William Bramley/The Gods of Eden/21

Funny Money

FEW TOPICS OCCUPY as many minds or stimulate as many emotions as money. This is largely because money is an overwhelming problem to a majority of people. One thing which causes modern money to be a problem is inflation, whether inflation is climbing at 3% annually or 300%. Inflation, of course, is the situation in which the costs of goods and services steadily rise due to the ever-decreasing value of money. This happens when the money supply becomes larger in proportion to the supply of valuable goods and services.

Money itself is not valuable; only the goods and services that can be bought with it are. The wealth of any individual or nation, therefore, is ultimately determined by what it produces in terms of valuable products and services, not by how much money it prints, distributes or holds. A nation could actually survive without any currency at all as long as it was otherwise productive.

The purpose of money is to facilitate the exchange of goods and services. Money is therefore an extension of the barter system. Barter is the act of trading something one possesses or does for something of someone else's. Production and barter are the bases of all economy.

Coins and paper money were originally created to assist in barter. They allowed people to barter without having to carry around actual goods or immediately deliver a service. This permitted individuals to trade more easily and to save the profits of their labors for the future.

Paper money initially began as "promissory notes." A promissory note is a written promise to pay a debt. A person would write a note on a piece of paper promising the bearer of the note a certain quantity of goods or services that the notewriter could provide on demand. To illustrate, let us look at the following fictitious example:

Let us pretend that a chicken farmer was in the village market and wanted to trade for a basket of apples. He did not have his chickens with him, so he might write a note to the apple seller entitling the bearer of the note to come up to the farm at any time to pick out two healthy chickens. The chicken farmer would be able to walk away with his basket of apples and it would be up to the apple grower to visit the farm one day to redeem the note by getting his two chickens. As long as people have faith in the chicken farmer's ability to honor his notes, he will be able to use them for barter.

Let us now pretend that as the day draws to a close, the apple grower decides to have a look around the market. He comes across the cloth merchant. The apple grower's wife has been henpecking him for days to buy some of the new silk that just arrived on a caravan from the Far East. The apple grower's home life has been made miserable by her unceasing demands and her denial of wifely comforts, so he negotiates with the cloth merchant for some silk. The cloth merchant, however, does not need any more apples, so the apple grower, remembering that he has a note for two chickens, asks the merchant if the merchant needs poultry. The merchant says that he does, and the apple grower gives him the note for two chickens in exchange for silk. It is now up to the cloth merchant to trudge on up to the chicken farm to redeem the note. The chickens themselves have never left the coop, yet they have changed ownership twice in one day. This type of exchange was all that paper money was initially created for; but do you see the temptation that it can open up?

If the chicken farmer knows that some time will pass before he must redeem his notes with actual chickens, or that some if his notes will circulate forever and never come in for redemption, he may be tempted to issue more notes than he has in actual chickens, thinking that he will be able to cover all the notes by the time they come back to him. Temptation now gets the best of the chicken farmer.

The chicken farmer has a big family get-together coming up and he wants to impress his in-laws for once by putting on an opulent feast. Down to the market he goes where he writes notes for chickens not yet hatched and stocks up with an abundance of goods from other merchants. Several things can now happen. The chicken farmer will get away with it if he is always able to meet the demand for chickens when his notes come in for redemption. Another thing that may, and often will, occur is that he has so saturated the marketplace with his chicken notes that most people just do not want any more of them, so he must offer even more hens for each trade to make people feel that it is worth their while. He is now writing notes for two or three chickens in exchange for items for which he previously only had to issue single-chicken notes. As these chicken notes circulate, they become less and less valuable because there are so many of them. A vicious spiral ensues: the more notes the chicken farmer issues, the less valuable they become, and the more he has to issue in order to get what he wants. This is known as inflation.

Now comes the worst part.

With more and more notes outstanding, an increasing number of notes will start coming in for redemption. Soon the farmer will see that his true wealth, which is his supply of chickens, is becoming rapidly depleted even though only a small portion of his outstanding notes have come back. To preserve his chickens, he must decrease the value of his notes by declaring that the outstanding notes are now only good for half of what they say. This is called devaluation.

As we can see, paper notes, or money, are rooted in actual commodities and are meant to be an expression that the creator of the notes has something valuable to trade.

In contrast to notes are coins, which functioned somewhat differently. Metals have always been considered valuable, and so pieces of metal were convenient trading tools. Metal pieces were imprinted with various designs, thereby becoming coins, and their metallic purity was guaranteed by the imprinter. Coin values were initially determined by the quantity and purity of the metal contained within the coins. Gold was a rare and popular metal, so coins made from gold were more expensive and had a higher barter value than, for instance, copper coins.

Metal coins became a popular tool of barter because they were durable and quantities could be controlled. They did create some problems, however. Realistically, people were only trading pieces of metal for other goods. This created a disproportionate emphasis on metals. The acquisition of coins and coin metals became an obsession to a great many people, and such obsessions tend to drain away energy better spent producing other valuable goods and services. The system also gave a disproportionate amount of power to those who possessed large quantities of coined metals, even though other commodities, such as food, are ultimately more valuable. The person with the coin metals could immediately acquire any good or service, but a farmer first had to go through the intermediate step of exchanging his product for a coin or coin metal before he could have the same spending flexibility.

Coin metals merged with paper notes to create the foundation of our modern monetary system in the 1600's. Those

William Bramley/The Gods of Eden/21/216/5