The Invention of Money
Anyone forging it would be punished with death.
That point was deeply relevant.
The problem with many new forms of money is that people are reluctant to adopt them. Genghis Khan’s grandson didn’t have that difficulty. He took measures to insure the authenticity of his currency, and if you didn’t use it—if you wouldn’t accept it in payment, or preferred to use gold or silver or copper or iron bars or pearls or salt or coins or any of the older forms of payment prevalent in China—he would have you killed. This solved the question of uptake.
The instruments of trade and finance are inventions, in the same way that creations of art and discoveries of science are inventions—products of the human imagination.
Paper money, backed by the authority of the state, was an astonishing innovation, one that reshaped the world.
It’s only at moments when the system buckles that we start to wonder why these things are worth what they seem to be worth.
Bitcoin, a new form of money based on nothing but the power of cryptography.
The idea is that the value of the new money is derived not from the imprimatur of any state but from a combination of mathematics, global connectedness, and the trust that resides in the network.
In all good stories, the hero wants something but faces an obstacle. In the case of the nation-state, what it wants to do is wage war, and the obstacle it faces is how to pay for it.
borrow a huge sum of money, and use taxes to pay back the interest over time.
One of the most significant effects of the paper money was the way it stimulated borrowing and lending—and trading.
The usual costs of warfare were added to a huge bill for annuities—lifelong interest payments made in settlement of old loans.
Money must be turned to the service of trade, and lie at the discretion of the prince or parliament to vary according to the needs of trade. Such an idea, orthodox and even tedious for the past fifty years, was thought in the seventeenth century to be diabolical.
This idea of Law’s led him to the idea of a new national French bank that took in gold and silver from the public and lent it back out in the form of paper money.
A U.S. bank with assets under a hundred and twenty-four million dollars is obliged to keep a cash reserve of only three per cent.
He funded the company the same way he had funded the bank, with deposits from the public swapped for shares.
He then used the value of those shares, which rocketed from five hundred livres to ten thousand livres, to buy up the debts of the French King. The French economy, based on all those rents and annuities and wages, was swept away and replaced by what Law called his “new System of Finance.”
The use of gold and silver was banned. Paper money was now “fiat” currency, underpinned by the authority of the bank and nothing else.
People started to wonder whether these suddenly lucrative investments were worth what they were supposed to be worth; then they started to worry, then to panic, then to demand their money back, then to riot when they couldn’t get it.
The great irony of Law’s life is that his ideas were, from the modern perspective, largely correct.
Today, we live in a version of John Law’s system. Every state in the developed world has a central bank that issues paper money, manipulates the supply of credit in the interest of commerce, uses fractional-reserve banking, and features joint-stock companies that pay dividends.
His great and probably unavoidable mistake was to underestimate the volatility that his inventions introduced, especially the risks created by runaway credit.
How did these once wild ideas become part of the very fabric of modern finance and government? Trial and error.
It was not the case that smart people figured everything out at once and implemented it simultaneously.
The modern economic system evolved, and evolution involves innovations, repetitions, failures, and dead ends. In finance, it involves busts and panics and crashes.
Bagehot’s work on banking similarly focussed on the difference between appearances and realities, specifically the gap between the air of solidity and respectability cultivated by Victorian banks and the evident fact that they kept collapsing and going broke. There were huge bank crises in 1797, in 1825, in 1847, and in 1857, all of them caused by the oldest and simplest reason of bankruptcy in finance: lending money to people who can’t pay it back.
In theory, all the money in circulation during the era of Victorian banking was backed up by deposits in gold. One pound in paper money was backed by 123.25 grains of actual gold. In practice, that wasn’t true.
There were multiple occasions when the government suspended the convertibility of paper money to gold. In addition, banks could print their own money. They often didn’t have enough gold to sustain the value of their notes, in the event of customers coming to the bank and demanding conversion.
A system in which banks don’t hold cash reserves equivalent to their outstanding loans works fine, unless enough people turn up at the bank and simultaneously want their paper money turned into its metal equivalent. Unfortunately, that kept happening, and banks kept going broke.
What is money? Where does it derive its value? Who finally guarantees the value of debts and credits?
money, real money, was gold, and gold alone. All the other forms of currency in the system were merely different kinds of credit. Credit was indispensable to a functioning economy, and helped make everybody rich, but in the final analysis only gold was legal tender, according to the strict definition of the term—money that cannot be refused in settlement of a debt.
paradox: all the credit in the system was essential to the economy, but it wasn’t really money, because it wasn’t gold, which underpinned the value of everything else.
The main source of the profitableness of established banking is the smallness of the requisite capital
The less equity the bank needed to keep as a margin of safety, the more money it could lend, and, therefore, the more profit it could make. Gold was essential in order to guarantee the currency, but the bankers didn’t want it taking up valuable space on their balance sheets. Better to let the government do that, in the form of the Bank of England.
We still have a version of this system, in which government guarantees underpin the profitability of banks. The central bank’s crucial role is to lend money freely at a time of crisis—to be what is called “the lender of last resort.” Grant, who admits to “a libertarian’s biases,” sees this doctrine as the seed of “deposit insurance, the too-big-to-fail doctrine, and the rest of the modern machinery of socialized financial risk.”
Then came the credit crunch, and the moment—the latest version of the old familiar one—when things turned out not to be worth what they were supposed to be worth.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/05/the-invention-of-money
That point was deeply relevant.
