11. #Theories of political money.# There are two extreme views regarding the nature of paper money, and a third which endeavors to find the truth between these two. First is that of the cost-of-production theorists, who declare that government is powerless to influence value, or to impart value to paper by law. They deny that there is any other basis for the value of money than the cost of the material that is in it. Money made of paper, on a printing press, has a cost almost negligibly small, and, therefore, they say it can have no value. The facts that it does circulate and that it is treated as if it had value are explained by the cost-of-production theorists as follows: while the paper note is a mere promise to pay, with no value in itself, it is accepted because of the hope of its redemption, just as any private note. Depreciation, according to this view, is due to loss of confidence; the rise toward par measures the hope of repayment.

Taking a very different view, the extreme fiat-theorists a.s.sert that the government has unlimited power to maintain the value of paper money by conferring upon it the legal-tender quality. The meaning of _fiat_ is "let there be," and the fiat-money advocates believe that the government has but to say, "Let there be money," to impart value to a piece of paper. The typical fiat-money advocates in the United States were the "Greenbackers," who wished to retain the greenbacks issued in the Civil War and to increase the amount greatly. They saw in paper money an unlimited source of income to the government.

They proposed the payment of the national debt, the support of the government without taxes, and the loan of money without interest to citizens. All might live in luxury if the extreme fiat-money theorists could realize their dreams. The depreciation that has taken place in nearly every case where government notes have been issued, the fiat-theorists declare to be due to a mild enforcement of the law of legal tender. To them the fact that paper money may circulate for a time at par appears a reason why it always should. They do not recognize that there is a saturation point in the use of money, and that its use is still further limited by the fear of larger issues.

The almost universally accepted opinion among economists rejects both of these views, tho recognizing in each a certain limited aspect of the truth. The cost-of-production view quite overlooks the features in which paper money differs from ordinary credit paper. The value of one's promises to pay depends on his reputation and his resources; the resources const.i.tute the basis of value. Bonds have value because they yield interest and are payable at a definite time in standard money.

But paper money, lacking this basis for its value, has another basis in its money use, in its power to buy goods.

The theory of paper money here outlined makes the value of paper money a special case of monopoly value. As the power of any private monopoly over price is relative, not absolute, so is that of the government over the value of political money. The money use is the source of value of the paper notes. It is this which gives the economic condition for value in paper money and strictly limits the power of the government--a fact overlooked by the fiat-theorists. Business conditions remaining unchanged, the limit of possible issue without depreciation is the number of units in circulation before the paper money was issued, the saturation point of full-weight and full-value coins. Whenever governments have failed to stop at that point, paper money has depreciated. But under wise and honest control and regulation political paper money might serve the monetary function very effectively.

[Footnote 1: The problem of a legally authorized double standard, bimetallism, is treated in the next chapter. An irredeemable paper money may be, for a time, the standard money.]

[Footnote 2: The faith _(fides)_ is not always that the issuer of the money (whether it be a bank or the government) will redeem the money on demand at any future time; for fiduciary money may circulate while irredeemable, that is, either carrying no promise of redemption in the standard money or in fact not being redeemed. Yet undoubtedly actual redemption on demand or a good prospect of future redemption is one of the circ.u.mstances stimulating the faith and the readiness of each person in turn to receive fiduciary money.]

[Footnote 3: In the broad sense as above defined, ch. 3, sec. 10.]

[Footnote 4: See next section on worn coins.]

[Footnote 5: Receipts and Expenditures of Mint Service in 1914:]

[Footnote 6: It makes no difference what may be deemed the cause of their acceptance; whether it be habit, public opinion in business circles, or the act of law making them a legal tender; the essential thing is that they continue to be accepted as money.]

[Footnote 7: In this and following numerical examples no account is taken of the possibility that the standard metal may depreciate in the world market in terms of all other goods as a result of its diminished use as money in one or more countries. This properly belongs in a complete theoretical treatment of the subject.]

[Footnote 8: See "Modern Currency Reforms" (1916), by E.W. Kemmerer, professor of Economics and Finance in Princeton University, for a detailed treatment of this remarkable series of monetary changes, probably unequaled in instructiveness to the student of monetary theory.]

