> The world used gold/silver for its currency for most of human history until 1970 when we entered this period of worldwide fiat currencies. Our current situation is pretty remarkable.
This much is patently false, and probably even still false once you account for the accepted exaggeration in most appeals to the entirety of human history.
There was no unified monetary system for the vast majority of human history, never mind one based on gold and silver.
And for the smaller, more recent portion of human history it is again probably largely untrue. I'd point to Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber [0]. I'm sure many people have many opinions on the work, particularly around these parts, but I believe it at least does a good job of refuting this particular statement.
I realize some of these graphs may be coincidences but it makes a compelling case for me in understanding our current wealth inequality. When you can create money backed by nothing, those closest to the printer will know best how to funnel it into their pockets.
The New Deal political coalition was shattered in 1968 and we've had neoliberal politics since then which are indifferent to economic inequality. Inequality has unsurprisingly gone up.
Blaming it on magic paper vs gold money to the exclusion of everything else seems like a red herring.
> The New Deal political coalition was shattered in 1968 and we've had neoliberal politics since then which are indifferent to economic inequality.
This is also a red herring. The New Deal did little to actually fix structural wealth problems. And "neoliberal" politics actually included a lot of progressive politics like negative income tax, drug legalization, prison abolition, etc.
A better reading of history would be that the post-war boom in the US mostly amounted to a lucky windfall and the US has wasted a lot of policies trying to recreate an economic boom using cultural levers.
Eh. The New Deal was a lot of things over 35 years but there was a consistent "bottom-up" theme that's been replaced by a "supply side" theme.
Neither set of ideologies explains everything, but lots of little decisions over a few decades can add up.
(Also, I realize we're being fast and loose with labels here, but after 20 years of Reagan/Bush/Clinton drug war, taking credit for legalization feels a little bold.)
> negative income tax, drug legalization, prison abolition, etc.
Under what interpretation of the word "neoliberal" do any of these things fall under? Especially the last two; find me a single person claimed to be neoliberal who supports either.
I have a hard time seeing the discontinuity between the New Deal people you're referencing and the 1960s Great Society ones that pretty much iterated on the same themes of the scientific management of society through monolithic institutions with expansive powers.
It's pretty much relentless hubris with little to show and much to answer for.
Depends on the outcome you're looking for, I guess. From a sheer "managing the macro architecture of civilization" perspective it's hard to argue -- the speed with which China can do substantial things is staggering. They trade that off for individual liberties, presumably. Which makes one wonder if the liberties we enjoy are worth the bargain, on net.
Or perhaps the question boils down to whether "on net" is the right objective function.
I guess you'd have to ignore what Deidre McCloskey describes as the Great Enrichment of liberal democracies:
"[...] a rise in real wages 1800 to the present by a factor of 10 or 30 or
(allowing for improved quality of goods) 100, which is to say 900 or 2,900 or 9,900
percent" [1]
Meanwhile there's a certain propensity for incredible inhumanity, eugenics (in the case of the 1920s Progressive movement) and the outright abuse and "reeducation" of minority races in China.
it's not. China is looking at a demographic collapse in the next few years that upends their running economic model and makes any future projections based on past history suspect. One of the ways out of demographic collapse is immigration, but somehow I don't see China's equivalent of US's Mexico/LatAM coming out of the global geopolitical woodwork. Immigration is simply not in China's DNA. Outside of immigration, no amount of "scientific management" or "good policy" will make 18-30 year-olds appear magically over the course of 5-10 years. Unless my understanding of biology is wrong and dolphins could sprout legs and walk on land, usually it takes 18-30 years.
I'm willing to change my mind. What sort of an ace in its hole does china have to change this situation?
The specific thing that will collapse is the economy.
When people retire there is a sudden shift from investment to liquidation. That's a driving factor for popping asset bubbles, and china is currently one huge asset bubble.
Like it or not (i personally dont), we are also living in a world where the central planners rely on consumption-driven economics, and there just isn't a chinese consumer market anymore due to demographics.
The multi-child family people are already retired, though, and long-retired at that. Them dying out means a shrinking population but also lower pension costs with no lost labor.
