as a guarantee of the weight and purity of the metal. In doing so, the government will often impose a fee which is known as seigniorage. The role of a mint and of coin is different between commodity money and fiat money. In situations where there is commodity money, the coin retains its value if it is melted and physically altered, while in fiat money it does not.
Commodity money often comes into being in situations where other forms of money are not available or not trusted. Various commodities were used in pre-RevolutionaryAmericaincluding wampum, maize, iron nails, beaver pelts, and tobacco. In post-warGermany, cigarettes became used as a form of commodity money in some areas. Cigarettes are still used as a form of commodity money in prison cell.
Although commodity money is more convenient than barter, it can also be inconvenient to use as a medium of exchange or a standard of deferred payment due to the transport and storage concerns. Accordingly, notes began to circulate that a government or other trusted entity (e.g. the Knights Templar in Europe in the 13th century) would guarantee as representing a certain stored value on account. This creates a form of money known as representative money - the beginning of a long slow shift to credit money.
Historically gold was by far the most widely recognized commodity out of which to make money: gold was compact, easy to work into more beautiful jewelry, had decorative and functional utility as a finely strung wire or thin foil leaf, and most importantly, could always be traded for other metals to make weapons with. A state could be described as a political enterprise with sufficient land, gold and reputation for protecting both, e.g. theFortKnoxgold repository long maintained by theUnited States, could reliably issue certificates to substitute for the gold and be trusted to actually have it. Between 1933 and 1970, one U.S. dollar was technically worth exactly 1/35 of a troy ounce (889 mg) of gold. However, actual trade in gold as a precious metal within theUnited Stateswas banned - presumably to prevent anyone from actually going up toFortKnoxand asking for their gold. This was a fairly typical transition from commodity to representative to fiat money, with people trading in other goods being forced to trade in gold, then to receive paper money that purported to be as good as gold, and then ultimately see this currency 'float' on commodity markets.
However, commodity money remained active in the background in some form or another, and seems to have been revived thanks to global capitalism, wherein a currency is widely traded as a commodity. One way to view such trade is that currency of resource-rich nations tends to be tied to the price of those particular commodity items until it becomes a 'developed nation'. Thus, one could see the nominally fiat money of say Cuba as being tied to the commodity 'sugar' globally, rather than to the military power of Cuba that holds within its own borders.
Also, commodity supplies and protections of supplies by states' military fiat remain critical to trade, and there are active commodity market speculations on the stability of certain states, e.g. speculation on the survival of the regime of Saddam Hussein inIraqhas from time to time driven the price of oil. Some argue that this is not so much a commodity market but more of an assassination market sp
本论文由英语论文网提供整理,提供论文代写,英语论文代写,代写论文,代写英语论文,代写留学生论文,代写英文论文,留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。