Gold

Gold standard

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For other uses, see Gold standard (disambiguation).
Under a gold standard, paper notes are convertible into pre-set, fixed quantities of gold.

The gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is a fixed weight of gold. Three distinct kinds of gold standard can be identified. The gold specie standard is a system in which the monetary unit is associated with circulating gold coins, or with the unit of value defined in terms of one particular circulating gold coin in conjunction with subsidiary coinage made from a lesser valuable metal. The gold exchange standard may involve only the circulation of silver coins, or coins made of other metals, but the authorities will have guaranteed a fixed exchange rate with another country that is on the gold standard, hence creating a de facto gold standard, in that the value of the silver coins has a fixed external value in terms of gold that is independent of the inherent silver value. The gold bullion standard is a system in which gold coins do not actually circulate as such, but in which the authorities have agreed to sell gold bullion on demand at a fixed price.

Gold certificates were used as paper currency in the United States from 1882 to 1933, these certificates were freely convertible into gold coins.

Contents

The gold specie standard

A gold specie standard existed in some of the great empires of earlier times, such as in the case of the Byzantine Empire which used a gold coin known as the Byzant. But with the ending of the Byzantine Empire, the civilized world tended to use the silver standard, such as in the case of the silver pennies that became the staple coin of Britain around the time of King Offa in the year 796 AD. The Spanish discovery of the great silver deposits at Potosi in the 16th century, led to an international silver standard in conjunction with the famous pieces of eight, which carried on in earnest until the nineteenth century. In modern times the British West Indies was one of the first regions to switch to a gold specie standard. The gold standard in the British West Indies, that followed from Queen Anne's proclamation of 1704, was based on the Spanish gold doubloon coin. In the year 1717, Sir Isaac Newton, who was master of the Royal Mint, established a new mint ratio as between silver and gold that had the effect of driving silver out of circulation and putting Britain on a gold standard. But it wasn't until the year 1821, following the introduction of the gold sovereign coin by the new Royal Mint at Tower Hill in the year 1816, that the United Kingdom was formally put on a gold specie standard. The United Kingdom was the first of the great industrial powers to switch from the silver standard to a gold specie standard. Soon to follow was Canada in 1853, Newfoundland in 1865, and the USA and Germany 'de jure' in 1873. The USA used the American Gold Eagle as their unit, and Germany introduced the new gold mark, while Canada adopted a dual system based on both the American Gold Eagle and the British Gold Sovereign. Australia and New Zealand adopted the British gold standard, as did the British West Indies, while Newfoundland was the only British Empire territory to introduce its own gold coin as a standard. Royal Mint branches were established in Sydney, New South Wales, Melbourne, Victoria, and Perth, Western Australia for the purposes of minting gold sovereigns from Australia's rich gold deposits.

The gold exchange standard

Towards the end of the nineteenth century some of the remaining silver standard countries began to peg their silver coin units to the gold standards of the United Kingdom or the USA. In 1898, British India pegged the silver rupee to the pound sterling at a fixed rate of 1s 4d, while in 1906, the Straits Settlements adopted a gold exchange standard against the pound sterling with the silv67 dollars to 1 troy oz (31.1 g) gold. (See Coinage Act of 1873).

Throughout the 1870s deflationary and depressionary economics created periodic demands for silver currency. However, attempts to introduce such currency generally failed, and continued the general pressure towards a gold standard. By 1879, only gold coins were accepted through the Latin Monetary Union, composed of France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland and later Greece, even though silver was, in theory, a circulating medium.

Suspension of the gold standard

Governments faced with the need to fund high levels of expenditure, but with limited sources of tax revenue, suspended convertibility of currency into gold on a number of occasions in the 19th century. The British government suspended convertibility during the Napoleonic wars and the US government during the US Civil War. In both cases, convertibility was resumed after the war.

Gold standard from peak to crisis (1901–1932)

Suspending gold payments to fund the war

As in previous major wars under its gold standard, the British government suspended the convertibility of Bank of England notes to gold in 1914 to fund military operations during World War I. By the end of the war Britain was on a series of fiat currency regulations, which monetized Postal Money Orders and Treasury Notes. The government later called these notes banknotes, which are different from US Treasury notes. The United States government took similar measures. After the war, Germany, having lost much of its gold in reparations, could no longer produce gold Reichsmarks age), and was forced to issue unbacked paper money, leading to major inflation. This was one of the major causes of discontent during the Bakumatsu period, and one of the causes of the demise of the Shogunate.

Following Germany's example after the Franco-Prussian War of extracting reparations to facilitate a move to the gold standard, Japan gained the needed reserves after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. Whether the gold standard offered a nation a seal of good housekeeping when it sought to borrow abroad is debated.