The working population has been steady-state at 1-child for 40 years followed by 2-child for the last few years.
I suppose there could be some demand loss due to fewer people demanding things, but.. there's a lot of room for additional demand in China. Plenty of people where running water is a last-20-years nice new thing.
Hypothetically, what would occur if the federal reserve simply sent money to every bank account rather than trying to steer market interest rates? If it's an equivalent action then why do we only perform the action that is more prone to regulatory capture?
Theoretically, supply side economics. Demand side economics makes even liberal economists uncomfortable, because it's so closely tied to inflation of consumer goods. They would rather fund the industries that make the goods, so there are more goods (and jobs producing them).
It's clear that it isn't working, which is why a heretical sect of MMT economics wants to do demand side. It's a big change, the kind that takes a generation dying off to accomplish. Especially since it may not work. It's a genuine unknown, with the primary advantage that we don't already know what kind of regulatory capture it would cause. Which is enough for some, given how badly the current situation is fraying.
It's not an equivalent action. If you print money and use it to buy bonds, then if you ever want to reduce inflation you can just sell the bonds again. Whereas if you print money and give it away then to get it back you have to tax people, which is (a) unpopular and (b) involves 'the government bailing out the central bank'.
You cannot make an absolute statement that consumers vs businesses deserve more money, you have to look at the current market.
However, the central banks have opened the flood gates for supply side monetary stimulus. It's not unreasonable to think that the demand side has been neglected massively and that money should be put into the demand side instead.
That question is usually answered by the people willing to take out commercial loans. Without the market supplying that function, you’d have to try and figure this out yourself centrally.
The second issue is that you really are spraying money evenly across the whole economy, effectively starving productive ventures of capital while at the same time endowing moribund ventures with it instead.
So it’s not quite an equivalent scheme, it has different benefits and costs.
Because in a democracy, effectively granting the legislature the power to print money and hand it to citizens is fraught with some pretty obvious conflicts of interest.
(yes I know the Fed is “independent” but it is the tail on a government dog—the two are separated only in name)
Is the peril greater than giving money to large financial corporations? Extremely Large corporations often lobby or directly corrupt their surrounding regulatory authorities.
I don't get why people keep linking this page. How can you "understand" anything from a page which provides no analysis and presents numbers with no caveats? How can I trust that these charts aren't cherry picked?
What do you think of Capital and Ideology? Piketty posits some theories/hypothesis with caveats throughout and has a lot of data for certain countries and time periods, 75% of the book is history through the lens he is examining.
If we're talking "generally": Yes, we can trust that charts aren't cherry picked by reading the analysis. A proper analysis would include argumentation for why this metric is critical and why this chart is interesting.
Fiat currency is backed by the existence of an economy that exchanges fiat currency for goods and services. If that economy disappears you get hyperinflation. See Zimbabwe and Argentina as examples of countries that destroyed their economies and suffer from hyperinflation as a result of massively reducing the ability to exchange money for food.
Think about it this way. You play a video game with micro transactions. You receive 1000 units of premium currency. Why is that currency valuable? It's valuable because you can exchange it for cash shop items. Imagine if the cash shop shuts down but the game keeps running. Your currency would be worthless because you lost the ability to exchange it.
It might be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by a lot. I think there is a heavy dose of magical thinking in it, and plenty gold bugs really, actually do seem to think there is something special about gold.
I even once got into a discussion with someone on a science fiction forum who's belief in gold was so absolute that he thought it would inevitably be the foundation of all interstellar commerce, even with alien species because gold is so unique it's one thing everyone would inevitably agree on being a universal store of value.
A lot of excellent other answers, so I hesitated to chip in but I think there is a useful way to think about this.
If the unit of exchange was always physical gold coins then yes, there would be a finite amount of money. However the moment we turned to promissory notes, cheques, bank notes and financial instruments such as in fractional reserve banking the link to physical gold was a fiction. Such notes have been around a very, very long time although of course increasing in prominence over time.
It was a fiction even for precious metal coins as well because the moment a government started running low on the metal, or just wanted to inflate it's currency, it would just debase the coins.
Even if we think gold is finite (doubtful in any meaningful sense), it does not follow that the amount of money (in the modern sense) would be finite in gold standard.