CHAPTER 6

THE STANDARD OF DEFERRED PAYMENTS

-- 1. Relative positions of gold and silver; historical. -- 2. Gold production, first half of nineteenth century. -- 3. Concept of the general price level. -- 4. Index numbers. -- 5. Gold production and monetary legislation, 1850 to 1879. -- 6. Definition of the standard of deferred payments. -- 7. Increasing importance of the standard. -- 8. Fluctuating standard and the interest-rate. -- 9. Notable changes in prices.

-- 10. Nature and object of bimetallism. -- 11. The movement for national bimetallism in America. -- 12. Rising prices after 1896. -- 13.

Defectiveness of the gold standard. -- 14. Various ideal standards suggested. -- 15. The tabular standard.

-- 1. #Relative positions of gold and silver: historical.# It is not possible within the limits of our s.p.a.ce to enter here into the details of the world's monetary history. It must suffice for our purpose to sketch briefly the period preceding the nineteenth century. Both gold and silver were used as moneys in Europe in the Middle Ages, tho silver was much the more common. The two metals continued to be used side by side in Europe and in the new settlements in America, silver for the smaller and gold for many of the larger transactions.

Both were made legalized forms of money (and standards of deferred payments) in units of specified weights and fineness, the weights bearing a certain ratio to each other. Thus it was possible for a debtor to discharge his obligations with that one of the two metals that at the moment was the cheaper at the legal ratio. Fluctuations in the prices of gold in terms of silver were at times such as to cause a large part of the full-weight coins of one or the other metal to leave circulation (in accordance with Gresham's law). So from time to time the ratio was slightly changed by law in the various countries to permit the circulation or to bring back the kind of money that had been undervalued in terms of the other. But it is a very remarkable fact that from the time of Xenophon until the discovery of America (a period of nearly 2000 years), the market ratio of silver to gold bullion in Europe remained pretty close to 10 to 1, being only temporarily altered by sudden and unusual occurrences. From 1492 to 1660 the ratio changed to 15 to 1, where it remained with remarkable stability until about the year 1800. At the establishment of the mint of the United States in 1792 that ratio was found to exist. Men had come to look upon the ratio of 15 to 1 as the natural order, determined (it was sometimes said) providentially by the deposit of the two metals in due proportion in the earth's surface. But as we now see it, this in part was mere chance and in part was due to the equalizing effect of the wide use of both metals so that the one could be easily subst.i.tuted for the other in case of a divergence of the market ratio from the legal ratio as money. From the year 1500 until 1800 the Western hemisphere was the main source of the precious metals, the alluvial deposits were widely scattered, were gradually discovered, were usually found in small quant.i.ties, and were extracted in primitive ways. The existing stock of precious metals, gold and silver, more than other products of mine and field, is at any time the acc.u.mulation of many years' production, and is changed very little, proportionally, by a large change of output in any year or short period. It changes in volume as does a glacier fed by the snows of many years, not as does a river, filled by a single rainfall. For a short time after the discovery of America (from 1493 to about 1544) the average coining value[1] of the world's production of gold, nearly all found in America, was about 1-1/2 times as great as that of silver; but thereafter for three centuries from about 1545, the annual value of silver produced was between 1-1/2 to 4 times as great as that of gold, averaging about twice as great. Silver was the money chiefly in use in the ordinary transactions in all of the princ.i.p.al countries of the world.

-- 2. #Gold production, first half of nineteenth century.# We have now to note some great changes in the production of gold in the nineteenth century, changes both absolute and relative to that of silver. The market ratio of the two metals had been gradually changing before 1792 and continued to change. Gold was slowly becoming more valuable in terms of silver and the legal ratio of 15 to 1 in the United States (at which both metals were admitted free to the mint) proved to have undervalued gold. Gold largely left circulation and silver and bank notes formed the greater part of our circulating medium. Then, in 1834, soon after the production of gold had begun to increase somewhat more rapidly than that of silver, the legal ratio of the United States was changed to 16 to 1. This brought a good deal of gold back into circulation and gradually drove out most of the silver (the heavier coins disappearing first).

