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of Money
-The Argument Refined
An Analysis ofthe Theory
and Practice of Concurrent Currencies
Nohel Laureate 1974
Diseases desperate grown,
By desperate appliances are reli'ved,
Or not at all.
(Hamlet, Act iv, Scene iii)
~ ~
Published by
First published in October 1976
Second Edition, revised and enlarged, February 1978
Third Edition, with a new Introduction, October 1990
2 Lord North Street, Westminster,
London SWIP 3LB
Hobart Paper (Special) 70
All rights reseroed
Printed in Great Britain by
6 Marlborough Road, Churchill Industrial Estate, Lancing, W Sussex
Text set in 'Monotype' Baskeroille
Geoffrey E. Wood
PREFACE Arthur Seldon
Free trade in money
Proposal more practicable than utopian
European currency
Free trade in banking
Preventing government from concealing
Competition in currency not discussed
by economists 26
Initial advantages of government monopoly
in money 27
Government certificate of metal weight and
purity 29
The appearance of paper money 31
Political and technical possibilities ofcontrolling
paper money 31
Monopoly of money has buttressed government
power 32
History is largely inflation engineered by
government 33
Early Middle Ages' deflation local or temporary 34
Absolutism suppressed merchants' attempts to
create stable money 35
The superstition disproved by
spontaneous money
Private money preferred
Legal tender creates uncertainty
Taxes and contracts
Parallel currencies 44
Trade coins 45
The private Swiss 'ducat' 46
Constant but not fixed value 47
Control of value by competition 48
Effects of competition 52
'A thousand hounds': the vigilant press 53
Three questions 54
No clear distinction between money and
non-money 56
Pseudo-exactness, statistical measurement, and
scientific truth 56
Legal fictions and defective economic theory 57
Meanings and definitions 58
Control by selling/buying currency and
(short-term) lending
Current issuing policy
The crucial factor: demand for currency to hold
Would competition disrupt the system?
Would parasitic currencies prevent
control of currency value?
Four uses of money 67
(i) Cash purchases 67
(ii) Holding reserves for future payments 68
(iii) Standard of deferred payments 68
(iv) A reliable unit of account 69
'A stable value of money' 70
Balancing errors 70
Criteria of choice 73
Effectiveness for accounting again decisive 74
Wholesale commodity prices as standard of
value for currencies over international regions 75
The cash balance approach . . . 77
. .. and the velocity of circulation 78
A note on 'monetarism' 79
Why indexation is not a substitute for a stable
currency 82
The historical evidence 84
The supply of currency, stable prices, and
the equivalence of investment and saving 87
'Neutral money' fictitious 87
Increased demand for liquidity 88
A single national currency, not several
competing currencies 90
Demand deposits are like bank notes or
cheques 91
New controls over currencies; new
banking practices 92
Opposition to new system from established
bankers. . . 93
. . . and from banking cranks 93
The problem of a 'dear' (stable) money 94
No such thing as oil-price (or any other)
cost-push inflation 95
The problem of rigid prices and wages 96
The error of the 'beneficial mild inflation' 96
Responsibility for unemployment would be
traced back to trade unions 98
Preventing general deflation 99
Government the major source of instability 100
Monetary policy a cause of depressions 102
Government cannot act in the general interest 102
No more balance-of-payment problems 103
The addictive drug of cheap money 104
The abolition of central banks 105
No fixing of rates of interest 106
Remove protection of official currency
from competition 108
Better even than gold-the 'wobbly anchor' 109
Competition would provide better money
, than would government 110
Government monopoly of money unnecessary 111
Difference between voluntarily accepted and
enforced paper money 111
National currencies not inevitable or desirable 113
Rigidity of wage-rates: raising national price
structure is no solution 115
Stable national price level could disrupt
economic activity 115
Good national money impossible under
democratic government dependent on
special interests 117
Government monopoly of money and
government expenditure 118
Government money and unbalanced budgets 118
Government power over money facilitates
centralisation 120
Preventing rapid depreciation of formerly
exclusive currency 121
Introduce new currencies at once, not gradually 122
Commercial bank change in policy 123
Pressures for return to national monetary
monopolies 125
Recurring governn1.ental control of currency
and capital movements 125
The possibility of a multiplicity of similar
currenCIes 127
The preservation of a standard of long-term debts
even while currencies may lose their value 128
New legal framework for banking 129
Gold standard not the solution 130
Good money can come only from self-interest,
not from benevolence 131
Is competitive paper currency practicable? 132
'Free Money Movement' 133
APPENDIX: The Destruction of Paper Money, 1950 - I 975 136-7
Inside back cover
I. Illustration of possible currency price deviations 53
II. Illustration of a currency stabilisation scheme 61
Aggregate price of commodities sold at prices changed
(against previous period) by percentage indicated
I. (a) stable prices 71
I. (b) increase in prices 72
The Hobart Papers are intended to contribute a stream of
authoritative, independent and lucid analyses to understanding
the application of economic thinking to private and govern-
mental activity. Their characteristic concern has been the
optimum use of scarce resources to satisfy consumer preferences
and the extent to which it can be achieved in markets within
the appropriate legal/institutional framework created by
government or by other arrangements.
It has long been a common belief among economists since
the classical thinkers of the 18th century that one of the most
important functions of government was to create a monetary
mechanism and to issue money.
The debates among economists
have been on how far governments have performed this
function efficiently and on the means ofincreasing or decreasing
the power of government over the supply of money. But the
general assumption has been that government had to control
monetary policy and that each country had to have its own
structure of monetary units.
This assumption is now questioned by Professor F. A. Hayek.
He goes much more fully into the 'somewhat startling'
departure from the classical assumption which he touched on
in Choice in Currency, Occasional Paper No. 48, published in
February 1976.
Even this short expansion of the theme indicates insights into
the nature of money and its control for a wide range of readers:
they should stimulate the student and suggest precepts for
politicians. In effect, Professor Hayek is arguing that money
is no .different from other commodities and that it would be
better supplied by competition between private issuers than
by a monopoly of government. He argues, in the classic
tradition ofAdam Smith but with reference to the 20th century,
that money is no exception to the rule that self-interest would
be a better motive than benevolence in producing good results.
The advantages that Professor Hayek claims for competitive
currencies are not only that they would remove the power of
government to inflate the money supply but also that they
would go a long way to prevent the destabilising fluctuations
that government monopoly of money has precipitated over the
last century of 'trade cycles' and, an urgent question in the
1 In the Second Edition, Professor Hayek notes that it was not among those duties
that Adam Smith said fell to the state (page 33).
1970s, make it more difficult for government to inflate its own
Although the argument in places is necessarily abstract and
requires close attention, the central theme is crystal clear:
government has failed, must fail, and will continue to fail to
supply good money. If government control of money is
unavoidable Professor Hayek thinks a gold system better than
any other; but he maintains that even gold would be found
less dependable than competing paper currencies whose value
would be maintained more or less stable because their issuers
would have a strong inducement to limit their quantity or lose
their business.
The argument for competitive currencies is in the direct line
of descent in the thinking of the Austrian school of economists
which Professor Lord Robbins largely introduced to Britain by
bringing Professor Hayek to the London School of Economics
in 1931. These two helped to make the works of Menger,
Wieser, Bohm-Bawerk and Mises known to British students
and teachers, but little further has been heard of the Austrian
School until the last year or two. New interest in the Austrian
School by economists in the USA is being followed by increasing
attention in Britain, particularly by young economists. In this
Hobart Paper Special, Professor Hayek refers to the writings of
several of his predecessors and may further stimulate interest
in the Austrian school of economics.
Although italicising is not common in lEA Papers it has been
used here moderately to help especially readers new to economics
to follow the steps in the argument.
Professor Hayek's Hobart Special comes at a time when, after
pre-war monetary blunders said to have precipitated the 1929-
32 Great Depression, nearly a third of a century of post-war
'monetary management' (or mis-management) by government,
and when attempts at international management have hardly
been more successful, economists are again looking to means of
taking money out of the control of government altogether. In
Hobart Paper 69 (Gold or Paper?) Professor E. Victor Morgan
and Mrs Morgan re-examine the breakdown of monetary
management since the war and re-assess the case for re-
establishing a link between currency and gold. Some months
ago l\1r Peter Jay, the Economics Editor of The Times, proposed
a Currency Commission.! Both of these approaches reflect the
1 The Times, 15 April, 1976.
anxiety to reduce or remove the power of politicians over the
supply of money and will seem to younger economists and to
new generations in finance, commerce, industry and teaching
to be radical departures from post-war economic thinking.
Professor Hayek's proposal that the supply of money be put
into the market-place along with other goods and services is
even more revolutionary: he is arguing that the attempt for the
past 50 years to depend on benevolence in government to
manage money has failed and that the solution must lie in the
self-interest of monetary agencies that will suffer by losing their
livelihood if they do not supply currencies that users will find
dependable and stable. Professor Hayek's Hobart Special, and
the works of other economists who are trying to evolve methods
of 'taking money out of politics', should stimulate economists
and non-economists alike to re-examine the first principles of
the control of money if civilised society is to continue.
The Institute is known for rapid publication-normally a
few short weeks from completed MS to copy. Professor Hayek's
movements from Austria to Scotland and then to London
elongated the usual timetable of editing, processing for publi-
cation, and proof-reading. Even so these stages-for a manu-
script twice the length of a typical Hobart-ran from early
July to late September. I should like to thank Michael Solly,
who excelled himself in helping to make this timetable possible,
and Goron Pro-Print our printers, who worked rapidly and
Its constitution requires the Institute to dissociate its Trustees,
Directors and Advisers from the argument and conclusion of
its authors, but it presents this new short work by Professor
Hayek as an important reconsideration of a classical precept
from one of the world's leading thinkers.
August 1976 ARTHUR SELDON
For the Second (extended) Edition Professor Hayek has written
many and sometimes lengthy additions to refine and amplify
the argument. In all he has added about a third to two-fifths
to the original text. (To identify the self-contained additions,
both long and short, a single star is placed at the beginning
and two stars at the end. There are in addition many other
refinements of words, phrases and sentences, including numer-
ous footnotes, passim.)
The Hohart Paper has now become a substantial text on
the revolutionary proposal to replace state control of the
money supply by competing private issuers in the market.
When this principle was put to an august personage in the
British banking system the urbane but complacent reply was
'That may be for the day after tomorrow'. This is a not un-
common reaction of practical men to the new thinking of
academics. New ideas are liable to be dismissed as the work of
theorists by hard-headed men who have to face the realities
of everyday life. Practical men are so near their 'day-to-day
problems' that they may see only the difficulties and obstacles
and not the fundamental causes of error or failure. It is proper
to reflect that the tree-feller cannot see the extent of the wood.
Even more fundamental change may sometimes have to be
by radical reform rather than by piecemeal modification of a
method or policy that has been shown to be defective. And the
longer reform is delayed the more disturbing it may have to
be. A man sinking in a bog cannot escape by a short step; his
only hope may be a long leap.
The question is whether Professor Hayek's diagnosis-that
state control of money has rarely supplied a dependable means
of payment but has, in practice, been responsible for destabilis-
ing currencies and down the centuries for inflation-is correct or
not. If it is correct, then tinkering with government monopoly
control of money will not remove the defects and dangers.
This enlarged Second Edition should be earnestly studied not
least by bankers, all the more when, as in Britain, they are not
as removed from governmental-which means political-
influence as they are in other countries. The additions will also
make the Second Edition all the more valuable for teachers
and students of economics who are more concerned with
fundamental truths than with short-term expedients.
December 1977
For in every country of the world, I believe, the avarice and injustice
of princes and sovereign states abusing the confidence of their subjects,
have by degrees diminished the real quali!y of the metal, which had
been originallY contained in their coins.
(The Wealth ofNations (1776), I. iv, Glasgowedn.,
Oxford, 1976, p. 43.)