Gold standard means that the value of an unit of currency is tied to a specific amount of gold. In addition it may mean that the amount of bank notes in circulation in such system matches the amount of gold in the vaults of central bank.
Neither of those means that the amount of money people have lent to the banks (i.e. money at their bank account) has any meaningful relationship to the amount of gold - at least without extremely strict regulation of financial companies, lending and saving.
(Of course, same applies to cryptocurrencies, the claim that current cryptocurrencies would somehow set a limit for money creation is just a massive misunderstanding of money and credit.)
That's not a fact. Money can and will be created out of thin air regardless if your monetary system is built on central bank money, gold or even bitcoin.
A naive example:
Alice has a gold coin. she walks to a bank and makes a deposit. Now she has one gold coin in her bank account and bank is holding her coin.
Now Bob walks into the bank and says that he needs a loan of one gold coin to buy things. Bank happily lends the coin received from Alice to Bob.
Bob walks to Alice and buys things from Alice and gives the coin to Alice.
Now Alice has one gold coin and another gold coin at her bank account. Total amount of money she has is now two gold coins, even if only one gold coin exists in the whole universe!
And yes, that money at her bank account is as real money as money nowadays gets. And yes, the truth is even more weird, you do not even need to circulate the money as in the naive example, banks can and will just create money out of thin air to people's accounts. After all, the money at the account is literally, literally nothing more or less than a way for bank to say that it will pay you money some later date if you so wish. To make that promise, you do not need any money to exist anywhere. Even I can do that promise on any imaginable currency (what that promise is worth is another discussion). And as said, this has absolutely nothing to do with what "base money" the monetary system is built on. And of course, this is the reason why financial system is so heavily regulated.
> There is, therefore, a natural limit to how fractional your reserve can be and keep trust over a long term.
The point is that both fiat and gold sit in a system of debt powered by trust. If you're theorizing a natural limit to the smallness of reserves, you might as well be theorizing a natural limit to the amount of money that can be printed.
edit: it's certainly physically easier to have no reserves than to print infinite paper.
That natural limit is way, way, beyond levels that cause catatrophic disturbances in economy[1], thus the distinction is irrelevant.
[1] See your favourite mania, or even crisis of 2008 that can be argued to be because of failure of regulation to limit leverage of financial institutions.
But Bob has -1 gold coin in his bank account, so there is still only 1 gold coin. If Alice deposits her "new" gold coin into her account, the bank still has only one coin. If Alice demands to withdraw her 2 coins, the gold bank won't be able to comply, whereas the fiat bank would just print another coin.
That's not how amount of money is calculated. If you did, you would end up with a funny result that there is no money at all. As all modern money is debt from someone to someone else.
Fractional reserve banking doesn't actually model how banks work in the modern economy though - they don't lend out deposits, they just add a figure to the customer's account and add a matching loan to their assets, literally creating money. They could do this without any deposits at all.
Yes, but minimally you can create disclosure regulations requiring entities that are lending to disclose the level of leverage they are operating at. Customers can then discriminate when they deposit based on withdrawal risk.
Sorry, your comment made me laugh a bit. You know, before the smartest guys were incentivized to figure out how to make you and me click ads, they were incentivized to figure out how to circumvent financial regulation. Turned out that it is really, really f*cking hard to write a regulation that can't be somehow gamed. And even if it was not, you need to remember that vast majority of people do not know how to handle percentages, it is quite naive to expect that those people could make any rational judgements based on any financial disclosures whatsoever. Just look around, Madoff managed to con quite a few sophisticated investors, and to anyone with any common sense Tether has been behaving exactly as if they would be doing their best to scam the whole crypto scene - and nobody cares or requires disclosures.
Under standard definitions, every bank loan creates money out of thin air. When you get a $10k car loan, for example, that means the amount of money floating around the economy has increased by $10k; there's nobody else in the market who has to spend $10k less because you got that loan.
We pull gold out of the ground when it is economical to do so. That is to say when the exchange of gold to currency is favorable for extraction, which can also be conveyed to mean that when there isn't enough gold to the demand of currency for gold.