In the decade 1841-50 the average annual value of the gold production had, for the first time since the early sixteenth century, exceeded that of silver. Then, from 1848 to 1850, came the great gold discoveries in California and in Australia. In 1851 the value of gold produced was one and one-half times that of silver; in 1852 was three times, and in 1853 four times as great; and then slowly declined, but continued every year as late as 1870 to be over twice as great.

This caused the displacement of silver by gold and drove out a large proportion of the silver coins of smaller denominations. This led to the law of 1853, authorizing subsidiary coinage (on government account only) of lighter weight.[2] Let us observe the effect on prices that was brought about by the discoveries of 1848-49, and, first, we must consider briefly the method of measuring and expressing general changes in prices.

-- 3. #Concept of the general price level.# The price of any good is some other good or group of goods given for it in trade.[3] The standard unit of money coming to be the most convenient expression for price (whether or not money be actually pa.s.sed from hand to hand in that particular trade), prices usually are monetary prices, and more specifically are prices in gold, or in silver, or in whatever const.i.tutes the standard money unit. But the price of each good is a definite, separate fact, which expresses the ratio at which that commodity is sold. The price of any particular kind of goods may fluctuate in either direction as compared with the prices of other goods at the same time. For example, iron and many other goods may rise while wheat and many other goods fall in price. There is, therefore, no such thing as an actual _general_ change in the prices of goods in terms of money, but it may be seen that the prices of large cla.s.ses of goods, often of nearly all goods, change upward or downward at the same time and in the same general direction. We thus have need to distinguish between changes in the valuations of particular kinds of goods in terms of each other and general changes in the valuation of a number of different goods in terms of the monetary unit.

To get some idea of whether such a general trend occurs, the algebraic sum of all the changes in the particular prices of a selected group of goods may be taken, and for convenience this may be reduced to an average price (by dividing the sum by the number of articles). Such an average is called a general price and, when comparing it with the general price of another time, we speak of changes up or down in _general prices,_ or in the _general scale of prices,_ or in the _price level._

When gold is the standard unit, its value is the converse of general prices; as prices go up the value of gold goes down, and gold is said to _depreciate_. As prices go down, the value of gold goes up and gold is said to _appreciate_. Rising prices mean falling value of gold (and at the same time falling purchasing power), and _vice versa._

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 2. INDEX NUMBERS OF PRICES. The four series of prices here shown begin at different periods; the American in 1840 (Aldrich report 1840-1889 and Bureau of Labor from 1890 on); the English in 1846; the German in 1851; the French in 1857. We have adjusted each of these series to a base of the average prices for 1890-1899, in accord with the basic period used by the American Bureau of Labor.

The reader must be on his guard against misunderstanding the diagram.

It does not represent the heights of the prices of the different countries compared with each other either at any one date or for the entire period. For example, the heights of the lines at the year 1860, do not indicate that American prices were lowest and French the highest at that date, or, indeed, tell anything whatever directly on that point. The various series of prices are compared within themselves, every year with the average of the prices for 1890-1899 in each country, respectively. The only comparison allowable, therefore, between the several lines, is that between the fluctuations, both as to their times and as to their directions, both as to the larger tidal movements and as to the lesser wave-like movements within the business cycles. The Figure does indicate that both American and German prices have risen somewhat as compared with the English and French prices, since the period before 1860.

This figure should be studied in connection with Figure 1, in ch.

4, sec. 9, on gold production. The Figures indicate that the rapidly growing monetary use of gold offset a large part of the effects of increasing gold production between 1840-1860 and 1884-1914. Between 1884 and 1896 prices actually continued to fall after gold production had begun to climb. Likewise the growing monetary use of gold accentuated strongly the effects, between 1873 and 1883 of a comparatively small decrease in gold production.]

-- 4. #Index numbers.# The process of calculating general prices and changes in them has in it, inevitably, something of arbitrariness and incompleteness. For not all prices can be included, but only those of articles of somewhat standardized grades and those that are pretty regularly sold in markets where prices are publicly quoted. Any list of articles that can be selected is of unequal importance to different persons and cla.s.ses of persons, at different places, at different times, and for different purposes. And yet the study of general prices as shown by any broadly selected list reveals changes which in some measure affect the interests of every member of the community.