In my despair about the hopelessness of finding a politically
feasible solution to what is technically the simplest possible
problem, namely to stop inflation, I threw out in a lecture
delivered about a year ago
a somewhat startling suggestion,
the further pursuit of which has opened quite unexpected new
horizons. I could not resist pursuing the idea further, since
the task of preventing inflation has always seemed to me to be
of the greatest importance, not only because of the harm and
suffering major inflations cause, but also because I have long
been convinced that even mild inflations ultimately produce
the recurring depressions and unemployment which have been
a justified grievance against the free enterprise system and
must be prevented if a free society is to survive.
The further pursuit of the suggestion that government should
be deprived of its monopoly of the issue of money opened the
most fascinating theoretical vistas and showed the possibility
of arrangements which have never been considered. As soon
as one succeeds in freeing oneself of the universally but tacitly
accepted creed that a country must be supplied by its govern-
ment with its own distinctive and exclusive currency, all sorts
of interesting questions arise which have never been examined.
The result was a foray into a wholly unexplored field. In this
short work I can present no more than some discoveries made
in the course of a first survey of the terrain. I am of course
very much aware that I have only scratched the surface of the
complex of new questions and that I am still very far from
having solved all the problems which the existence of multiple
concurrent currencies would raise. Indeed, I shall have to ask
a number of questions to which I do not know the answer; nor
can I discuss all the theoretical problems which the explanation
of the newsituation raises. Much more work will yet have to be
1 See [31]. Numben in square brackets will throughout refer to the Bibliography
at the end of the Paper (pp. 138-144).
done on the subject; but there are already signs that the basic
idea has stirred the imagination of others and that there are
indeed some younger brains at work on the problem.
The main result at this stage is that the chief blemish of the
market order which has been the cause of well-justified
reproaches, its susceptibility to recurrent periods of depression
and unemployment, is a consequence of the age-old govern-
ment monopoly of the issue of money. I have now no doubt
whatever that private enterprise, if it had not been prevented
by government, could and would long ago have provided the
public with a choice of currencies, and those that prevailed in
the competition would have been essentially stable in value
and would have prevented both excessive stimulation of
investment and the consequent periods of contraction.
The demand for the freedom of the issue of money will at
first, with good reason, appear suspect to many, since in the
past such demands have been raised again and again by a long
series of cranks with strong inflationist inclinations. From most
of the advocates of 'Free Banking' in the early 19th century
(and even a substantial section of the advocates of the 'banking
principle') to the agitators for a 'Free Money' (Freigeld)-
Silvio Gesell [22] and the plans of Major C. H. Douglas [13],
H. Rittershausen [51] and Henry Meulen [44]-in the 20th,
they all agitated for free issue because they wanted more money.
Often a suspicion that the government monopoly was incon-
sistent with the general principle of freedom of enterprise
underlay their argument, but without exception they all
believed that the monopoly had led to an undue restriction
rather than to an excessive supply of money. They certainly did
not recognise that government more often than any private
enterprise had provided us with the Schwundgeld (shrinking
money) that Silvio Gesell had recommended.
I will here merely add that, to keep to the main subject, I
will not allow myself to be drawn into a discussion of the
interesting methodological question of how it is possible to say
something of significance about circumstances with which we
have practically no experience, although this fact throws
interesting light on the method of economic theory in general.
In conclusion I will merely say that this task has seemed to
me important and urgent enough to interrupt for a few weeks
the major undertaking to which all my efforts have been de-
l See [35], [59] and [60].
voted for the last few years and the completion of which still
demands its concluding third volume.
The reader will, I hope,
understand that in these circumstances, and against all my
habits, after completing a first draft of the text of the present
Paper, I left most ofthe exacting and time-consuming task ofpol-
ishing the exposition and getting it ready for publication to the
sympathetic endeavours of Mr Arthur Seldon, the Editorial
Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, whose beneficial
care has already made much more readable some of my shorter
essays published by that Institute, and who has been willing
to assume this burden. His are in particular all the helpful
headings of the sub-sections and the 'Questions for Discussion'
at the end. And the much improved title of what I had intended
to call Concurrent Currencies was suggested by the General
Director of the Institute, Mr Ralph Harris. I am profoundly
grateful to them for thus making possible the publication of this
sketch. It would otherwise probably not have appeared for a
long time, since lowe it to the readers of Law, Legislation and
Liberty that I should not allow myself to be diverted from com-
pleting it by this rather special concern for longer than was
necessary to get a somewhat rough outline of my argument on
A special apology is due to those of my many friends to whom
it will be obvious that, in the course of the last few years when
I was occupied with wholly different problems, I have not
read their publications closely related to the subject of this
Paper which would probably have taught me much from which
I could have profited in writing it.
30 June, 1976
1 Law, Legislation and Liberty: Vol. I was Rules and Order, Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1973. Vol. 2, The Mirage of Social Justice, will appear about the same time as the
present Paper. Vol. 3, The Political Order of a Free Society, nearing completion, will
be published, I hope, in 1978.
It is just 13 months after I commenced writing this study and
only a little more than six months since its first publication. It
is therefore perhaps not very surprising that the additions I
found desirable to make in this Second Edition are due more
to further thinking about the questions raised than to any
criticisms I have so far received. The comments so far, indeed,
have expressed incredulous surprise more often than any
objections to my argument.
Most of the additions therefore concern rather obvious points
which perhaps I ought to have made more clearly in the First
Edition. Only one of them, that on page 127 (page 98 of
the First Edition) concerns a point on which further thought
has led me to expect a somewhat different development from
what I had suggested if the reform I propose were adopted.
Indeed the clear distinction between two different kinds of
competition, the first of which is likely to lead to the general
acceptance of one widely used standard (or perhaps a very
few such standards), while the second refers to the competition
for the confidence of the public in the currency of a particular
denomination, seems to me of ever greater importance. I have
now sketched, in a somewhat longer insertion to Section XXIV
(pp. 127-129), one of the most significant probable conse-
quences, not originally foreseen by me.
I have made only minor stylistic changes to bring out more
clearly what I meant to say. I have even let stand the differ-
ence between the more tentative tone at the beginning which,
as will not have escaped the reader, gradually changes to a
more confident tone as the argument proceeds. Further thought
has so far only still more increased my confidence both in the
desirability and the practicability of the fundamental change
Some important contributions to the problems considered
here which were made at a Mont Pelerin Society conference
held after the material for this Second Edition was prepared
could not be used since I had immediately after to start on
prolonged travels. I hope that particularly the papers presented
then by W. Engels, D. L. Kemmerer, W. Stiitzel and R. Vaubel
will soon be available in print. I have, however, inserted at a
late stage a reply to a comment by Milton Friedman which
seemed to me to demand a prompt response.
I should perhaps have added above to my reference to my
preoccupation with other problems which have prevented me
from giving the present argument all the attention which it
deserves, that in fact my despair of ever again getting a toler-
able money system under the present institutional structure is
as much a result of the many years of study I have now devoted
to the prevailing political order, and especially to the effects of
government by a democratic assembly with unlimited powers,
as to my earlier work when monetary theory was still one of
my central interests.
I ought, perhaps, also to add, what I have often had occasion
to explain but may never have stated in writing, that I strongly
feel that the chief task of the economic theorist or political
philosopher should be to operate on public opinion to make
politically possible what today may be politically impossible,
and that in consequence the objection that my proposals are
at present impracticable does not in the least deter me from
developing them.
Finally, after reading over once more the text of this Second
Edition I feel I ought to tell the reader at the outset that in
the field of money I do not want to prohibit government from
doing anything except preventing others from doing things
they might do better.
Freiburg im Breisgau
FRIEDRICH AUGUST HAYEK, Dr Jur, Dr Sc Pol (Vienna),., PSc
(Econ.) (London), Visiting Professor at the University of
Salzburg, Austria, 1970-74. Director of the Austrian Institute for
Economic Research, 1927-31, and Lecturer in Economics at the
University of Vienna, 1929-31. Tooke Professor of Economic
Science and Statistics, University of London, 1931-50. Professor
of Social and Moral Science, University of Chicago, 1950-62.
Professor of Economics, University of Freiburg LBrg., West
Germany, 1962-68. He was awarded the Alfred Nobel Memorial
Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974. Created Companion of
Honour in 1984.
Professor Hayek's most important publ,ications include Prices
and Production (1931), Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1933),
The Pure Theory of Capital (1941), The Road to Serfdom (1944),
Individualism and Economic Order (1948), The Counter-Revolution of
Science (1952), and The Constitution of Liberty (1960). His latest
works are a collection of his writings under the title Studies in
Philosophy, Politics and Economics (1967) and Law, Legislation and
Liberty (Vol. I: Rules and Order, 1973; Vol. II: The Mirage ofSocial
justice, 1976; Vol. III: The Political Order of a Free People, 1979);
New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History ofIdeas
(1978); and The Fatal Conceit (1988). He has also edited several
books and has published articles in the Economic journal,
Economica and other journals.
The lEA has published his The Confusion ofLanguage in Political
Thought (Occasional Paper 20, 1968), his Wincott Memorial
Lecture, Economic Freedom and Representative Government
(Occasional Paper 39, 1973), a collection of his writings with a
new essay (assembled by Sudha Shenoy), A Tiger by the Tail
(Hobart Paperback 4, 1972, Second Edition, 1978), an essay in
Verdict on Rent Control (lEA Readings No.7, 1972), Full
Employment at Any Price? (Occasional Paper 45, 1975), and Choice
in Currency: A Way to Stop Inflation (Occasional Paper 48, 1976).
The central argument of this Hobart Paper by Professor Hayek is
that price level stability can be achieved only by removing from
national governments their monopoly of money creation.
Although price level performance in the years before the Paper's
publication had been unsatisfactory worldwide (in Britain, for
example, the cost of living had risen by just over 500 per cent
during the previous quarter-century), the Paper had little
apparent practical impact. Discussion continued to be of how to
improve the performance of these government monopolies
rather than of how to end them. If the idea of monetary
competition was discussed at all, it was dismissed as 'politically
impossible' .
As Hayek observed, that objection should be irrelevant to an
' ... the present political necessity ought to be no concern of
the economic scientist. His task ought to be, as I will not cease
repeating, to make politically possible what today may be
politically impossible. To decide what can be done at the
moment is the task of the politician, not of the economist ...'
(Second edn., 1978, pp. 79-80)
Fortunately, Hayek was not alone in that belief. Other scholars
have followed up his analysis, and have studied episodes where
there has not been a government monopoly of money.
Lawrence White (1984) studied the Scottish system of competi-
tive money issue-a system admired by Adam Smith. Eugene
White (1990) examined the period during the French Revolution
when there was competition in the issuing of money. Hugh
Rockoff (1990) examined competitive money issue in the United
States. Of course, none of these episodes emerged as one of
perfect monetary performance, and none is recent. But all turned
out· to be more stable than government monopoly of money has
been; and their age is irrelevant, for the principle they illustrate
is the timeless one that incentives influence conduct. Hayek's
analysis as set out in this Hobart Paper is acquiring empirical
At the same time, those who consider themselves practical
men have started to think about what might be done to. improve
our monetary system. A few years ago the notion that a British
Chancellor of the Exchequer would propose freeing the Bank of
England from the authority of the Treasury would have seemed
totally unbelievable. But Nigel Lawson has revealed that when
Chancellor he made just such a proposal. This increased
attention should be no surprise. In the years since Hayek's Paper
first appeared, price level performance has not improved.
Between 1978 and 1990, the cost of living has risen in Britain by
230 per cent. That fall in the value of sterling has occurred
despite the British economy undergoing a severe recession in an
attempt to end inflation.
This failure is not unique to Britain. In Germany since 1978,
prices have risen by 138 per cent; in Switzerland by 143 per
cent; and in the USA by 190 per cent. All did better than Britain,
but surely evidel)ce enough that an independent central bank is,
as Milton Friedman argued in 1962, no guarantee of satisfactory
monetary performance. What then should and can be done?
The New Zealand Government has recently recognised that
incentive is important, and has linked the pay of its senior
central bankers to their success in delivering stable prices. In a
forthcoming paper, Charles Goodhart (1991) urges the same for
the Bank of England.
