Like most areas of public policy, international monetary relations are sub-ject to frequent proposals for change. Fixed exchange rates, floating exchange rates, and commodity-backed currency all have their advocates. Before considering the merits of alternative international monetary sys-tems, we should understand the background of the international mone-tary system. Although an international monetary system has existed since monies have been traded, it is common for most modern discussions of international monetary history to start in the late nineteenth century. It was during this period that the gold standard began.
THE GOLD STANDARD: 1880 TO 1914
Although an exact date for the beginning of the gold standard cannot be pinpointed, we know that it started during the period from 1880 to 1890. Under a gold standard, currencies are valued in terms of their gold equivalent (an ounce of gold was worth $20.67 in terms of the U.S. dollar over the gold standard period). The gold standard is an important begin-ning for a discussion of international monetary systems because when each currency is defined in terms of its gold value, all currencies are linked in a system of fixed exchange rates. For instance, if currency A is worth 0.10 ounce of gold, whereas currency B is worth 0.20 ounce of gold, then 1 unit of currency B is worth twice as much as 1 unit of A, and thus the exchange rate of 1 currency B 5 2 currency A is established.
Maintaining a gold standard requires a commitment from participating countries to be willing to buy and sell gold to anyone at the fixed price. To maintain a price of $20.67 per ounce, the United States had to buy and sell gold at that price. Gold was used as the monetary standard because it is a homogeneous commodity (could you have a fish standard?) worldwide that is easily storable, portable, and divisible into standardized units like ounces. Since gold is costly to produce, it possesses another
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-385247-2.00002-0 All rights reserved.
26 International Money and Finance
important attribute—governments cannot easily increase its supply. A gold standard is a commodity money standard. Money has a value that is fixed in terms of the commodity gold.
One aspect of a money standard that is based on a commodity with relatively fixed supply is long-run price stability. Since governments must maintain a fixed value of their money relative to gold, the supply of money is restricted by the supply of gold. Prices may still rise and fall with swings in gold output and economic growth, but the tendency is to return to a long-run stable level. Figure 2.1 illustrates graphically the rela-tive stability of U.S. and U.K. prices over the gold standard period as compared to later years. However, note also that prices fluctuated up and down in the short run during the gold standard. Thus, frequent small bursts of inflation and deflation occurred in the short run, but in the long run the price level remained unaffected. Since currencies were convert-ible into gold, national money supplies were constrained by the growth of the stock of gold. As long as the gold stock grew at a steady rate, prices would also follow a steady path. New discoveries of gold would generate discontinuous jumps in the price level, but the period of the gold stan-dard was marked by a fairly stable stock of gold.
People today often look back on the gold standard as a “golden era” of economic progress. It is common to hear arguments supporting a