General prices are conveniently compared from one time to another through the use of index numbers. An _index number_ of any article is the per cent which its price at any certain date is of its price at another date (or of the average for a series of prices) taken as a base or standard. Thus if the average price of cotton in the base year were 10 cents (taken as 100) and the price rose to 12 cents, the index number would be 120. _A tabular index number_ is the per cent which the price of a selected group of articles at any certain date is of the price of the same group of articles at a date which has been taken as the base.[4]

The princ.i.p.al index numbers of the leading countries are here shown.

The fact that from 1862 to 1879 inclusive prices in the United States were expressed in an irredeemable paper standard makes comparisons for that period misleading. A better idea is obtained by using as the base for each of the several series, the average of prices in each country for the years 1890 to 1899.

-- 5. #Gold production and monetary legislation, 1850 to 1879#. The unprecedented increase in gold production between 1849 and 1853, and the continuance of production in volume about four-fold as great as that of the decade 1840-49 was reflected at once in a rise of prices.

This was a period of prosperity in business culminating in the crisis of 1857 (felt more or less in all the leading countries). This prosperity accelerated the effect of increasing quant.i.ties of the standard money. Credit was stimulated and the rate of circulation and the efficiency of money were increased. Prices rose to a temporary maximum in 1857 and then fell as a great international financial crisis occurred. The great new supplies of gold had been readily taken ("absorbed") into the monetary circulation of the world, to meet the needs of rapidly growing commerce and industry. In the European countries,[5] prices in terms of gold, tho fluctuating somewhat, kept at about the same level from 1860 to 1870. The years 1871 and 1872 were very prosperous and showed rapidly rising prices which reached a maximum in 1873, when a financial panic occurred.

In that very year, just as the gold production for the first time since 1851 had fallen below $100,000,000, several notable changes in monetary legislation were made which made gold more important in the circulation of a number of countries.

In 1873 Germany made gold the standard throughout the new German Empire (having prepared the way by legislation in 1871 which made gold a legal tender alongside of silver), and provided that silver was thenceforth to be used only in the subsidiary coinage. The same year Belgium, and the next year the other countries of the Latin Union (France, Switzerland, and Italy) took steps which resulted in demonetizing silver; that is, in limiting its coinage to governmental account, and in making gold their one standard money.

The United States at that time had neither gold nor silver regularly in circulation (except in California), and there was a long-continued discussion of "a return to specie payments," which meant the return to a metallic standard, and the redemption of greenbacks on demand.

Meantime in 1873 a law was pa.s.sed making the gold dollar "the unit of value," and dropping out the standard silver dollar from the list of coins authorized to be issued at the mint.[6] From 1873 until 1879, prices (in greenbacks) were falling in this country very rapidly because the country with the increase in population, wealth, and business, was "growing up to" its unchanging currency supply. For a like reason at the same time gold prices throughout the world were falling. While this country was lowering its level of prices from an inflated paper money to a gold commodity basis, the gold basis itself was sinking to a lower level. The very demand of our treasury and banks for gold caused the retention of our own gold product (which between 1864 and 1876 had been nearly all exported) and required an enormous net importation of gold between 1878 and 1888. This reduced suddenly by one-half the amount available each year from our production for the rest of the world.

-- 6. #Definition of the standard of deferred payments.# These various changes in the purchasing power of the standard money had great effects upon industrial conditions. Particularly had they shifted the positions and claims of debtors and creditors, because of the enormous importance of money as "the standard of deferred payments," Let us now get a more definite understanding of that term.

