Theory
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Commodity money is inconvenient to store and transport. Furthermore, it does not allow a government to manipulate or restrict the flow of commerce within its dominion with the same ease that a fiat currency does. As such, commodity money gave way to representative money, and gold and other specie were retained as its backing.
Gold was a common form of money due to its rarity, durability, divisibility, fungibility, and ease of identification, often in conjunction with silver. Silver was typically the main circulating medium, with gold as the metal of monetary reserve.
The gold standard variously specified how the gold backing would be implemented, including the amount of specie per currency unit. The currency itself is just paper and so has no intrinsic value, but is accepted by traders because it can be redeemed any time for the equivalent specie. A U.S. silver certificate, for example, could be redeemed for an actual piece of silver.
Representative money and the gold standard protect citizens from hyperinflation and other abuses of monetary policy, as were seen in some countries during the Great Depression. However, they were not without their problems and critics, and so were partially abandoned via the international adoption of the Bretton Woods System. That system eventually collapsed in 1971, at which time nearly all nations had switched to full fiat money.
According to Keynesian analysis, the earliness with which a country left the gold standard reliably predicted its economic recovery from the great depression. For example, Great Britain and Scandinavia, which left the gold standard in 1931, recovered much earlier than France and Belgium, which remained on gold much longer. Countries such as China, which had a silver standard, almost avoided the depression entirely. The connection between leaving the gold standard as a strong predictor of that country's severity of its depression and the length of time in its recovery has been shown to be consistent for dozens of countries, predominantly in developing countries. This may explain why the experience and length of the depression differed between national economies.
Read more about this topic: Gold Standard
Famous quotes containing the word theory:
“The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful theory by an ugly fact.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)
“By the “mud-sill” theory it is assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible. According to that theory, a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be—all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly.... Free labor insists on universal education.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)