Is this effort to harness incentives to deliver the objective
worthwhile? Is the objective of sufficient importance? And if so,
can anything else be done? In this Paper, Hayek sets out with
great lucidity why inflation is so important and so damaging. It
does of course redistribute between borrowers and lenders. That
is arbitrary. It is also inefficient, for it disrupts the working of the
capital market. But the problems caused by inflation go beyond
that; they affect the whole economy by making future prices
harder to foresee and current price movements harder to
'If the value of money .is so regulated that an appropriate
average of prices is kept constant . . . the unpredictability of
particular future prices, inevitable in a functioning market
economy, remains, [but] the fairly high long-run chances are
that for people in general the effects of the unforeseen price
changes will just about cancel out.' (pp. 67-68)
Hayek contrasts this situation with one where there is inflation:
'. .. the individual enterprise ... could ... not base its
calculations and decisions on a known median from which
individual movements of prices were as likely to diverge in
the one direction as in the other. Successful calculations, or
effective capital and cost accounting, would then become
impossible.' (p. 69)
And the problems are, he emphasises, additional to the
'. .. temporary changes in the structure of relative prices
[which inflation] also brings about, which will cause mis-
directions of production'. (p. 69)
The instabilities produced by these distortions and by the
occasional efforts of governments to slow inflation are, Hayek
argues, responsible for the recurring periods of mass unemploy-
ment which characterise capitalist economies. The benefits of
stable money would not end with a stable price level.
How, then, to achieve monetary stability? Milton Friedman,
and recently many' others, have urged a monetary rule,
embedded where possible in a 'monetary constitution', so that
the growth of money is steady and predictable.
There can be no
doubt that such a rule would end the grosser failures of monetary
management. But why do we need to regulate our suppliers of
money? Here competition comes in. For regulation of an
industry-by government, regulatory agency, or rule-can be
defended only if the industry is not regulated by competition. In
general, competition will deliver the best attainable outcome.
Why not in money? That is the question addressed in this Paper;
and the answer is that competition in the supply of money will
produce that desired outcome, just as it does in other economic
The republication of this Hobart Paper now is particularly
timely. First, of course, because inflation has once more risen.
But, secondly, because there is now an opportunity to have a
substantial degree of competition in the supply of money. The
countries of the EEC are committed to abolishing all exchange
controls between each other. There are proposals to go further,
to fIX exchange rates and impose a common European currency.
But if these latter proposals are resisted we will have competition
between national currencies within Europe.
By a very simple
measure we will have harnessed the incentives of prestige and
1 It is worth remarking that in a recent paper (1986) co-authored with Anna Schwartz,
Milton Friedman has moved close to the position here advanced by Professor Hayek.
2 The benefits of monetary competition in the particular context of the EEC were set out
in Vaubel (1979), revived in Wood (1989), and were subsequently urged upon EEC
Finance Ministers by Nigel Lawson in a paper (HM Treasury, 1989) he presented to a
meeting of these Ministers when he was Chancellor.
profit (for governments get revenue from money creation) to
deliver stable money.
In just 12 years, the proposal in this Paper by Professor Hayek
has moved from being 'politically impossible' to being within
our grasp. We should seize it.
October 1990 GEOFFREY E. WOOD
Professor ofEcorwmics,
City University Business Sclwol
Friedman, Milton (1962): 'Should there be an Independent
Monetary Authority?', in Leland B.Yeager (ed.), In Search ofa
Monetary Constitution, Boston, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Friedman, Milton, and AnnaJ. Schwartz (1986): 'Has Govern-
ment any Role in Money?', Journal of Monetary Ecorwmics,
January, pp. 37-62.
Goodhart, Charles A. E. (1991): 'British Monetary Policy:
March 1990', in S. F. Frowen (ed.), Monetary Policy and
Financial Innovations in Five Industrial Countries, London:
Her Majesty's Treasury (1989): An Evolutionary Approach to
Ecorwmic and Monetary Union, London: HM Treasury.
Rockoff, Hugh (1990): 'Lessons from American Experience
with Free Banking', in Forrest H. Capie and Geoffrey E.
Wood (eds.), Unregulated Banking: Chaos or Order?, London:
Vaubel, Roland (1979): Clwice in European Monetary Union, Ninth
Wincott Memorial Lecture, Occasional Paper 55, London:
Institute of Economic Affairs.
White, Eugene (1990): 'Banking in a Revolution', in Capie and
Wood (op. cit.).
White, Lawrence (1984): Free Banking in Britain, Cambridge:
Wood, Geoffrey E. (1989): 'Banking and Monetary Control after
1992: A Central Bank for Europe?', in Whose Europe?, lEA
Readings No. 29, London: Institute of Economic Affairs.
The concrete proposal for the near future, and the occasion for
the examination of a much more far-reaching scheme, is that
the countries of the Common Market, preferably with the neutral
countries of Europe (and possibly later the countries of North
America) mutually bind themselves by formal treaty not to place any
obstacles in the way of the free dealing throughout their territories in
one another's currencies (including gold coins) or of a similar free
exercise of the banking business by any institution legally established
in any of their territories.
This would mean in the first instance the abolition of any kind
of exchange control or regulation of the movement of money
between these countries, as well as the full freedom to use
any of the currencies for contracts and accounting. Further, it
would mean the opportunity for any bank located in these
countries to open branches in any other on the same terms as
established banks.
Free trade in money
The purpose of this scheme is to impose upon existing monetary
and financial agencies a very much needed discipline by making
it impossible for any of them, or for any length of time, to issue
a kind of money substantially less reliable and useful than the
money of any other. As soon as the public became familiar
with the new possibilities, any deviations from the straight
path of providing an honest money would at once lead to the
rapid displacement of the· offending currency by others. And
the individual countries, being deprived of the various dodges
by which they are now able temporarily to conceal the effects
of their actions by 'protecting' their currency, would be con-
strained to keep the value of their currencies tolerably stable.
Proposal more practicable than utopian European currency
This seems to me both preferable and more practicable than
the utopian scheme of introducing a new European currency,
which would ultimately only have the effect of more deeply
entrenching the source and root of all monetary evil, the
government monopoly of the issue and control of money. It
would also seem that, if the countries were not prepared to
adopt the more limited proposal advanced here, they would
be even less willing to accept a common European currency.
The idea of depriving government altogether of its age-old
prerogative of monopolising money is still too unfamiliar and
even alarming to most people to have any chance of being
adopted in the near future. But people might learn to see the
advantages if, at first at least, the currencies of the governments
were allowed to compete for the favour of the public.
Though I strongly sympathise with the desire to complete
the economic unification of Western Europe by completely free-
ing the flow of money between them, I have grave doubts about
the desirability ofdoing so by creating a new European currency
managed by any sort of supra-national authority. Quite apart
from the extreme unlikelihood that the member countries
would agree on the policy to be pursued in practice by a
common monetary authority (and the practical inevitability of
some countries getting a worse currency than they have now),
it seems highly unlikely, even in the most favourable circum-
stances, that it would be administered better than the present
national currencies. Moreover, in many respects a single
international currency is not better but worse than a national
currency ifit is not better run. It would leave a country with a
financially more sophisticated public not even the chance of
escaping from the consequences of the crude prejudices
governing the decisions of the others. The advantage of an
international authority should be mainly to protect a member
state from the harmful measures of others, not to force it to
join in their follies.
Free trade in banking
The suggested extension of the free trade in money to free trade
in banking is an absolutely essential part of the scheme if it is
to achieve what is intended. First, bank deposits subject to
cheque, and thus a sort of privately issued money, are today of
course a part, and in most countries m
1ch the largest part, of
the aggregate amount of generally accepted media of exchange.
Secondly, the expansion and contraction of the separate
national superstructures of bank credit are at present the chief
excuse for national management of the basic money.
On the effects of the adoption of the proposal all I will add
at this point is that it is of course intended to prevent national
monetary and financial authorities from doing many things
politically impossible to avoid so long as they have the power
to do them. These are without exception harmful and against
the long-run interest of the country doing them but politically
inevitable as a temporary escape from acute difficulties. They
include measures by which governments can most easily and
quickly remove the causes of discontent of particular groups or
sections but bound in the long run to disorganise and ultimately
to destroy the market order.
Preventing government from concealing depreciation
The main advantage of the proposed scheme, in other words, is
that it would prevent governments from 'protecting' the cur-
rencies they issue against the harmful consequences of their own
nleasures, and therefore prevent them from further employing
these harmful tools. They would become unable to conceal
the depreciation of the money they issue, to prevent an outflow
of money, capital, and other resources as a result of making
their home use unfavourable, or to control prices-all measures
which would, of course,. tend to destroy the Common Market.
The scheme would indeed seem to satisfy all the requirements
of a common market better than a common currency without
the need to establish a new international agency or to confer
new powers on a supra-national authority.
The scheme would, to all intents and purposes, amount to a
displacement of the national circulations only if the national
monetary authorities misbehaved. Even then they could still
ward off a complete displacement of the national currency by
rapidly changing their ways. It is possible that in some very
small countries with a good deal of international trade and
tourism, the currency of one of the bigger countries might
come to predolninate, but, assuming a sensible policy, there is
no reason why most of the existing currencies should not
continue to be used for a long time. (It would, of course, be
important that the parties did not enter into a tacit agreement
not to supply so good a money that the citizens of the other
nations would prefer it! And the presumption of guilt would of
course always have to lie against the government whose money
the public did not like!)
I do not think the scheme would prevent governments from
doing anything they ought to do in the interest of a well-
functioning economy, or which in the long run would benefit
any substantial group. But this raises complex issues better
discussed within the framework of the full development of the
underlying principle.
If the use of several concurrent currencies is to be' seriously
considered for immediate application in a limited area, it is
evidently desirable to investigate the consequences of a general
application of the principle on which this proposal is based.
If we are to contemplate abolishing the exclusive use within
each national territory of a single national currency issued by
the government, and to admit on equal footing the currencies
issued by other governments, the question at once arises
whether it would not be equally desirable to do away altogether
with the monopoly of government supplying money and to
allow private enterprise to supply the public with other media
of exchange it may prefer.
The questions this reform raises are at present much more
theoretical than the practical proposal because the more far-
reaching suggestion is clearly not only much too strange and
alien to the general public to be considered for present applica-
tion. The problems it raises are evidently also still much too
little understood even by the experts for anyone to make a
confident prediction about the precise consequences of such
a scheme. Yet it is clearly possible that there is no necessity or
even advantage in the now unquestioned and universally
accepted government prerogative of producing money. It may
indeed prove to be harmful and its abolition a great gain,
opening the way for very beneficial developments. Discussion
therefore cannot begin early enough. Though its realisation
may be wholly impracticable so long as the public is mentally
unprepared for it and uncritically accepts the dogma of the
necessary government prerogative, this should no longer be
allowed to act as a bar to the intellectual exploration of the
fascinating theoretical problems the scheme raises.
Competition in currenC:J not discussed by economists
It is an extraordinary truth that competing currencies have
until quite recently never been seriously examined.
There is
no answer in the available literature to the question why a
government monopoly of the provision of money is universally
regarded as indispensable, or whether the belief is simply
derived from the unexplained postulate that there must be
within any given territory one single kind of money in circula-
tion-which, so long as only gold and silver were seriously
considered as possible kinds of money, might have appeared a
definite convenience. Nor can we find an answer to the question
of what would happen if that monopoly were abolished and the
provision of money were thrown open to the competition of
private concerns supplying different currencies. Most people
seem to imagine that any proposal for private agencies to be
allowed to issue money means that they should be allowed to
issue the same money as anybody else (in token money this
would, of course, simply amount to forgery) rather than
different kinds of money clearly distinguishable by different
denominations among which the public could choose freely.
Initial advantages of government monopoly in monf:Y
Perhaps when the money economy was only slowly spreading
into the remoter regions, and one of the main problems was
to teach large numbers the art of calculating in money (and
that was not so very long ago), a single easily recognisable
kind of money may have been of considerable assistance. And
it may be argued that the exclusive use of such a single uniform
sort of money greatly assisted comparison of prices and there-
fore the growth of competition and the market. Also, when
the genuineness of metallic money could be ascertained only
by a difficult process of assaying, for which the ordinary person
had neither the skill nor the equipment, a strong case could be
made for guaranteeing the fineness of the coins by the stamp
of some generally recognised authority which, outside the
great commercial centres, could be only the government.