For Japan, moving to gold was considered as vital to gaining access to Western capital markets.

Great Britain, Japan, and the Scandinavian countries left the gold standard in 1931.

Depression and World War II

Prolongation of the depression

Some critics blame the gold-exchange standard (different from a true gold standard) of the 1920s for prolonging the depression. The gold standard limited the Federal Reserve's control over monetary policy. As a result, the Fed could not lower interest rates as an expansionary policy to stimulate the Great Depression to an end. Rather, the Fed defended the fixed price of dollars in respect to the gold standard by raising interest rates, trying to increase the demand for dollars. Higher interest rates intensified the deflationary pressure on the dollar and reduced investment in the US. Central banks. The banks converted dollar assets to gold in 1931, reducing the Federal Reserve's gold reserves. This speculative attack on the dollar created a panic in the U.S. banking system. Fearing imminent devaluation of the dollar, many foreign and domestic depositors withdrew funds from U.S. banks to convert them into gold or other assets. Since the gold standard depressed demand for dollars, interest rates rose. Due to the Federal Reserve's reluctance to abandon the gold standard and float the U.S. currency as Britain had done, recovery in the United States was slower than in Britain. It wasn't until 1933 when the United States finally decided to abandon the gold standard that things began to improve.

British hesitate to return to gold standard

During the 1939–1942 period, the UK depleted much of its gold stock in purchases of munitions and weaponry on a "cash and carry" basis from the U.S. and other nations. This depletion of the UK's reserve convinced Winston Churchill of the impracticality of returning to a pre-war style gold standard. To put it simply the war had bankrupted Britain. John Maynard Keynes, who had argued against such a gold standard, proposed to put the power to print money in the hands of the privately owned Bank of England. Keynes, in warning about the menaces of inflation, said "By a continuous process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some". Quite possibly because of this, the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement established the International Monetary Fund and an international monetary system based on convertibility of the various national currencies into a U.S. dollar that was in turn convertible into gold. It also prevented countries from manipulating their currency's value to gain an edge in international trade.

Post-war international gold-dollar standard (1946–1971)

Main article: Bretton Woods system

After the Second World War, a system similar to a Gold Standard was established by the Bretton Woods Agreements. Under this system, many countries fixed their exchange rates relative to the U.S. dollar. The U.S. promised to fix the price of gold at $35 per ounce. Implicitly, then, all currencies pegged to the dollar also had a fixed value in terms of gold. Under the regime of the French President Charles de Gaulle up to 1970, France reduced its dollar reserves, trading them for gold from the U.S. government, thereby reducing U.S. economic influence abroad. This, along with the fiscal strain of federal expenditures for the Vietnam War, led President Richard Nixon to end the direct convertibility of the dollar to gold in 1971, resulting in the system's breakdown, commonly known as the Nixon Shock.

Theory

Commodity money is inconvenient to store and transport. It also does not allow the government to control or regulate the flow of commerce within their dominion with the same ease that a standardized currency does. As such, commodity money gave way to representative money, and gold and other specie were retained as its backing.

Gold was a common form of money due to its rarity, durability, divisibility, fungibility, and ease of identification, often in conjunction with silver. Silver was typically the main circulating medium, with gold as the metal of monetary reserve.

It is difficult to manipulate a gold standard to tailor to an economy’s demand for money, providing practical constraints against the measures that central banks might otherwise use to respond to economic crises.

The gold standard variously specified how the gold backing would be implemented, including the amount of specie per currency unit. The currency itself is just paper and so has no intrinsic value, but is accepted by traders because it can be redeemed any time for the equivalent specie. A U.S. silver certificate, for example, could be redeemed for an actual piece of silver.

Representative money and the gold standard protect citizens from hyperinflation and other abuses of monetary policy, as were seen in some countries during the Great Depression. However, they were not without their problems and critics, and so were partially abandoned via the international adoption of the Bretton Woods System. That system eventually collapsed in 1971, at which time nearly all nations had switched to full fiat money.

According to later analysis, the earliness with which a country left the gold standard reliably predicted its economic recovery from the great depression. For example, Great Britain and Scandinavia, which left the gold standard in 1931, recovered much earlier than France and Belgium, which remained on gold much longer. Countries such as China, which had a silver standard, almost avoided the depression entirely. The connection between leaving the gold standard as a strong predictor of that country's severity of its depression and the length of time of its recovery has been shown to be consistent for dozens of countries, including developing countries. This partly explains why the experience and length of the depression differed between national economies.