Coming from a gold bug: you can still create an infinite number of IOUs on gold. Thats what the dollar was before Nixon closed the gold window. The fed was running a fractional reserve on their gold. Believe it or not they still are today, despite folks and major nations no longer have the ability to trade their dollars for some amount of the US treasury gold.
Look into the market value of the gold certificates that the fed has on its books. The fed hasn't marked their gold position to the market since the 70s. Very peculiar if you ask me. Also consider why each of the federal reserve banks trade these certificates amongst one another.
On top of that you can read the treasury's website and find that the policy states that the treasury gold plays an important role as collateral on the dollar https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages...
"Congress has specified that a Federal Reserve Bank must hold collateral equal in value to the Federal Reserve notes that the Bank receives. This collateral is chiefly gold certificates and United States securities. This provides backing for the note issue. The idea was that if the Congress dissolved the Federal Reserve System, the United States would take over the notes (liabilities). This would meet the requirements of Section 411, but the government would also take over the assets, which would be of equal value. Federal Reserve notes represent a first lien on all the assets of the Federal Reserve Banks, and on the collateral specifically held against them."
Yeah... sometimes I think Mises should be required reading for anyone commenting on HN threads about money. If anything, his descriptions of money and money substitutes are even more relevant in the modern financialized economy, where substitutes (i.e. derivatives) now exist for every imaginable asset class.
>Gold has intrinsic value for practically all of human existence.
The intrinsic value argument hardly makes any sense because it's almost always lower than the actual value. Someone interested in intrinsic value would be buying copper, not gold.
The intrinsic value of gold is an answer to whether gold will stay relevant 5000 years from now. It will guarantee that gold will always have some residual value, it doesn't guarantee that its current valuation is correct.
Compare this to Bitcoin which can be replaced by any competitor.
Compare this to the US dollar which is required to pay taxes. You will still see a use case for the dollar in a hundred years.
The finiteness of gold doesn’t imply any particular monetary value for it. The pre-1971 gold standard was maintained not by concrete standards of value but by global scale market manipulation; as we can see in market data since then, the actual market clearing price of gold is much more dynamic than the fixed peg imposed by gold standard laws.
The monetary value of gold emerged organically because it turned out to be the best available option for transactions between untrusted parties. After the emergence of modern states, this use case was restricted to cross-border payments since strong legal protections and centralized banking systems made fiat currencies trustworthy enough for domestic commerce.
But anyways, if one looks at why gold emerged as the preferred money for its time and place, “finiteness” aka non-zero marginal cost of production is certainly a relevant factor.
It does not follow from the post- gold-standard instability of gold that the prior stability was due to market manipulation; the nature of the asset changed fundamentally. You might say the gold was "backed by" the financial system, whereas now it's a speculative asset no better than BTC.
The point is that there was no underlying law of nature attaching gold to the financial system. The only thing "backed by" meant was, the government promised to trade gold and regulate the gold market as required to maintain their declared peg. Maybe it's a bit of a "hot take" to call that manipulation, but I don't think it's untrue or unfair - in some countries (although not the UK) governments went as far as simply prohibiting private speculation in gold.
Or... switching to a fiat system enabled the economy to expand faster than labor policy (minimum wage, maximum work week) has been able to keep up, enabling those at the top to exploit the gains.
Ignoring that half those graphs are just arrows pointing to arbitrary knees in exponential functions, I couldn't find this one which, unlike most on that page, directly graphs an ongoing policy choice, minimum wage vs. productivity: https://i0.wp.com/chicagopolicyreview.org/wp-content/uploads...
When you have money backed by gold, those who have it benefit from its appreciation. Same is true of any deflationary currency.
Wealth tends to flow uphill. Even in Communism the politically connected realized that wealth in that system was political capital and learned to position themselves to accumulate it. There is a reason the USSR collapsed and gave way to one of the most aristocratic states in the world.
I don’t discount that site though. A lot more happened in or around the early 70s than just the collapse of Bretton Woods.
I also don’t dismiss your comment as untrue. A fair inflationary currency would almost literally drop money from helicopters, not issue it to banks and governments. Still I imagine over time people would learn how to chase the helicopters.
