Originally, paper money was not regarded as money but merely as a representation of gold. Various paper certificates represented claims on gold stored with the banks. Holders of paper certificates could convert them into gold whenever they deemed necessary. Because people found it more convenient to use paper certificates to exchange for goods and services, these certificates came to be regarded as money.
Paper certificates that are accepted as the medium of exchange open the scope for fraudulent practice. Banks could now be tempted to boost their profits by lending certificates that were not covered by gold. In a free-market economy, a bank that over-issues paper certificates will quickly find out that the exchange value of its certificates in terms of goods and services will fall. To protect their purchasing power, holders of the over-issued certificates naturally attempt to convert them back to gold. If all of them were to demand gold back at the same time, this would bankrupt the bank. In a free market then, the threat of bankruptcy would restrain banks from issuing paper certificates unbacked by gold. On this Mises wrote,
People often refer to the dictum of an anonymous American quoted by Tooke: “Free trade in banking is free trade in swindling.” However, freedom in the issuance of banknotes would have narrowed down the use of banknotes considerably if it had not entirely suppressed it. It was this idea which Cernuschi advanced in the hearings of the French Banking Inquiry on October 24, 1865: “I believe that what is called freedom of banking would result in a total suppression of banknotes in France. I want to give everybody the right to issue banknotes so that nobody should take any banknotes any longer.”1
This means that in a free-market economy, paper money cannot assume a “life of its own” and become independent of commodity money.
The government can, however, bypass the free-market discipline. It can issue a decree that makes it legal for the over-issued bank not to redeem paper certificates into gold. Once banks are not obliged to redeem paper certificates into gold, opportunities for large profits are created that set incentive to pursue an unrestrained expansion of the supply of paper certificates. The uncurbed expansion of paper certificates raises the likelihood of setting off a galloping rise in the prices of goods and services that can lead to the breakdown of the market economy.
To prevent such a breakdown, the supply of the paper money must be managed. The main purpose of managing the supply is to prevent various competing banks from over-issuing paper certificates and from bankrupting each other. This can be achieved by establishing a monopoly bank-i.e., a central bank-that manages the expansion of paper money.
To assert its authority, the central bank introduces its paper certificates, which replace the certificates of various banks. (The central bank’s money purchasing power is established on account of the fact that various paper certificates, which carry purchasing power, are exchanged for the central bank money at a fixed rate. In short, the central bank paper certificates are fully backed by banks certificates, which have the historical link to gold.)
The central bank paper money, which is declared as the legal tender, also serves as a reserve asset for banks. This enables the central bank to set a limit on the credit expansion by the banking system. Note that through ongoing monetary management, i.e., monetary pumping, the central bank makes sure that all the banks can engage jointly in the expansion of credit out of “thin air” via the practice of fractional reserve banking. The joint expansion in turn guarantees that checks presented for redemption by banks to each other are netted out, because the redemption of each will cancel the other redemption out. In short, by means of monetary injections, the central bank makes sure that the banking system is “liquid enough” so that banks will not bankrupt each other.
It would appear that the central bank can manage and stabilize the monetary system. The truth, however, is the exact opposite. To manage the system, the central bank must constantly create money “out of thin air” to prevent banks from bankrupting each other. This leads to persistent declines in money’s purchasing power, which destabilizes the entire monetary system.
Observe that while, in the free market, people will not accept a commodity as money if its purchasing power is subject to a persistent decline, in the present environment, central authorities are coercively imposing money that suffers from a steady decline in its purchasing power. Since the present monetary system is fundamentally unstable it is not possible to fix it. Even Milton Friedman’s scheme to fix the money rate growth at a given percentage won’t do the trick. After all a fixed percentage growth is still money growth, which leads to the exchange of nothing for something-i.e., economic impoverishment and the boom-bust cycle. Moreover, we can conclude that there cannot be a “correct” money supply rate of growth. Whether the central bank injects money in accordance with economic activity or fixes the rate of growth, it further destabilizes the economy.
The central bank can keep the present paper standard going as long as the pool of real wealth is still expanding. Once the pool begins to stagnate-or, worse, shrinks then no monetary pumping will be able to prevent the plunge of the system. A better solution is of course to have a true free market and allow the gold to assert its monetary role. As opposed to the present monetary system in the framework of a gold standard money cannot disappear and set in motion the menace of the boom-bust cycles. In fractional reserve banking, when money is repaid and the bank doesn’t renew the loan, money evaporates. Because the loan has originated out of nothing, it obviously couldn’t have had an owner. In a free market, in contrast, when money i.e. gold is repaid, it is passed back to the original lender; the money stock stays intact.
1. Mises , Human Action p 446.
Very nicely put. One to be bookmarked into my favourites tab.
Seeing the headline, I immediately agreed, indeed the monetary system of private debt usurping national currency status is the key cause for Booms and Busts.
It was Fisher et al’s 1939 Program for Monetary Reform that best laid out the problem of “the lawless variability of the national circulating media”. And, its solution.
http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/amir.sufi/research/MonetaryReform_1939.pdf
Of course, their economists’ solution was a change to ‘money by law’ in order to tame the economic roller coaster resulting from the banker cartel’s largesse, a solution never appreciated by the anarcho-Cap brigade.
A bit anachronistic for Frank to claim that central banks can control ‘credit-debt’ expansion through the use of its paper money issuance, since, in this country, paper money is issued as “whatever you need”, and since banks can make all the loans they want without reserves, and the CB must issue those reserves, not as paper money, in order to have a working payments system.
It’s not paper money, but bank lending, that drives the cycle. It’s like a total fantasy world around here on occasion.
But I digress. The state of affairs is that the present Boom-Bust cycle is indeed fostered by a debt-based money system, but I see no evidence that a commodity based money system would do better. Economically-speaking.
Thanks.
Its a shame that politicians and crony banksters had to interfere in the market for money. If they hadn’t then currency innovations like Shire Silver and Valaurum, both of which make using precious metals as convenient as bank notes, would have arrived much sooner and we might have avoided the bad system we now have.