Differing definitions

A 100% reserve gold standard, or a full gold standard, exists when a monetary authority holds sufficient gold to convert all of the representative money it has issued into gold at the promised exchange rate. It is sometimes referred to as the gold specie standard to more easily identify it from other forms of the gold standard that have existed at various times. A 100% reserve standard is generally considered difficult to implement as the quantity of gold in the world is too small to sustain current worldwide economic activity at current gold prices. Its implementation would entail a many-fold increase in the price of gold. Furthermore, the "necessary" quantity of money (i.e. one that avoids either inflation or deflation) is not a fixed quantity, but varies continuously with the level of commercial activity.

This is due to the Fractional-reserve banking system. As money is created by the central bank and spent into circulation, the money expands via the money multiplier. Each subsequent loan and redeposit results in an expansion of the monetary base. Therefore, the promised exchange rate would have to be constantly adjusted.

In an international gold-standard system (which is necessarily based on an internal gold standard in the countries concerned) gold or a currency that is convertible into gold at a fixed price is used as a means of making international payments. Under such a system, when exchange rates rise above or fall below the fixed mint rate by more than the cost of shipping gold from one country to another, large inflows or outflows occur until the rates return to the official level. International gold standards often limit which entities have the right to redeem currency for gold. Under the Bretton Woods system, these were called "SDRs" for Special Drawing Rights.

Advantages

The theory of the gold standard rests on the idea that maximal increases in governmental purchasing power during wartime emergencies require post-war deflations, which would not occur without monetary institutions like the gold standard, which insist upon return to pre-war price-levels and therefore deflationary wartime expectations.

The gold standard limits the power of governments to inflate prices through excessive issuance of paper currency. It may tend to reduce uncertainty in international trade by providing a fixed pattern of international exchange rates. Under the classical international gold standard, disturbances in price levels in one country would be partly or wholly offset by an automatic balance-of-payment adjustment mechanism called the "price specie flow mechanism."

Disadvantages

Gold prices (US$ per ounce) since 1968, in nominal US$ and inflation adjusted US$.

Advocates of a renewed gold standard

The return to the gold standard is supported by many followers of the Austrian School of Economics, Objectivists and libertarians[9] largely because they object to the role of the government in issuing fiat currency through central banks. A significant number of gold standard advocates also call for a mandated end to fractional reserve banking.

Few lawmakers today advocate a return to the gold standard, other than adherents of the Austrian school and some supply-siders. However, some prominent economists have expressed sympathy with a hard currency basis, and have argued against fiat money, including former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (himself a former Objectivist), and macro-economist Robert Barro. Greenspan famously argued the case for returning to a gold standard in his 1966 paper "Gold and Economic Freedom", in which he described supporters of fiat currencies as "welfare statists" intent on using monetary policies to finance deficit spending. He has argued that the fiat money system of today has retained the favorable properties of the gold standard because central bankers have pursued monetary policy as if a gold standard were still in place. U.S. Congressman Ron Paul has continually argued for the reinstatement of the gold standard.

The current global monetary system relies on the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency by which major transactions, such as the price of gold itself, are measured. A host of alternatives have been suggested, including energy-based currencies, market baskets of currencies or commodities, gold being one of the alternatives.

In 2001 Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad proposed a new currency that would be used initially for international trade among Muslim nations. The currency he proposed was called the Islamic gold dinar and it was defined as 4.25 grams of pure (24 carat) gold. Mahathir Mohamad promoted the concept on the basis of its economic merits as a stable unit of account and also as a political symbol to create greater unity between Islamic nations. The purported purpose of this move would be to reduce dependence on the United States dollar as a reserve currency, and to establish a non-debt-backed currency in accord with Islamic law against the charging of interest. However, to date, Mahathir's proposed gold-dinar currency has failed to take off.

Gold as a reserve today

Main article: Gold reserves

During the 1990s Russia liquidated much of the gold reserves of the former USSR, while several other nations accumulated gold in preparation for the Economic and Monetary Union. The Swiss Franc was based on a full gold convertibility until 2000. However, gold reserves are held in significant quantity by many nations as a means of defending their currency, and hedging against the U.S. Dollar, which forms the bulk of liquid currency reserves. Weakness in the U.S. Dollar tends to be offset by strengthening of gold prices. Gold remains a principal financial asset of almost all central banks alongside foreign currencies and government bonds. It is also held by central banks as a way of hedging against loans to their own governments as an "internal reserve". Approximately 19% of all above-ground gold is held in reserves by central banks.

Both gold coins and gold bars are widely traded in liquid markets, and therefore still serve as a private store of wealth. Some privately issued currencies, such as digital gold currency, are backed by gold reserves.

In 1999, to protect the value of gold as a reserve, European Central Bankers signed the Washington Agreement on Gold, which stated that they would not allow gold leasing for speculative purposes, nor would they enter the market as sellers except for sales that had already been agreed upon.

See also

Numismatics portal

References

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Further reading

External links

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