Indeed. There is a reason why the ancient Hebrew laws dictated that every 50 years all debts are wiped away and all assets returned to their hereditary owners.
Debt and money go together. When you take on debt your creditor can decide to sell his credit to somebody else, de facto using your promise to repay your debt as a currency.
Isn't your promise...just a promise? Yet you can buy stuff with it?
The current wealth inequality is caused by the productivity gains being concentrated on a smaller population. One Amazon can provide goods far more efficiently than thousands small businesses.
Obviously it represents the point where productivity increased but real wages remained stagnant. I think you’re purposely pretending not to understand it though.
On half those graphs the arrow points to an arbitrary "knee" on an exponential function. It's a graphical version of the Gish Gallop [1] and conspiracy-theory "it makes you think!" arguments. Explanation is definitely warranted.
Gold-backed currencies are, similarly, a historical aberration. They only came into being around the 1870s!
States have picked all kinds of units for accounting and tax purposes for literally millennia. Wheat, silver, wool, gold. They adjusted standard weights and measures all the time to manage their debts and the economy. Fiat is the historical norm, going back about five thousand years.
Separately, some governments have made coins out of various things for a little over two thousand years. And separately still, people have traded gold throughout history as a commodity.
But it's just not true that gold and silver were de-facto money somehow until 1971.
The original article is itself an incredibly long-winded exercise in this kind of bad faith argument... also called a “straw man”. The final paragraphs make that clear, when they claim that the inflation fearmongering is just a front for anti-statists. So if that’s what this is all about, why not just write an article about the merits of a state-directed economy and dispense with the charade?
That itself seems like a straw man. "Anti-statists" is your term -- neither "statist" nor "anti-statist" appears anywhere in the article. And it doesn't say anything at all about a "state-directed economy"; I'm not sure precisely what you mean by that but on the face of it it sounds like a Soviet-style command economy, which scarcely anyone wants (including, I think, Richard Murphy) and certainly isn't the only alternative to the sort of small-government right-libertarianism he seems to be complaining about.
But let's suppose that what Murphy really wants is a "state-directed economy", and that he's concerned that opponents of that are making bad arguments about inflation to oppose it. In that case, why shouldn't he write an article explaining why he disagrees with the key premise of those arguments, namely that there's a real danger of problematically high inflation?
It seems like the principle you're appealing to ("why not just ... and dispense with the charade?") is that if you want X, you should always just argue for X rather than addressing bad arguments against X. I think that principle is very wrong. People are often persuaded by bad arguments, and if someone has been persuaded by a bad argument against X then they will likely not listen willingly when you present your arguments for X. (Because they already know X is bad.) But if you write something about the specific argument they've been convinced by, they might pay attention, and you might convince them.
If the strongest possible interpretation is that gold and gold-backed currencies were universal throughout human history until 1971, that is also wrong.
Gold and silver have been money for thousands and thousands of years, that doesn’t mean it’s a unified monetary system, it was just a natural occurrence.
Back when dimes were silver you could get a gallon of gas for about a dime. If you found a silver dime today and sold it for melt value you will get pretty close to being able to get a gallon of gas for that dime still!
> There was no unified monetary system for the vast majority of human history, never mind one based on gold and silver.
In case this is an honest misunderstanding:
Pretty much every society in history used gold, silver, or some other rare natural resource. Of course there was never a global such system, but OP didn't mean to say that.
I'm not certain what you are referring to with that article. I don't see much that inherently and obviously supports your assertion.
In fact it references the same book I mentioned earlier, which clearly talks about the lack of such systems in early societies. And of course, such societies dominate human history.
If you want to talk about more modern well-recorded history, again I turn to the book mentioned. And there the simplest summation I can come up with is "yes, but no."
This much is patently false, and probably even still false once you account for the accepted exaggeration in most appeals to the entirety of human history.
There was no unified monetary system for the vast majority of human history, never mind one based on gold and silver.
And for the smaller, more recent portion of human history it is again probably largely untrue. I'd point to Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber [0]. I'm sure many people have many opinions on the work, particularly around these parts, but I believe it at least does a good job of refuting this particular statement.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years