The problem with many new forms of money is that people are reluctant to adopt them. Genghis Khan’s grandson didn’t have that difficulty. He took measures to insure the authenticity of his currency, and if you didn’t use it—if you wouldn’t accept it in payment, or preferred to use gold or silver or copper or iron bars or pearls or salt or coins or any of the older forms of payment prevalent in China—he would have you killed. This solved the question of uptake.
The instruments of trade and finance are inventions, in the same way that creations of art and discoveries of science are inventions—products of the human imagination.
Paper money, backed by the authority of the state, was an astonishing innovation, one that reshaped the world.
It’s only at moments when the system buckles that we start to wonder why these things are worth what they seem to be worth.
Bitcoin, a new form of money based on nothing but the power of cryptography.
The quest for new forms of money
The idea is that the value of the new money is derived not from the imprimatur of any state but from a combination of mathematics, global connectedness, and the trust that resides in the network.
In all good stories, the hero wants something but faces an obstacle. In the case of the nation-state, what it wants to do is wage war, and the obstacle it faces is how to pay for it.
borrow a huge sum of money, and use taxes to pay back the interest over time.
One of the most significant effects of the paper money was the way it stimulated borrowing and lending—and trading.
The usual costs of warfare were added to a huge bill for annuities—lifelong interest payments made in settlement of old loans.
Money must be turned to the service of trade, and lie at the discretion of the prince or parliament to vary according to the needs of trade. Such an idea, orthodox and even tedious for the past fifty years, was thought in the seventeenth century to be diabolical.
This idea of Law’s led him to the idea of a new national French bank that took in gold and silver from the public and lent it back out in the form of paper money.
A U.S. bank with assets under a hundred and twenty-four million dollars is obliged to keep a cash reserve of only three per cent.
He funded the company the same way he had funded the bank, with deposits from the public swapped for shares.
He then used the value of those shares, which rocketed from five hundred livres to ten thousand livres, to buy up the debts of the French King. The French economy, based on all those rents and annuities and wages, was swept away and replaced by what Law called his “new System of Finance.”
The use of gold and silver was banned. Paper money was now “fiat” currency, underpinned by the authority of the bank and nothing else.
It ended in disaster.
People started to wonder whether these suddenly lucrative investments were worth what they were supposed to be worth; then they started to worry, then to panic, then to demand their money back, then to riot when they couldn’t get it.
The great irony of Law’s life is that his ideas were, from the modern perspective, largely correct.
Today, we live in a version of John Law’s system. Every state in the developed world has a central bank that issues paper money, manipulates the supply of credit in the interest of commerce, uses fractional-reserve banking, and features joint-stock companies that pay dividends.
His great and probably unavoidable mistake was to underestimate the volatility that his inventions introduced, especially the risks created by runaway credit.
How did these once wild ideas become part of the very fabric of modern finance and government? Trial and error.
It was not the case that smart people figured everything out at once and implemented it simultaneously.
The modern economic system evolved, and evolution involves innovations, repetitions, failures, and dead ends. In finance, it involves busts and panics and crashes.
Bagehot’s work on banking similarly focussed on the difference between appearances and realities, specifically the gap between the air of solidity and respectability cultivated by Victorian banks and the evident fact that they kept collapsing and going broke. There were huge bank crises in 1797, in 1825, in 1847, and in 1857, all of them caused by the oldest and simplest reason of bankruptcy in finance: lending money to people who can’t pay it back.
In theory, all the money in circulation during the era of Victorian banking was backed up by deposits in gold. One pound in paper money was backed by 123.25 grains of actual gold. In practice, that wasn’t true.
There were multiple occasions when the government suspended the convertibility of paper money to gold. In addition, banks could print their own money. They often didn’t have enough gold to sustain the value of their notes, in the event of customers coming to the bank and demanding conversion.
A system in which banks don’t hold cash reserves equivalent to their outstanding loans works fine, unless enough people turn up at the bank and simultaneously want their paper money turned into its metal equivalent. Unfortunately, that kept happening, and banks kept going broke.
What is money? Where does it derive its value? Who finally guarantees the value of debts and credits?
money, real money, was gold, and gold alone. All the other forms of currency in the system were merely different kinds of credit. Credit was indispensable to a functioning economy, and helped make everybody rich, but in the final analysis only gold was legal tender, according to the strict definition of the term—money that cannot be refused in settlement of a debt.
paradox: all the credit in the system was essential to the economy, but it wasn’t really money, because it wasn’t gold, which underpinned the value of everything else.
The main source of the profitableness of established banking is the smallness of the requisite capital
The less equity the bank needed to keep as a margin of safety, the more money it could lend, and, therefore, the more profit it could make. Gold was essential in order to guarantee the currency, but the bankers didn’t want it taking up valuable space on their balance sheets. Better to let the government do that, in the form of the Bank of England.
We still have a version of this system, in which government guarantees underpin the profitability of banks. The central bank’s crucial role is to lend money freely at a time of crisis—to be what is called “the lender of last resort.” Grant, who admits to “a libertarian’s biases,” sees this doctrine as the seed of “deposit insurance, the too-big-to-fail doctrine, and the rest of the modern machinery of socialized financial risk.”
Then came the credit crunch, and the moment—the latest version of the old familiar one—when things turned out not to be worth what they were supposed to be worth.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/05/the-invention-of-money