As a medium of exchange, money comes to be the unit in which most prices are expressed and compared; in other words, it becomes the common denominator of prices.[7] This makes it also the most convenient unit in which to express the amount of credit transactions and of existing debts.[8] A credit transaction is a trade lengthened in time; one party fulfils his part of the contract, the other party promises to give an equivalent at a later date. The equivalent may be in any kind of goods; for example, in barter one may part with a horse on the promise of a cow to be received later; or a small horse on the promise of a large one; or a flock of sheep on the promise of its return at the end of the year with a part of the increase of the flock. A simple standard in which to express the debt is the thing borrowed, as horse, sheep, wheat, house. Again, the thing to which the value of debts is referred may be a thing quite different from the goods borrowed and, with the growth of the monetary economy and the use of the interest contract, money comes more and more to be used as the standard. At length the law declares that, in the absence of any other agreement, the amount of a debt is to be payable in terms of the unit of standard money, which thus is made legal tender as well as the customary standard of deferred payments. A _standard of deferred payments_ is the thing of value in which, by law or by contract, the amount of a debt is expressed and payable.

-- 7. # Increasing importance of the standard.# Until the use of money develops, the use of credit is difficult and limited; it becomes easy when the value of all things is expressed in terms of a common circulating medium. It therefore generally is true that the importance of money as the standard of deferred payments increases with the use of money as a medium of trade. The volume of outstanding debts expressed in terms of money now very greatly exceeds the total value of the circulating medium. Changes in the general level of prices have, therefore, great effects upon all existing debts. The value of all debts changes in the same proportion as does that of the standard unit of money; when this rises or falls in value, it means increase or reduction, in the same ratio, of the purchasing power of every creditor. It is as if he had in his possession metal dollars equal in amount to the face of the debt, and they had changed by so much in purchasing power. The debtor's interests in such changes are, of course, just the reverse of the creditor's interests.

Outstanding contract debts may be roughly divided into two cla.s.ses: short-time loans, running less than a year; and long-time loans, running for a year or more.[9] Fluctuations are rarely rapid and great enough to affect appreciably the debtors and creditors in the case of short-time loans. The results are appreciable in the case of loans running from one to five years, and may be very great in the case of loans made for still longer periods, such as the bonded indebtedness of nations, states, munic.i.p.alities, and business corporations, and as mortgages given by farmers on their land or by owners of city real estate. A mult.i.tude of interests are thus affected by a change in the value of money. When money rises in purchasing power, receivers of fixed incomes are gainers. When it falls in purchasing power, they lose. Receivers of fixed incomes from loans include not merely private investors, but also many educational and charitable inst.i.tutions which dispense their incomes for public purposes. Wages and salaries of many kinds go up and down less rapidly than do other prices, and thus to some extent wage-earners are in the position of pa.s.sive capitalists[10] as regards changes in the monetary standard. In a capitalistic age, therefore, almost every individual is affected in some way by a change in the value of money.

-- 8. #Fluctuating standard and the interest-rate.# In connection with the standard of deferred payments there is presented a problem of the effect that fluctuations of the standard may have upon the interest-rate.[11] As the general price-level falls or rises, the monetary standard conversely appreciates or depreciates.[12] If these changes are slight in amount and imperceptible in their direction they may not affect considerably the motives of borrowers and lenders.

Therefore, the rate of interest this year in long-time loans would be just that resulting in the expectation, on all hands, of a stationary level of general prices. Suppose that rate to be 5 per cent on the standard investment (such as real-estate loans and good bonds). Then the lender of $1000 will receive each year a $50 income and at the end of the investment period $1000 princ.i.p.al, each dollar of which will purchase the same composite quantum of goods that a dollar would have purchased at the time the loan was made. Likewise, the borrower would pay interest and princ.i.p.al in a standard that reflected an unchanging general level of prices. But, now, if the general level of prices unexpectedly falls 1 per cent within the year, the creditor of a loan maturing at the end of the year would receive (princ.i.p.al and interest) $1050 which will purchase 1 per cent more goods per dollar than the sum he loaned, or (approximately) $1060 worth of goods. Hence, he has received, in quantum of goods, a yield of 6 per cent on his investment. If this change continues for five years, the lender of a five-year loan would receive each year $50 having a purchasing power successively 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 per cent greater than the same sum had at the making of the loan; and at the end of the five years would collect the princ.i.p.al, having a purchasing power 5 per cent greater.