But today these initial advantages, which might have served
as an excuse for governments to appropriate the exclusive right
of issuing metallic money, certainly do not outweigh the
1 But, though I had independently arrived at the realisation of the advantages
p o s s e s s ~ d by independent competing currencies, I must now concede intellectual
priority to Professor Benjamin Klein, who, in a paper written in 1970 and
published in 1975 (35], until recently unknown to me, had clearly
explained the chief advantage of competition among currencies.
disadvantages of this system. It has the defects ofall monopolies:
one must use their product even if it is unsatisfactory, and,
above all, it prevents the discovery of better methods of
satisfying a need for which a monopolist has no incentive.
If the public understood what price in periodic inflation and
instability it pays for the convenience of having to deal with
only one kind of money in ordinary transactions, and not
occasionally to have to contemplate the advantage of using
other money than the familiar kind, it would probably find it
very excessive. For this convenience is much less important
than the opportunity to use a reliable money that will not
periodically upset the smooth flow of the economy-an oppor-
tunity ofwhich the public has been deprived by the government
monopoly. But the people have never been given the oppor-
tunity to discover this advantage. Governments have at all times
had a strong interest in persuading the public that the right to
issue money belongs exclusively to them. And so long as, for
all practical purposes, this meant the issue of gold, silver and
copper coins, it did not matter so much as it does today,
when we know that there are all kinds of other possible sorts
of money, not least paper, which government is even less
competent to handle and even more prone to abuse than
metallic money.
For more than 2,000 years the government prerogative or
exclusive right of supplying money amounted in practice
merely to the monopoly of minting coins of gold, silver or
copper. It was during this period that this prerogative came to
be accepted without question as an essential attribute of
sovereignty-clothed with all the mystery which the sacred
powers of the prince used to inspire. Perhaps this conception
goes back to even before King Croesus of Lydia struck the first
coins in the sixth century BC, to the time when it was usual
merely to punch marks on the bars of metal to certify its
At any rate, the minting prerogative of the ruler was firmly
established under the Roman emperors.
When, at the begin-
1 w. Endemann [15], Vol. II, p. 171.
ning of the modern era, Jean Bodin developed the concept of
sovereignty, he treated the right of coinage as one of the most
important and essential parts of it.
The regalia, as these royal
prerogatives were called in Latin, of which coinage, mining,
and custom duties were the most important, were during the
Middle Ages the chief sources of revenue of the princes and
were viewed solely from this angle. It is evident that, as
coinage spread, governments everywhere soon discovered that
the exclusive right of coinage was a most important instrument
of power as well as an attractive source of gain. From the
beginning the prerogative was neither claimed nor conceded
on the ground that it was for the general good but simply as
an essential element of governmental power.
The coins served,
indeed, largely as the symbols of might, like the flag, through
which the ruler asserted his sovereignty, and told his people
who their master was whose image the coins carried to the
remotest parts of his realm.
Government certificate of metal weight and purity
The task the government was understood to assume was of
course initially not so much to make money as to certify the
weight and fineness of the materials that universally served as
which after the earliest times were onlythe three metals,
gold, silver, and copper. It was supposed to be a task rather
like that of establishing and certifying uniform weights and
The pieces of metal were regarded as proper money only if
1 J. Bodin [5], p. 176. Bodin, who understood more about money than most of
his contemporaries, may well have hoped that the governments of large states
would be more responsible than the thousands of minor princelings and cities
who, during the later part of the Middle Ages, had acquired the minting
privilege and sometimes abused it even more than the richer princes of large
2 The same applies to the postal monopoly which everywhere appears to provide
a steadily deteriorating service and of which in Great Britain (according to
The Times, 25 May, 1976) the General Secretary of the Union of Post Office
\Vorkers (!) said recently that 'Governments of both political complexions
have reduced a once great public service to the level of a music-hall joke'.
Politically the broadcasting monopoly may be even more dangerous, but economi-
cally I doubt whether any other monopoly has done as much damage as that
of issuing money.
3 Cf. Adam Smith [54, p. 40J: ' ... those public offices called mints: institutions
exactly of the same nature with those of the aulnagers and stampmasters of
woollen and linen cloth'.
they carried the stamp of the appropriate authority, whose
duty was thought to be to assure that the coins had the proper
weight and purity to give them their value.
During the Middle Ages, however, the superstition arose
that it was the act of government that conferred the value upon
the money. Although experience always proved otherwise, this
doctrine of the valor impositus
was largely taken over by legal
doctrine and served to some extent as justification of the
constant vain attempts of the princes to impose the same value
on coins containing a smaller amount of the precious metal.
(In the early years of this century the medieval doctrine was
revived by the German Profess'or G. F. Knapp; his State Theory
of Money still seems to exercise some influence on contemporary
legal theory.)2
There is no reason to doubt that private enterprise would, if
permitted, have been capable of providing as good and at least
as trustworthy coins. Indeed occasionally it did, or was com-
missioned by government to do so. Yet so long as the technical
task of providing uniform and recognisable coins still presented
major difficulties, it was at least a useful task which government
performed. Unfortunately, governments soon discovered that it
was not only useful but could also be made very profitable,
at least so long as people had no alternative but to use the
money they provided. The seignorage, the fee charged to cover
the cost of minting, proved a very attractive source of revenue,
and was soon increased far beyond the cost ofmanufacturing the
coin. And from retaining an excessive part of the metal brought
to the government mint to be struck into new coins, it was only
a step to the practice, increasingly common during the Middle
Ages, of recalling the circulating coins in order to recoin the
various denominations \\lith a lower gold or silver content.
We shall consider the effect of these debasements in the next
Section. But since the function of government in issuing money
is no longer one of merely certifying the weight and fineness of
a certain piece of metal, but involves a deliberate determination
of the quantity of money to be issued, governments have
become wholly inadequate for the task and, it can be said
without qualifications, have incessantly and everywhere abused
their trust to defraud the people.
1 Endemann [15], p. 172.
2 Knapp [36], and compare Mann [41].
t· A
The appearance ofpaper money
The government prerogative, which had originally referred
only to the issue of coins because they were the only kind of
money then used, was promptly extended to other kinds of
money when they appeared on the scene. They arose originally
when governments wanted money which they tried to raise
by compulsory loans, for which they gave receipts that they
ordered people to accept as money. The significance of the
gradual appearance of government paper money, and soon of
bank notes, is for our purposes complicated because for a long
time the problem was not the appearance of new kinds of
money with a different denomination, but the use as money of
paper claims on the established kind of metallic money issued
by government monopoly.
I t is probably impossible for pieces of paper or other tokens
of a material itself of no significant market value to come to be
gradually accepted and held as money unless they represent a
claim on some valuable object. To be accepted as money they
must at first derive their value from another source, such as
their convertibility into another kind of money. In consequence,
gold and silver, or claims for them, remained for a long time
the only kinds of money between which there could be any
competition; and, since the sharp fall in its value in the 19th
century, even silver ceased to be a serious competitor to gold.
(The possibilities of bimetallism
are irrelevant for our
present problems.)
Political and technical possibilities of controlling paper money
The position has become very different, however, since paper
money established itself everywhere. The government mono-
poly of the issue of money was bad enough so long as metallic
moneypredominated. But it becamean unrelieved calamitysince
paper money (or other token money), which can provide the
best and the worst money, came under political control. A
money deliberately controlled in supply by an agency whose
self-interest forced it to satisfy the wishes of the users might be
the best. A money regulated to satisfy the demands of group
interests is bound to be the worst possible (Section XVIII).
The value of paper money obviously can be regulated
according to a variety of principles-even if it is more than
1 Section VII, below, pp. 43-45.
doubtful that any democratic government with unlimited
powers can ever manage it satisfactorily. Though historical ex-
perience would at first seem to justify the belief that only gold
can provide a stable currency, and that all paper money is
bound to depreciate sooner or later, all our insight into the
processes determining the value of money tells us that this
prejudice, though understandable, is unfounded. The political
impossibility that governments will achieve it does not mean
there is reason to doubt that it is technically possible to control
the quantity of any kind of token money so that its value will
behave in a desired manner, and that it w'ill for this reason
retain its acceptability and)ts value. It would therefore now be
possible, if it were permitted, to have a variety of essentially
different monies. They could represent not merely different
quantities of the same metal, but also different abstract units
fluctuating in their value relatively to one another. In the same
way, we could have currencies circulating concurrently
throughout many countries and offering the people a choice.
This possibility appears, until recently, never to have been con-
templated seriously. Even the most radical advocates of free
enterprise, such as the philosopher Herbert Spencer
or the
French economist Joseph Garnier,2 seem to have advocated
only private coinage, while the free banking movement of the
mid- 19th century agitated merely for the right to issue notes in
terms of the standard currency. 3
Monopoly of money has buttressed government power
While, as we shall see presently, government's exclusive right
to issue and regulate money has certainly not helped to give
us a better money than ,ve would otherwise have had, and
probably a very much worse one, it has ofcourse become a chief
instrument for prevailing governmental policies and profoundly
assisted the general growth of governmental power. Much of
contemporary politics is based on the assumption that govern-
ment has the power to create and make people accept any
amount of additional money it wishes. Governments will for
this reason strongly defend their traditional rights. But for the
same reason it is also most important that they should be taken
from them.
A government ought not, any more than a private person, to
1 Herbert Spencer [57]. 2 Joseph Garnier [21]. 3 Vera C. Smith [55].
be able (at least in peace-time) to take whatever it wants, but be
limited strictly to the use of the means placed at its disposal by
the representatives of the people, and to be unable to extend
its resources beyond what the people have agreed to let it have.
The modern expansion of government was largely assisted by
the possibility of covering deficits by issuing money-usually
on the pretence that it was thereby creating employment. It
is perhaps significant, however, that Adam Smith [54, p. 687]
does not mention the control of the issue of money among the
'only three duties [which] according to the system of natural
liberty, the sovereign has to attend to'.
When one studies the history of money one cannot help
wondering why people should have put up for so long with
governments exercising an exclusive power over 2,000 years
that was regularlyused to exploit and defraud them. This can be
explained only by the myth (that the government prerogative
was necessary) becoming so firmly established that it did not
occur even to the professional students of these matters (for a
long time including the present writer!) ever to question it.
But once the validity of the established doctrine is doubted its
foundation is rapidly seen to be fragile.
We cannot trace the details of the nefarious activities of
rulers in monopolising money beyond the time of the Greek
philosopher Diogenes who is reported, as early as the fourth
century Be, to have called money the politicians' game of dice.
But from Roman times to the 17th century, when paper money
in various forms begins to be significant, the history of coinage
is an almost uninterrupted story of debasements or the con-
tinuous reduction of the metallic content of the coins and a
corresponding increase in all commodity prices.
History is largely inflation engineered hy government
Nobody has yet written a full history of these developments.
I t would indeed be all too monotonous and depressing a story,
1 F. A. Hayek [29], pp. 324 et seq.
but I do not think it an exaggeration to say that history is
largely a history ofinflation, and usually of inflations engineered
by governments and for the gain of governments-though the
gold and silver discoveries in the 16th century had a similar
effect. Historians have again and again attempted to justify
inflation by claiming that it made possible the great periods of
rapid economic progress. They have even produced a series
of inflationist theories of historyl which have, however, been
clearly refuted by the evidence: prices in England and the
United States were at the end of the period of their most rapid
development almost exactly at the same level as two hundred
years earlier. But their recurring rediscoverers are usually
ignorant of the earlier discussions.
