Is gold money? Many would say so, and a web search returns tens of thousands of additional affirmative responses. If you want to start a fight with a gold bug, take the opposite view. But is it so? To answer the question of whether gold is money requires a definition. This one, from Wikipedia, is typical: Money is anything that is generally accepted in payment for goods and services and in repayment of debts. The main uses of money are as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value. Wikipedia refers to three properties of money. However, according to the Austrian economist Carl Menger, its acceptability in trade is the defining property. While money undoubtedly does serve as a store of value and a unit of account, these properties are derivative, not definitional properties. The reason that a medium of exchange necessarily is also a store of value is the anticipation of its exchange value in the future.1 On this point Menger wrote, [I]t appears to me to be just as certain that the functions of being a "measure of value" and a "store of value" must not be attributed to money as such, since these functions are of a merely accidental nature and are not an essential part of the concept of money.2 Using the above definition, the question of whether any particular good is or is not money, can be posed in this way: is the good in question accepted as the final means of payment for transactions? At present, in the developed world, nearly every nation has its own money or belongs to a currency union, such as the EU. Some nations in the developing world use the US dollar. In highly inflationary environments, the local currency is often spontaneously rejected in favor of the dollar or another foreign currency. Hardly anywhere do we find gold generally accepted as a means of payment. So gold must fail the definitional test of moneyness. Is this the end of the argument (and so the end of a very short article)? Not quite. Gold is not money, but it has most of the desirable properties of money, and the process by which it became money in the past gives some clues about how it may become money once again. A store of value is not necessarily a medium of exchange. As Menger says, a nonmonetary commodity can serve as a store of value: But the notion that attributes to money as such the function of also transferring "values" from the present into the future must be designated as erroneous. Although metallic money, because of its durability and low cost of preservation, is doubtless suitable for this purpose also, it is nevertheless clear that other commodities are still better suited for it.3 Analyst Paul van Eeden has shown that gold has maintained its purchasing power relative to the time that the gold standard ended. In "Is Gold an Inflation Hedge?" I have provided links to Van Eeden's articles and a more detailed discussion. I will summarize his analysis here. A theoretical gold price equivalent which would give gold the same purchasing power as it had at the end of the gold standard is calculated by taking the convertibility ratio of $35 in 1933, and then multiplying by a factor representing the growth in the quantity of fiat money from that time. Under the classical gold standard, gold was the entire world's money. By counting worldwide growth in currency (not only US dollars) and comparing it to a worldwide price currency index of the gold price, van Eeden avoids the pitfalls of looking only at gold's dollar price, which can experience significant volatility due to the dollar's exchange rate against other national currencies. Van Eeden's research shows that, since the end of the gold standard, the price of gold in units of fiat currency has tracked its purchasing-power-equivalent price fairly well, oscillating in a band around its theoretical value. In essence, the purchasing power of gold has been reasonably stable in the time since the end of the gold standard, which is only another way of saying that gold has served as a store of value. Even today most of the demand for gold is not for direct use, but demand to hold. In the developed world, people purchase coins and bars for storage in vaults. In other areas, people save by accumulating bullion jewelry. Distinct from ornamental jewelry, bullion jewelry has low workmanship value added. Its price is not much greater than the melt value of its metal content.
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