| Fiat System in History |  |  |  |
| 1st fiat system (France) John law, a Scottish gambler and amateur economist, was able to convince to the regent that the main reason for the economic to slow down is due to gold and silver were too scarce and inelastic to serve as money.  [Source: www.mapforum.com] He proposed by switching to paper, trade would be faster as more currency is created. He set up a bank that took deposits in coin, but issued loans and withdrawals in paper. His newly created Banque Royale (Royal Bank) issued 2.7 billion livres in banknotes in the space of two years. His newly created Mississippi Company achieved a market capitalization of 5 billion livres over the same period. This resulted in a massive stock market bubble. Following a parabolic blow off, the bubble collapsed, the bank failed and Law fled the country, leaving destitution in his wake. (Antoine Murphy, John Law (Oxford, 1997), passim.)  [Source: Frontispiece of Arlequin Actionist (Amsterdam, 1720), reprinted in Antoine Murphy, John Law (Oxford, 1997)] However, people wanted gold and silver when they took profits. Law capped redemption in gold and silver to avoid depleting his reserves. This removed France's paper currency from the gold and silver standard and hence put it on the Mississippi Company share price standard. The amount of paper currency afloat was now many times the actual reserves of gold and silver and hyperinflation set in. In 1720, the bank and company were united and Law was appointed Controller General of Finances to attract capital. Law's pioneering note-issuing bank was successful until the French government was forced to admit that the number of paper notes being issued by the Banque Royale were not equal to the amount of metal coinage it held. (The French Period" (of New Orleans area), 2009) 2nd fiat system (United State) The second episode was the case of the Continental Congress. This is the most sympathetic of the four. Meeting in May 1775 following the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington and Concord, Congress had a war to finance and no clear way to do so.  [Source: www.americanrevolution.org] It could not levy taxes because its authority was unclear. Both the British Crown and the individual states claimed the power to tax, and anyway, a brand new tax would not have gone down well in the context of a rebellion that was largely about taxes. A loan was also out of the question, since a lender would have been crazy to take the risk of funding a ragtag band of colonial rebels at the outset of their rebellion. So Congress did what it had to do, and printed up the money. Lots of it.   [Source: www.frbsf.org] Over the next five years, until they stopped the presses in 1780, Congress issued about $241 million face amount of irredeemable, non-convertible paper bills known as “Continentals.”11 The bills served their purpose, keeping the armies in the field, but how they functioned in practice is described in the following passage (William G. Anderson, The Price of Liberty (University Press of Virginia, 1983), p. 3.): A barber wallpapered his shop with Continentals. An old soldier, wounded in the leg, used a bundle of his pay as a bandage, and coined the word “shinplaster,” which was later used to describe any sort of money that could not be redeemed. A ship’s crew discharged in Boston, and paid off in now worthless currency, found a way of making suits out of the paper bills and paraded through the streets. “For two or three years we constantly saw and were informed of creditors running away from their debtors, and the debtors pursuing them in triumph, and paying them without mercy,” wrote [a contemporary observer]. 3rd fiat system (France) The third episode was the fiat money of Revolutionary France. This was the most chilling of the four, intertwined as it was with the Reign of Terror. In 1789, France was broke once again, with a heavy debt and a serious deficit. With the memory of John Law still fresh, the Jacobins set about their experiment with great caution and solemnity. They promised themselves they would limit the emission of paper, called assignats, to 400 million, come what may. They over-collateralized the paper with the extensive and valuable lands of the church that had been seized in the name of the people. They put bells and whistles on the paper to distinguish it from the plain paper used in Law’s Bubble, and to signify that it was tightly controlled. They persuaded themselves that the evils of the earlier debacle stemmed from the fact that Law’s paper was the issue of a corrupt monarchy operating in secret. This time would be different; after all, it was now the virtuous people operating in the open. Wrong. By the morning of February 18, 1796, when all the machinery, plates and paper for printing the hated paper money were finally broken and burned in the Place Vendome, a total of 45 billion had been issued.( Andrew Dickson White, Fiat Money Inflation in France (Foundation for Economic Freedom, 1959), p. 93) Here we see one of the revolutionary kingpins, Marat, as depicted shortly after his assassination by Charlotte Corday.  [Source: www.bc.edu] Note the assignat on the table by his bathtub.  [Source: www.joelscoins.com] 4th fiat system (Germany) The fourth episode was the German inflation following the defeat of Imperial Germany in World War I. This is probably the most famous of the four. Everyone’s heard stories of wheelbarrows filled with paper money needed to buy a loaf of bread, wage payments made twice daily to keep up with the inflation, etc. It started with Germany’s defeat in the war. Germany was an economic basketcase. It had counted on winning, and paying for the war with booty. It had bled its population white and stuffed its central bank with government paper. To make matters worse, the victors imposed heavy reparations through the infamous Treaty of Versailles.  [Source: http://www.geh.org] After handing over its merchant marine, its rolling stock, its flocks and herds, as well as a large portion of its gold reserves, Germany turned to printing new marks and selling them in the foreign exchange market for whatever they would bring. (Benjamin M. Anderson, Economics and the Public Welfare (LibertyPress, 2nd ed., 1979), p. 106)  [Source:Golden Sextant archives] Before the War, the mark had an exchange value of about 24 cents. When postwar trade started up in the summer of 1919, the mark fetched 8 cents. ( Ibid., p. 107) Four and a half years later the currency was replaced by a new rentenmark, which had a value of about 24 cents. The conversion rate was 1 trillion old marks for each rentenmark.
Now, despite their obvious differences, these episodes had several important features in common. To begin with, it’s worth noting that in each case the fateful errors were made by talented and well-educated people. They were their countries’ best and brightest financial minds. This includes John Law, by the way, who’s gotten very bad, and I think, unfair, press ever since. These men did not take the road to ruin frivolously, but rather as a measured response to a set of exigent circumstances. The point is that governments are simply incapable of managing a money supply. The pressures and temptations always prove too great. Source: http://www.goldensextant.com/LLCPostings4.html#anchor134408 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Last Updated ( 17 Dec 2010 ) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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