Early Middle Ages' deflation local or temporary
The early Middle Ages may have been a period of deflation
that contributed to the economic decline of the whole of
Europe. But even this is not certain. It would seem that on the
whole the shrinking of trade led to the reduction of the amount
of money in circulation, not the other way round. We find too
many complaints about the dearness of commodities and the
deterioration of the coin to accept deflation as more than a local
phenomenon in regions where wars and migrations had
destroyed the market and the money economy shrank as people
buried their treasure. But where, as in Northern Italy, trade
revived early, we find at once all the little princes vying with
one another in diminishing the coin-a process which, in spite
of some unsuccessful attempts of private merchants to provide a
better medium of exchange, lasted throughout the following
centuries until Italy came to be described as the country with
the worst money and the best writers on money.
But though theologians and jurists joined in condemning
these practices, they never ceased until the introduction of
paper money provided governments with an even cheaper
method of defrauding the people. Governments could not, of
course, pursue the practices by which they forced bad money
upon the people without the cruellest measures. As one legal
treatise on the law of money sums up the history of punishment
for merely refusing to accept the legal money:
1 Especially Werner Sombart [56] and before him Archibald Alison [1] and others.
Cf. on them Paul Barth [4], who has a whole chapter on 'History as a function
of the value of money', and Marianne von Herzfeld [32].
'From Marco Polo we learn that, in the 13th century,
Chinese law made the rejection of imperial paper money
punishable by death, and twenty years in chains or, in some
cases death, was the penalty provided for the refusal to
accept French assignats. Early English law punished repudi-
ation as lese-majesty. At the time of the American revolution,
non-acceptance of Continental notes was treated as an
enemy act and sometimes worked a forfeiture of the debt.'!
Absolutism suppressed merchants' attempts to create stable money
Some of the early foundations of banks at Amsterdam and
elsewhere arose from attempts by merchants to secure for
themselves astable money, but rising absolutism soon suppressed
all such efforts to create a non-governmental currency. Instead,
it protected the rise of banks issuing notes in terms of the
official government money. Even less than in the history of
metallic money can we here sketch how this development
opened the doors to new abuses of policy.
It is said that the Chinese had been driven by their experience
with paper money to try to prohibit it for all time (of course
unsuccessfully) before the Europeans ever invented it.
European governments, once they knew about this possibility,
began to exploit it ruthlessly, not to provide people with good
money, but to gain as much as possible from it for their revenue.
Ever since the British Government in 1694 sold the Bank of
England a limited monopoly of the issue of bank notes, the
chief concern of governments has been not to let slip from their
hands the power over money, formerly based on the prerogative
of coinage, to really independent banks. For a time the ascend-
ancy of the gold standard and the consequent belief that to
maintain it was an important matter of prestige, and to be
driven off it a national disgrace, put an effective restraint on
this power. It gave the world the one long period-200 years
or more-of relative stability during which modern industrial-
ism could develop, albeit suffering from periodic crises. But as
soon as it was widely understood some 50 years ago that the
convertibility into gold was merely a method of controlling the
amount of a·currency, which was the real factor determining its
1 A. Nussbaum [50], p. 53.
t On the Chinese events, see W. Vissering [61] and G. Tullock [58], who does nbt,
however, allude to the often recounted story of the 'final prohibition'.
value, governments became only too anxious to escape that
discipline, and money became more than ever before the play-
thing of politics. Only a few of the great powers preserved for a
time tolerable monetary stability, and they brought it also to
their colonial empires. But Eastern Europe and South America
never knew a prolonged period of monetary stability.
But, while governments have never used their power to
provide a decent money for any length of time, and have
refrained from grossly abusing it only when they were under
such a discipline as the gold standard imposed, the reason that
should make us refuse any longer to tolerate this irresponsibility
ofgovernment is that we know today that it is possible to control
the quantity of a currency so as to prevent significant fluctua-
tions in its purchasing power. Moreover, though there is every
reason to mistrust government if not tied to the gold standard
or the like, there is no reason to doubt that private enterprise
whose business depended on succeeding in the attempt could
keep stable the value of a money it issued.
Before we can proceed to show how such a system would
work we must clear out of the way two prejudices that will
probably give rise to unfounded objections against the proposal.
v. THE MYSTIQUE OF LEGAL TENDER
The first misconception concerns the concept of 'legal tender'.
It is not of much significance for our purposes, but is widely
believed to explain or justify government monopoly in the
issue of money. The first shocked response to the proposal here
discussed is usually 'But there must be a legal tender', as if
this notion proved the necessity for a single government-issued
money believed indispensable for the daily conduct of business.
In its strictly legal meaning, 'legal tender' signifies no more
than a kind of money a creditor cannot refuse in discharge of
a debt due to him in the money issued by government.
so, it is significant that the term has no authoritative definition
1 Nussbaum [50], Mann [41] and Breckinridge [6].
in English statute law.! Elsewhere it simply refers to the means
of discharging a debt contracted in terms of the money issued
by government or due under an order of a court. In so far as
government possesses the monopoly of issuing money and uses
it to establish one kind of money, it must probably also have
power to say by what kind of objects debts expressed in its
currency can be discharged. But that means neither that all
money need be legal tender, nor even that all objects given
by the law the attribute of legal tender need to be money.
(There are historical instances in which creditors have been
compelled by courts to accept conlmodities such as tobacco,
which could hardly be called money, in discharge of their
claims for money. 2)
The superstition disproved by spontaneous money
The term 'legal tender' has, however, in popular imagination
come to be surrounded by a penumbra of vague ideas about
the supposed necessity for the state to provide money. This is a
survival of the medieval idea that it is the state which some-
how confers value on money it otherwise would not possess.
And this, in turn, is true only to the very limited extent that
government can force us to accept whatever it wishes in place
of what we have contracted for; in this sense it can give the
substitute the same value for the debtor as the original object
of the contract. But the superstition that it is necessary for
government (usually called the 'state' to make it sound better)
to declare what is to be money, as if it had created the money
which could not exist without it, probably originated in the
naive belief that such a tool as money must have been 'invented'
and given to us by some original inventor. This belief has been
wholly displaced by our understanding of the spontaneous
generation of such undesigned institutions by a process of
social evolution of which money has since become the prime
1 Mann [41], p. 38. On the other hand, the refusal until recently of English
Courts to give judgement for paying in any other currency than the pound
sterling has made this aspect of legal tender particularly influential in England.
But this is likely to change after a recent decision (Miliangos v. George Frank
Textiles Ltd [1975]) established that an English Court can give judgement in
a foreign currency on a money claim in a foreign currency, so that, for instance,
it is now possible in England to enforce a claim from a sale in Swiss francs.
(Financial Times, 6 November, 1975: the report is reproduced in F. A. Hayek
[31], pp. 45-6).
2 Nussbaum [50], pp. 54-5.
paradigm (law, language and morals being the other main
instances). When the medieval doctrine of the valor impositus
was in this century revived by the much admired German
Professor Knapp it prepared the way for a policy which in
1923 carried the German Mark down to I
of its former value!
Private monf:Y preferred
There certainly can be and has been money, even very satis-
factory money, without government doing anything about it,
though it has rarely been allowed to exist for long.
But a
lesson is to be learned from the report of a Dutch author about
China a hundred years ago who observed of the paper money
then current in that part of the world that 'because it is not
legal tender and because it is no concern of the State it is generally
accepted as money'.2 We owe it to governments that within
given national territories today in general only one kind of
money is universally accepted. But whether this is desirable,
or whether people could not, if they understood the advantage,
get a much better kind of money without all the to-do about
legal tender, is an open question. Moreover, a 'legal means of
payment' (gesetzliches Zahlungsmittel) need not be specifically
designated by a law. It is sufficient if the law enables the judge
to decide in what sort of money a particular debt can be
The commonsense of the matter was put very clearly 80
years ago by a distinguished defender of a liberal economic
policy, the lawyer, statistician and high civil servant Lord
Farrer. In a paper written in 18953 he contended that if nations
'make nothing else but the standard unit [of value they have
adopted] legal tender, there is no need and no room for
1 Occasional attempts by the authorities of commercial cities to provide a money
of at least a constant metallic content, such as the establishment of the Bank of
Amsterdam, were for long periods fairly successful and their money used far
beyond the national boundaries. But even in these cases the authorities sooner
or later abused their quasi-monopoly positions. The Bank of Amsterdam was a
state agency which people had to use for certain purposes and its money even
as exclusive legal tender for payments above a certain amount. Nor was it
available for ordinary small transactions or local business beyond the city limits.
The same is roughly true of the similar experiments of Venice, Genoa, Hamburg
and Nuremberg.
I Willem Vissering [61].
3 Lord Farrer (17], p. 43.
the operation of any special law of legal tender. The ordinary
law of contract does all that is necessary without any law
giving special function to particular. forms of currency. We
have adopted a gold sovereign as our unit, or standard of
value. If I promised to pay 100 sovereigns, it needs no special
currency law of legal tender to say that I am bound to pay
100 sovereigns, and that, if required to pay the 100
sovereigns, I cannot discharge the obligation by anything
else.' .
And he concludes, after examining typical applications of the
legal tender conception, that
(Looking to the above cases of the use or abuse of the law of legal
tender other than the last [i.e. that of subsidiary coins] we see
that they possess one character in common-viz. that the law in all
of them enables a debtor to pay and requires a creditor to receive
something different from that which their contract contemplated.
In fact it is a forced and unnatural construction put upon the
dealings of men by arbitrary power'.
To this he adds a few lines later that 'any Law of Legal Tender
is in its own nature "suspect" '.2
Legal tender creates uncertainty
'rhe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device
to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something
1 Ibid., p. 45. The locus classicus on this subject from which I undoubtedly derived
my views on it, though I had forgotten this when I wrote the First Edition of
this Paper, is Carl Menger's discussion in 1892 [43a] of legal tender under the
even more appropriate equivalent German term Zwangskurs. See pp. 98-106 of
the reprint, especially p. 101, where the Zwangskurs is described as 'eine
Massrege1, die in der iiberwiegenden Zahl der FaIle den Zweck hat, gegen den
Willen der Bevoklerung, zumindest durch einen Missbrauch der Miinzhoheit
oder des Notenregals entstandene pathologische (also exceptionelle[?]) Formen
von Umlaufsmitteln, durch einen Missbrauch der justizhoheit dem Verkehr
aufzudrangen oder in demselben zu erhalten'; and p. 104 where Menger
describes it as 'ein auf die Forderungsberechtigten geiibter gesetzlicher Zwang,
bei Summenschulden (bisweilen auch bei Schulden anderer Art) solche Geld-
sorten als Zahlung anzunehmen, welche dem ausdriicklich oder stillschweigend
vereinbarten Inhalte der Forderungen nicht cntsprechen, oder diesel ben sich
zu einem Wert aufdrangen zu lassen, der ihrem Wert im freien Verkehr nicht
entspricht'. Especially interesting also is the first footnote on p. 102 in which
Menger points out that there had been fairly general agreement on this among
the liberal economists of the first half of the 19th century, while during the
second half of that century, through the influence of the (presumably German)
lawyers, the economists were led erroneously to regard legal tender as an
attribute of perfect money.
S Ibid., p. 47.
they never intended when they made the contract. It becomes
thus, in certain circumstances, a factor that intensifies the
uncertainty of dealings and consists, as Lord Farrer also
remarked in the same context,
'in substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract,
and a law which simply enforces the performance of such
contracts, an artificial construction of contracts such as
would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them
by an arbitrary law'.
All this is well illustrated by the historical occasion when the
expression 'legal tender' became widely known and treated as
a definition of money. In the notorious 'legal tender cases',
fought before the Supreme Court of the United States after
the Civil War, the issue was whether creditors must accept
at par current dollars in settlement of their claims for money
they had lent when the dollar had a much higher value.
same problem arose even more acutely at the end of the great
European inflations after the First World War when, even in
the extreme case of the German Mark) the principle 'Mark is
Mark' was enforced until the end-although later some
efforts were made to offer limited compensation to the worst
Taxes and contracts
A government must of course be ,free to determine in what
currency taxes are to be paid and to make contracts in any
currency it chooses (in this way it can support a currency it
issues or wants to favour), but there is no reason why it should
not accept other units of accounting as the basis of the assess-
ment of taxes. In non-contractual payments such as damages
or compensations for torts, the courts would have to decide
the currency in which they have to be paid, and might for
this purpose have to develop new rules; but there should be
no need for special legislation.
