Commodity Money System
A commodity money system is a monetary system such as the gold standard in which a commodity such as gold is made the unit of value and physically used as money, any other money, such as paper notes, being theoretically convertible to it on demand. An historical alternative which was rejected in the Twentieth Century was bimetallism, also called the "double standard", under which both gold and silver were legal tender.
Read more about this topic: Monetary System
Famous quotes containing the words commodity, money and/or system:
“There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone. I don’t mean the square-eyed toothpaste-and-hair-dye people or the new-car-or-bust people, or the success-and-coronary people. Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that’s the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln.”
—John Steinbeck (1902–1968)
“Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The golden mean in ethics, as in physics, is the centre of the system and that about which all revolve, and though to a distant and plodding planet it be an uttermost extreme, yet one day, when that planet’s year is completed, it will be found to be central.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)