1 Cf. Nussbaum [50], pp. 586-592.
fa In Austria after 1922 the name 'Schumpeter' had become almost a curse word
among ordinary people, referring to the principle that 'Krone is Krone', because
the economist]. A. Schumpeter, during his short tenure as Minister of Finance,
had put his name to an order ofcouncil, merely spelling out what was undoubtedly
valid law, namely that debts incurred in crowns when they had a higher value
could be repaid in depreciated crowns, ultimately worth only a 15,000th part
of their original value.
There is a real difficulty if a government-issued currency is
replaced by another because the government has disappeared
as a result of conquest, revolution, or the break-up of a nation.
In that event the government taking over will usually make
legal provisions about the treatment of private contracts
expressed in terms of the vanished currency. If a private
issuing bank ceased to operate and was unable to redeem its
issue, this currency would presumably become valueless and
the holders would have no enforceable claim for compensation.
But the courts may decide that in such a case contracts
between third parties in terms ofthat currency, concluded when
there was reason to expect it to be stable, would have to be
fulfilled in some other currency that came to the nearest
presumed intention of the parties to the contract.
It is a misunderstanding of what is called Gresham's law
to believe that the tendency for bad money to drive out
good money makes a government monopoly necessary. The
distinguished economist W. S. Jevons emphatically stated the
law in the form that better money cannot drive out worse
precisely to prove this. It is true he argued then against a
proposal of the philosopher Herbert Spencer to throw the
coinage of gold open to free competition, at a time when the
only different currencies contemplated were coins of gold and
silver. Perhaps Jevons, who had been led to economics by his
experience as assayer at a mint, even more than his con-
temporaries in general, did not seriously contemplate the
possibility of any other kind of currency. Nevertheless his
indignation about what he described as Spencer's proposal
'that, as we trust the grocer to furnish us with pounds of
tea, and the baker to send us loaves of bread, so we might
trust Heaton and Sons, or some of the other enterprising
firms of Birmingham, to supply us with sovereigns and
shillings at their own risk and profit',
1 W. S. Jevons [34], p. 64, as against Herbert Spencer [57].
led him to the categorical declaration that generally, in his
opinion, 'there is nothing less fit to be left to the action of
competition than money'.
It is perhaps characteristic that even Herbert Spencer had
contemplated no more than that private enterprise should be
allowed to produce the same sort of money as government then
did, namely gold and silver coins. He appears to have thought
them the only kind of money that could reasonably be con-
templated, and in consequence that there would necessarily be
fixed rates of exchange (namely of I: I if of the same weight
and fineness) between the government and private money. In
that event, indeed, Gresham's law would operate if any
producer supplied shoddier ware. That this was in Jevons's
mind is clear because he justified his condemnation of the
proposal on the ground that
'while in all other matters everybody is led by self-interest
to choose the better and rej ect the worse; but in the case of
money, it would seem as if they paradoxically retain the
worse and get rid of the better'.
What J evons, as so many others, seems to have overlooked,
or regarded as irrelevant, is that Gresham's law will apply only
to different kinds of money between which a fixed rate of
exchange is enforced by Law.
If the law makes two kinds of
money perfect substitutes for the payment of debts and forces
creditors to accept a coin of a smaller content of gold in
the place of one with a larger content, debtors wi]], of course,
1 ]evons, ibid., p. 65. An earlier characteristic attempt to justify making banking
and note issue an exception from a general advocacy of free competition is
to be found in 1837 in the writings of S.]. Loyd (later Lord Overstone) [38],
pA9: 'The ordinary advantages to the community arising from competition
are that it tends to excite the ingenuity and exertion of the producers, and thus
to secure to the public the best supply and quantity of the commodity at the
lowest price, while all the evils arising from errors or miscalculations on the
part of the producers will fall on themselves, and not on the public. With respect
to a paper currency, however, the interest of the public is of a very different
kind; a steady and equable regulation of its amount by fixed law is the end to
be sought and the evil consequence of any error or miscalculation upon this
point falls in a much greater proportion upon the public than upon the issuer.'
It is obvious that Loyd thought only of the possibility of different agencies
issuing the same currency, not of currencies of different denominations competing
with one another.
2 ]evons, ibid., p. 82. jevons's phrase is rather unfortunately chosen, because in the
literal sense Gresham's law of course operates by people getting rid of the
worse and retaining the better for other purposes.
3 cr. Hayek [30] and Fetter [17a].
pay only in the former and find a more profitable use for the
substance of the latter.
With variable exchange rates, however, the inferior quality
money would be valued at a lower rate and, particularly if it
threatened to fall further in value, people would try to get rid
of it as quickly as possible. The selection process would go on
towards whatever they regarded as the best sort of money
among those issued by the various agencies, and it would
rapidly drive out money found inconvenient or worthless.
Indeed, whenever inflation got really rapid, all sorts of objects
of a more stable value, from potatoes to cigarettes and bottles
of brandy to eggs and foreign currencies like dollar bills, have
come to be increasingly used as money, 2 so that at the end of the
great German inflation it was contended that Gresham's law
was false and the opposite true. It is not false, but it applies
only if a fixed rate of exchange between the different forms of
money is enforced.
So long as coins of the precious metals were the only practicable
and generally acceptable kinds of money, with all close
substitutes at least redeemable in them (copper having been
reduced comparatively early to subsidiary token money), the
only different kinds of money which appeared side by side were
coins of gold and silver.
The multiplicity of coins with which the old money-changers
had to deal consisted ultimately only of these two kinds,
and their respective value within each group was determined
by their content of either metal (which the expert but not the
layman could ascertain). Most princes had tried to establish
a fixed legal rate of exchange between gold and silver coins,
1 If, as he is sometimes quoted, Gresham maintained that better money quite
generally could not drive out worse, he was simply wrong, until we add his
probably tacit presumption that a fixed rate of exchange was enforced.
2 Cf. Bresciani-Turroni [7], p. 174: 'In monetary conditions characterised by a
great distrust in the national currency, the principle of Gresham's law is reversed
and good money drives out bad, and the value of the latter continually depreciates.'
But even he does not point out that the critical difference is not the 'great distrust'
but the presence or absence of effectively enforced fixed rates of exchange.
thereby creating. what came to be called a bimetallic system.
But since, in spite of very early suggestions that this rate be
fixed by an international treaty,
governments established
different exchange rates, each country tended to lose all the
coins of the metal it under-valued relatively to the rates pre-
vailing in other countries. The system was for that reason
more correctly described as an alternative standard, the
value of a currency depending on the metal which for the
time being was over-valued. Shortly before it was finally
abandoned in the second half of the 19th century, a last effort
was made to establish internationally a uniformrate ofexchange
of 1St between gold and silver. That attempt might have
succeeded so long as there· were no big changes in production.
The comparatively large share of the total stocks of either
metal that were in monetary use meant that, by an inflow or
outflow into or from that use, their relative values could
probably have been adjusted to the rate at which they were
legally exchangeable as money.
Parallel currencies
In some countries, however, gold and silver had also been
current for long periods side by side, their relative value
fluctuating with changing conditions. This situation prevailed,
for example, in England from 1663 to 169S when, at last, by
decreeing a rate of exchange between gold and silver coins at
which gold was over-valued, England inadvertently estab-
lished a gold standard.
The simultaneous circulation of coins
of the two metals without a fixed rate of exchange between
them was later called, by a scholar from Hanover where such
a systemexisted until 1857, parallel currencies (Parallelwiihrung),
to distinguish it from bimetallism.
This is the only form in which parallel currencies were ever
widely used, but it proved singularly inconvenient for a special
reason. Since for most of the time gold was by weight more
than IS times as valuable as silver, it was evidently necessary
to use the former for large and silver for the smaller (and
copper for the still smaller) units. But, with variable values for
the different kinds of coins, the smaller units were not constant
1 In 1582 by G. Scaruffi [57].
2 A. E. Feaveryear [16], p. 142.
8 H. Grote [23].
fractions of the larger ones. In other words, the gold and the
silver coins were parts of different systems without smaller or
larger coins respectively of the same system being available.!
This made any change from large to small units a problem,
and nobody was able, even for his own purposes, to stick to
one unit of account.
Except for a few instances in the Far East in recent times,2
there seem to have been very few instances of concurrent
circulation of currencies, and the memory of the parallel
circulation ofgold and silver coins has given the system rather a
bad name. It is still interesting because it is the only important
historical instance in which some of the problems arose that
are generally raised by concurrent currencies. Not the least of
them is that the concept of the quantity of money of a country
or territory has strictly no meaning in such a system, since we
can add the quantities of the different monies in circulation
only after we know the relative value of the different units.
Trade coins
Nor are the somewhat different but more complex instances
of the use of various trade coins
of much more help: the
Maria Theresa Thaler in the regions around the Red Sea and
the Mexican Dollar in the Far East, or the simultaneous
circulation of two or more national currencies in some frontier
districts or tourist centres. Indeed, our experience is so limited
that we can do no better than fall back upon the usual pro-
cedure of classical economic theory and try to put together,
from what we know from our common experience of the
conduct of men in relevant situations, a sort of mental model
(or thought experiment) of what is likely to happen if many
men are exposed to new alternatives.
1 For a time during the Middle Ages gold coins issued by the great commercial
republics of Italy were used extensively in international trade and maintained
over fairly long periods at a constant gold content, while at the same time the
petty coins, mostly of silver, used in local retail trade suffered the regular fate
of progressive debasement. (Cipolla [11], pp. 34 ff.)
2 G. Tullock [58] and [59]; compare B. Klein [35].
3 Aconvenient summary of information on trade coins is in Nussbaum [50], p. 315.
I shall assume for the rest ofthis discussion that it will be possible
to establish a number of institutions in various parts of the
worldwhich are free to issue notes incompetition and similarlyto
carry cheque accounts in their individual denominations. I shall
call these institutions simply 'banks', or 'issue banks' when
necessary to distinguish them from other banks that do not
choose to issue notes. I shall further assume that the name or de-
nomination a bank chooses for its issue will be protected like a
brand name or trade mark against unauthorised use, and that
there will be the same protection against forgery as against that
of any other document. These banks will then be vying for the
use of their issue by the public by making them as convenient
to use as possible.
The private Swiss 'ducat'
Since readers will probably at once ask how such issues can
come to be generally accepted as money, the best way to
begin is probably to describe how I would proceed if I were in
charge of, say, one of the major Swiss joint stock banks. Assum-
ing it to be legally possible (which I have not examined), I
''''ould announce the issue of non-interest bearing certificates
or notes, and the readiness to open current cheque accounts,
in terms of a unit with a distinct registered trade name such as
'ducat'. The only legal obligation I would assume would be to
redeem these notes and deposits on demand with, at the
option of the holder, either 5 Swiss francs or 5 D-marks or 2
dollars per ducat. This redemption value would however be
intended only as a floor belo\tv which the value of the unit
could not fall because I would announce at the same time my
intention to regulate the quantity of the ducats so as to keep
their (precisely defined) purchasing power as nearly as possible
constant. I would also explain to the public that I was fully
aware I could hope to keep these ducats in circulation only if
I fulfilled the expectation that their real value would be kept
approximately constant. And I would announce that I pro-
posed from time to time to state the precise commodity equiv-
alent in terms of which I intended to keep the value of the
ducat constant, but that I reserved the right, after announce-
ment, to alter the composition of the commodity standard as
experience and the revealed preferences of the public suggested.
I t would, however, clearly be necessary that, though it seems
neither necessary nor desirable that the issuing bank legally
commits itself to maintain the value of its unit, it should in its
loan contracts specify that any loan could be repaid either at
the nominal figure in its own currency, or by corresponding
amounts of any other currency or currencies sufficient to buy
in the market the commodity equivalent which at the time of
making the loan it had used as its standard. Since the bank
would have to issue its currency largely through lending,
intending borrowers might well be deterred by the formal
possibility of the bank arbitrarily raising the value of its
currency, that they may well have to be explicitly reassured
against such a possibility. **1
These certificates or notes, and the equivalent book credits,
would be made available to the public by short-term loans or
sale against other currencies.. The units would presumably,
because of the option they offered, sell from the outset at a
premium above the value of anyone of the currencies in which
they were redeemable. And, as these governmental currencies
continued to depreciate in real terms, this premium would in-
crease. The real value at the price at which the ducats were
first sold would serve as the standard the issuer would have
to try to keep constant. If the existing currencies continued
to depreciate (and the availability of a stable alternative might
indeed accelerate the process) the demand for the stable
currency would rapidly increase and competing enterprises
offering similar but differently-named units would soon emerge.
The sale (over the counter or by auction) would initially be
the chief form of issue of the new currency. After a regular
market had established itself, it would normally be issued only
in the course of ordinary banking business, i.e. through short-
term loans.
Constant but not fixed value
It might be expedient that the issuing institution should from
the outset announce precisely the collection of commodities
in terms of which it would aim to keep the value of the 'ducat'
1 [To assist readers of the First Edition to identify major additions, we have inserted
a single asterisk at the beginning and double asterisks at the end of substantial,
self-contained new passages. - ED.]
constant. But it would be neither necessary nor desirable that it
tie itself legally to a particular standard. Experience of the re-
sponse of the public to competing offers \vould gradually show
which combination ofcommodities constituted the most desired
standard at any time and place. Changes in the importance
of the commodities, the volume in which they were traded,
and the relative stability or sensitivity of their prices (especially
the degree to which they were determined competitively or not)
might suggest alterations to make the currency more popular.
On the whole I would expect that, for reasons to be explained
later (Section XIII), a collection of raw material prices, such
as has been suggested as the basis of a commodity reserve
would seem most appropriate, both from the point
of view of the issuing bank and from that of the effects of the
stability of the economic process as a whole.
Control of value by competition
In most respects, indeed, the proposed system should prove a
more practicable method of achieving all that was hoped from
a commodity reserve standard or some other form of 'tabular
standard.' At the same time it would remove the necessity of
making it fully automatic by taking the control from a monopol-
istic authority and entrusting it to private concerns. The threat
of the speedy loss of their whole business if they failed to meet
expectations (and how any government organisation would be
certain to abuse the opportunity to play with raw material
prices!) would provide a much stronger safeguard than any
that could be devised against a government monopoly. Com-
petition would certainly prove a more effective constraint,
forcing the issuing institutions to keep the value of their cur-
rency constant (in terms of a stated collection of commodities),
than would any obligation to redeem the currency in those
commodities (or in gold). And it would be an infinitely cheaper
method than the accumulation and the storing of valuable
The kind of trust on which private money would rest would
not be very different from the trust on which today all private
banking rests (or in the United States rested before the govern-
mental deposit insurance scheme!). People today trust that a
bank, to preserve its business, will arrange its affairs so that it
1 cr. Hayek [30], pp. 318-320.
will at all times be able to exchange demand deposits for cash,
although they know that banks do not have enough cash to
do so if everyone exercised his right to demand instant payment
at the same time. Similarly, under the proposed scheme, the
managers of the bank would learn that its business depended
on the unshaken confidence that it would continue to regulate
its issue of ducats (etc.) so that their purchasing power re-
mained approximately constant.
Is the risk in the venture therefore too big to justify entry
by men with the kind of conservative temper its successful
conduct probably requires?! It is not to be denied that, once
announced and undertaken, the decision on how large the
commitment was to grow would be taken out of the hands of
the issuing institution. To achieve its announced aim of
maintaining the purchasing power of its currency constant,
the amount would have to be promptly adapted to any change
of demand, whether increase or decrease. Indeed, so long as
the bank succeeded in keeping the value of its currency
constant, there would be little reason to fear a sudden large
reduction of the demand for it (though successful competitors
might well make considerable inroads on its circulation). The
most embarrassing development might be a rapid growth of
demand beyond the limits a private institution likes to handle.
But we can be fairly sure that, in the event ofsuch success, new
competition would soon relieve a bank of this anxiety.
The issuing bank could, at first, at no prohibitive cost
keep in cash a 100 per cent reserve of the currencies in terms
of which it had undertaken to redeem its issue and still treat
the premiums received as freely available for general business.
But once these other currencies had, as the result of further
IOn the question of its attractiveness the discussion by S. Fischer [18] of the
notorious reluctance of enterprise to issue indexed bonds is somewhat relevant.
It is true that a gradual increase of the value of the notes issued by a bank in terms
of other concurrent currencies might produce a situation in which the aggregate
value of its outstanding notes (Plus its liabilities from other sources) would exceed
its assets. The bank would of course not be legally liable to redeem its notes at this
value, but it could preserve this business only if it did in fact promptly buy at the
current rateany of its notes offered to it. So long as it succeeded in maintainingthe
real value of its notes, it would never be called upon to buy back more than a
fraction of the outstanding circulation. Probably no one would doubt that an art
dealer who owns the plates of the engravings of a famous artist could, so long as
his works remained in fashion, maintain the market value of these engravings by
judiciously selling and buying, even though he could never buy up all the existing
prints. Similarly, a bank could certainly maintain the value of its notes even
though it could never buy back all the outstanding ones.
inflation, substantially depreciated relative to the ducat, the
bank would have to be prepared, in order to maintain the value
of the ducat, to buy back substantial amounts of ducats at the
prevailing higher rate of exchange. This means that it would
have to be able rapidly to liquidate investments of very large
amounts indeed. These investments would therefore have to be
chosen very carefully if a temporary rush of demand for its
currency were not to lead to later embarrassment when the
institution that had initiated the development had to share the
market with imitators. Incidentally, the difficulty of finding
investments of an assured stable value to match similar obliga-
tions would not be anything like as difficult for such a bank as
we are considering as present-day bankers seem to find it: all
the loans made in its own currency would of course represent
such stable assets. The curious fact that such an issuing bank
would have claims and obligations in terms of a unit the
value of which it determined itself, though it could not do so
arbitrarily or capriciously without destroying the basis of
its business, may at first appear disturbing but should not
create real difficulties. What nlay at first appear somewhat
puzzling accounting problems largely disappear when it is
remembered that such a bank would of course keep its accounts
in terms of its own currency. The outstanding notes and
deposits of such a bank are not claims on it in terms of some
other unit of value; it determines itself the value of the unit
in terms of which it has debts and claims and keeps its books.
This will cease to seem shocking when we remember that this
is precisely what practically all central banks have been doing
for nearly half a century-their notes were of course redeemable
in precisely nothing. But notes which may appreciate relatively
to most other capital assets may indeed present to accountants
problems with which they never before had to deal. Initially
the issuing bank would of course be under a legal obligation
to redeem its currency in terms of the other currencies against
which it was at first issued. But after it has existed for some
time their value may have shrunk to very little or they may
have altogether disappeared.!
1 A real difficulty could arise if a sudden large increase in the demand for such a
stable currency, perhaps due to some acute economic crisis, had to be met by
selling large amounts of it against other currencies. The bank would of course
have to prevent such a rise in the value and could do so only by increasing its
supply. But selling against other currencies would give it assets likely to depreciate
[Contd. on page 51]
It has for so long been treated as a self-evident proposition that
the supply of money cannot be left to competition that probably
few people could explain \vhy. As we have seen, the explanation
appears to be that it has always been assumed that there must
be only one uniform kind of currency in a country, and that
competition meant that its amount was to be determined by
several agencies issuing it independently. It is, however, clearly
not practicable to allow tokens with the same name and readily
exchangeable against each other to be issued competitively,
since nobody would be in a position to control their quantity
and therefore be responsible for their value. The question we
have to consider is whether competition between the issuers
of clearly distinguishable kinds of currency consisting of
different units would not give us a better kind of money than we
have ever had, far outweighing the inconvenience of encounter-
ing (but for most people not even having to handle) more than
one kind.
In this condition the value of the currency issued by one
bank would not necessarily be affected by the supplies of other
currencies by different institutions (private or governmental).
And it should be in the power of each issuer of a distinct
currency to regulate its quantity so as to make it most accept-
able to the public-and competition would force him to do so.
Indeed, he would know that the penalty for failing to fulfil the
expectations raised would be the prompt loss of the business.
Successful entry into it would evidently be a very profitable
venture, and success would depend on establishing the credi-
bility and trust that the bank was able and determined to carry
out its declared intentions. It would seem that in this situation
sheer desire for gain would produce a better money than
government has ever produced.!
[Contd. from page 50]
in terms ofits own currency. It probably could not increase its short-term lending
very rapidly, even ifit offered to lend at a very low rate of interest-even though
in such a situation it would be safer to lend eyen at a small negative rate of
interest than to sell against other currencies. And it would probably be possible
to grant long-term loans at very low rates of interest against negotiable securities
(in terms of its own currency) which it should be easy to sell if the sudden
increase of demand for its currency should be as rapidly reversed.
1 Apart from notes and cheque deposits in its distinctive currency, an issuing bank
would clearly also have to provide fractional coins; and the availability of
Effects of competition
I t seems to me to be fairly certain that
(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approxi-
mately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people
were free to use it,-
(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping
the value of the currency constant one could trust the issuing hanks to
make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist
who runs no risk by depreciating his money,-
(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the
quantity of its issue,. and
(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute
the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media
of exchange for all possible purposes.
Clearly a number of competing issuers of different currencies
would have to compete in the quality of the currencies they
offered for loan or sale. Once the competing issuers had
credibly demonstrated that they provided currencies more
suitable to the needs of the public than government has ever
provided, there would be no obstacle to their becoming
generally accepted in preference to the governmental cur-
lContd. from page 57]
convenient fractional coins in that currency might well be an important factor
in making it popular. It would also probably be the habitual use of one sort of
fractional coins (especially in slot machines, fares, tips, etc.) which would
secure the predominance of one currency in the retail trade of one locality.
The effective competition between different currencies would probably be
largely confined to inter-business use, with retail trade following the decisions
about the currency in which wages and salaries were to be paid.
Certain special problems would arise where present sales practices are based
on the general use of uniform coins of a few relatively small standard units, as,
e.g., in vending machines, transportation or telephones. Probably even in
localities in which several different currencies were in general use, one set of
small coins would come to dominate. If, as seems probable, most of these com-
peting currencies were kept at practically the same value, the technical problem
of the use of coins might be solved in anyone of various ways. One might be
that one institution, e.g. an association of retailers, specialised in the issue of
uniform coins at slightly fluctuating market prices. Tradesmen and transport
and communication undertakings of a locality might join to sell, at market
prices and probably through the hanks, a common set of tokens for all· automats
in the locality. We can certainly expect commercial inventiveness rapidly to
solve such minor difficulties. Another possible development would be the
replacement of the present coins by plastic or similar tokens with electronic
markings which every cash register and slot machine would be able to sort out,
and the 'signature' of which would be legally protected against forKery as any
other document of value.
rencies-at least in countries in which government had
removed all obstacles to their use. The appearance and
increasing use of the new currencies would, of course, decrease
the demand for the existing national ones and, unless their
volume was rapidly reduced, would lead to their depreciation.
This is the process by which the unreliable currencies would
gradually all be eliminated. The condition required in order
that this displacement of the government money should
terminate before it had entirely disappeared would be that
government reformed and saw to it that the issue ofits currency
was regulated on the same principles as those of the competing
private institutions. It is not very likely that it would succeed,
because to prevent an accelerating depreciation of its currency
it would have to respond to the new currencies by a rapid
contraction of its own issue.
'A thousand hounds' : the vigilant press
The competition between the issuing banks would be made
very acute by the close scrutiny of their conduct by the press
and at the currency exchange. For a decision so important for
business as which currency to use in contracts and accounts,
all possible information would be supplied daily in the financial
press, and have to be provided by the issuing banks themselves
for the information of the public. Indeed, a thousand hounds
would be after the unfortunate banker who failed in the prompt
responses required to ensure the safeguarding of the value of
the currency he issues. The papers would probably print a
Ducats (8GB)
Florins (FNB)
Mengers (WK)
Piasters (DBS)
Reals (CNB)
Shekels (ORT)
Talents (ATBC)
Deviation from
Announced Our Test
Standard Standard
-0·04 -0·04
+0·02 +0·03
+0·10 +0·10
-0·06 -0·12
-1·02 -1·01
table daily, not only of the current rates of exchange between
the currencies but also of the current value, and the deviation
of each of the currencies likely to be used by their readers
from the announced standard of value in terms of commodities.
These tables might look something like Table I (with the
initials of the issuing institution given after the name of the
currency it issues).
Nothing would be more feared by the bankers than to see the
quotation of their currency in heavy type to indicate that the
real value had fallen below the standard of tolerance set by
the paper publishing the table.
Three questions
This sketch of the competition between several private issuing
institutions presupposes answers to a number of questions we
shall have to examine in more detail in succeeding sections.
-The first is whether a competing institution issuing its
distinctive currency will always be able to regulate its value
by controlling its quantity so as to make it more attractive to
people than other currencies, and how far other issuers of
currencies can by their policy interfere with these efforts.
-The second is which value (or other attribute of a currency)
the public will prefer if different banks announce that it is their
intention (and demonstrate their ability) to keep announced
values of their currency constant.
-A third and no less important question is whether the kind
of money most people will individually prefer to use will also
best serve the aims of all. Though one might at first think that
this must necessarily be so, it is not inevitably true. It is
conceivable that the success of people's efforts will depend not
only on the money they themselves use but also on the effects
of the money others use, and the benefits they derive for them-
selves from using a particular kind of money may conceivably
be more than offset by the disturbances caused by its general
use. I do not believe this to be the case in the present instance,
but the question certainly requires explicit consideration.
Before we can discuss further the interaction between
currencies it will be expedient to devote a section to precisely
what we mean by money or currency and its different kinds,
and the various ways in which they may differ from one
x. A DIGRESSION ON THE DEFINITION OF MONEY
Money is usually defined as the generally acceptable medium of
exchange,l but there is no reason why within a given community
there should be only one kind of money that is generally
(or at least widely) accepted. In the Austrian border town in
which I have been living for the past few years, shopkeepers
and most other business people will usually accept D-Marks
as readily as Austrian schillings, and only the law prevents
German banks in Salzburg from doing their business in
D-Marks in the same manner as they do 10 miles away on the
German side of the border. The same is true of hundreds of
other tourist centres in Austria frequented mainly by Germans.
In most of them dollars will also be accepted nearly as readily as
D-Marks. I believe the situation is not very different on both
sides of long stretches of the border between the United States
and Canada or Mexico, and probably along many other
But though in such regions everybody may be ready to
accept several currencies at the current rate of exchange,
individuals may use different kinds of money to hold (as
liquidity reserves), to make contracts for deferred payments,
or to keep their accounts in, and the community may respond
in the same manner to changes in the amounts of the different
By referring to different kinds of money we have in lnind
units of different denomination whose relative values may
1 This definition was established by Carl Menger [43], whose work also ought
to have finally disposed of the medieval conception that money, or the value
of money, was a creation of the state. Vissering [61], p. 9, reports that in early
times the Chinese expressed their notions of money by a term meaning literally
'current merchandise'. The now more widely used expression that money is the
most liquid asset comes, of course (as Carlile [8] pointed out as early as 190I),
to the same thing. To serve as a widely accepted medium of exchange is the
only function which an object must perform to qualify as money, though a
generally accepted medium of exchange will generally acquire also the further
functions of unit of account, store of value, standard of deferred payment, etc.
The definition of money as 'means of payment' is, however, purely circular,
since this concept presupposed debts incurred in terms of money. Cf. L. v. Mises
[45], pp. 34 if.
The definition of money as the generally acceptable medium of exchange
does not, of course, necessarily mean that even within one national territory
there must be a single kind of money which is more acceptable than all others;
there may be several equally acceptable kinds of money (which we may more
conveniently call currencies), particularly if one kind can be quickly exchanged
into the others at a known, though not fixed, rate.
fluctuate against one another. These fluctuating values must
be emphasised because they are not the only way in which
media of exchange may differ from one another. They may
also, even when expressed in terms of the same unit, differ
widely in their degree of acceptability (or liquidity, i.e. in the
very quality which makes them money), or the groups of
people that readily accept them. This means that different kinds
of money can differ from one another in more than one
No clear distinction between money and non-money
I t also means that, although we usually assume there is a
sharp line of distinction between what is money and what is
not-and the law generally tries to make such a distinction-
so far as the causal effects of monetary events are concerned,
there is no such clear difference. What we find is rather a
continuum in which objects of various degrees of liquidity, or
with values which can fluctuate independently of each other,
shade into each other in the degree to which they function
as money.!
I have always found it useful to explain to students that it
has been rather a misfortune that we describe money by a
noun, and that it would be more helpful for the explanation
of monetary phenomena if 'money' were an adjective describing
a property which different things could possess to varying
'Currency' is, for this reason, more appropriate,
since objects can 'have currency' to varying degrees and through
different regions or sectors of the population.
Pseudo-exactness, statistical measurement, and scientific truth
Here we encounter a difficulty \ve frequently meet in our
efforts to explain the ill-defined phenomena of economic life.
In order to simplify our exposition of what are very complex
interconnections that otherwise would become difficult to
follow, we introduce sharp distinctions where in real life
different attributes of the objects shade into each other. A
similar situation arises where we try to draw sharp distinctions
between such objects as commodities and services, consumers'
1 Cf. J. R. Hicks [33].
3 Machlup for this reason speaks occasionally, e.g. [39], p. 225, of ,moneyness' and
'near..moneyness' .
goods and capital goods, durable and perishable, reproducible
and non-reproducible, specific and versatile, or substitutable
and non-substitutable goods. All are very important distinc-
tions but they can become very misleading if, in the popular
striving for pseudo-exactness, wetreat these classes as measurable
quantities. This involves a simplification which is perhaps
sometimes necessary but always dangerous and has led to many
errors in economics. Though the differences are significant,
this does not mean we can neatly and unambiguously divide
these things into two, or any other number of, distinct classes.
We often do, and perhaps often must talk as if this division
were true, but the usage can be very deceptive and produce
wholly erroneous conclusions.!
Legal fictions and defective economic theory
Similarly, the legal fiction that there is one cle'arly defined
thing called 'money' that can be sharply distinguished from
other things, a fiction introduced to satisfy the work of the
lawyer or judge, was never true so far as things are to be
referred to which have the characteristic effects of events on
the side of money. Yet it has done much harm through leading
to the demand that, for certain purposes, only 'money'issued
by government may be used, or that there must always be
some single kind of object which can be referred to as the
'money' of the country. It has also, as we shall see, led to the
development in economic theory of an explanation of the value
of units of money which, though under its simplified assump-
tions it gives some useful approximations, is of no help for the
kind of problems we have to examine here.
For what follows it will be important to keep in mind that
different kinds of money can differ from one another in two
distinct although not wholly unrelated dimensions: accept-
ability (or liquidity) and the expected behaviour (stability or
variability) of its value. The expectation of stability will evi-
1 I t is a practice particularly congenial to statisticians, the applicability of whose
techniques frequently depends on using it. Though the popular tendency in
economics to accept only statistically testable theories has given us some useful
gross approximations to the truth, such as the quantity theory of the value of
money, they have acquired a quite undeserved reputation. The idea discussed
in the text makes most quantitative formulations of economic theory inadequate
in practice. To introduce sharp distinctions which do not exist in the real world
in order to make a subject susceptible to mathematical treatment is not to make
it more scientific but rather less so.
dently affect the liquidity of a particular kind of money, but it
may be that in the short run liquidity may sometimes be more
important than stability, or that the acceptability of a more
stable money may for some reason be confined to rather limited
Meanings and definitions
This is perhaps the most convenient place to add explicit
statements concerning the meanings in which we shall use
other frequently recurring terms. It will have become clear
that in the present connection it is rather more expedient to
speak of 'currencies' than 'monies', not only because it is
easier to use the former term in the plural but also because,
as we have seen, 'currency' emphasises a certain attribute. We
shall also use 'currency', perhaps somewhat in conflict with
the original meaning of the term, to include not only pieces of
paper and other sorts of 'hand-to-hand money', but also bank
balances subject to cheque and other media of exchange that
can be used for most of the purposes for which cheques are
used. There is, however, as we have just pointed out, no need
for a very sharp distinction between what is and what is not
money. The reader will do best if he remains aware that we
have to deal with a range of objects of varying degrees of
acceptability which imperceptibly shade at the lower end into
objects that are clearly not money.
Although we shall frequently refer to the agencies issuing
currency simply as 'banks', this is not meant to imply that all
banks will be issuing money. The term 'rate of exchange' will
be used throughout for rates of exchange between currencies,
and the term 'currency exchange' (analogous to stock exchange)
for the organised currency market. Occasionally we shall also
speak of 'money substitutes' when we have to consider border-
line cases in the scale of liquidity-such as travellers' cheques,
credit cards, and overdrafts-where it would be quite arbitrary
to assert that they either are or are not part of the circulation
of currency.
VALUE OF A COMPETlTIVE CURRENCY
The chief attraction the issuer of a competitive currency has
to offer to his customers is the assurance that its value will be
kept stable (or otherwise be made to behave in a predictable
manner). We shall leave for Section XII the question of
precisely what kind of stability the public will probably prefer.
For the moment we shall concentrate on whether an issuing
bank in competition with other issuers of similar currencies will
have the power to control the quantity of its distinctive issue
so as to determine the value it will command in the market.
The expected value of a currency will, of course, not be the
only consideration that will lead the public to borrow or buy
it. But the expected value will be the decisive factor determining
how much of it the public will wish to hold, and the issuing
bank will soon discover that the desire of the public to hold its
currency will be the essential circumstance on which its value
depends. At first it might perhaps seem obvious that the ex-
clusive issuer of a currency, who as such has complete control
over its supply, will be able to determine its price so long as
there is anyone who wants it at that price. If, as we shall
provisionally assume, the aim of the issuing bank is to keep
constant the aggregate price in terms of its currency of a par-
ticular collection of commodities it would, by regulating the
amount of the currency in circulation, have to counteract
any tendency of that aggregate price to rise or fall.
Control by selling/buying currency and (short-term) lending
The issuing bank will have two methods of altering the volume
of its currency in circulation: it can sell or buy its currency
against other currencies (or securities and possibly some
commodities); and it can contract or expand its lending
activities. In order to retain control over its outstanding cir-
culation, it will on the whole have to confine its lending to
relatively short-time contracts so that, by reducing or tem-
porarily stopping new lending, current repayments of out-
standing loans would bring about a rapid reduction of its
total issue.
To assure the constancy of the value of its currency the main
would have to be never to increase it beyond the
total the public is prepared to hold without increasing expendi-
ture in it so as to drive up prices of commodities in terms of it;
it must also never reduce its supply below the total the public is
prepared to hold without reducing expenditure in it and driving
prices down. In practice, many or even most of the commodities
in terms of which the currency is to be kept stable would be
currently traded and quoted chiefly in terms of some other
competing currencies (especially if, as we suggest in Section
XIII, it will be mainly prices of raw materials or wholesale
prices of foodstuffs). The bank would therefore have to look to
the effect of changes in its circulation, not so much directly on
the prices of other commodities, but on the rates of exchange with
the currencies against which they are chiefly traded. Though the
task of ascertaining the appropriate rates of exchange (con-
sidering the given rates of exchange between the different cur-
rencies) would be complex, computers would help with almost
instantaneous calculation, so the bank would know hour by
hour whether to increase or decrease the amounts of its cur-
rency to be offered as loans or for sale. Quick and immediate
action would have to be taken by buying or selling on the
currency exchange, but a lasting effect would be achieved only
by altering the lending policy.
Current issuing policy
Perhaps I ought to spell out here in· more detail how an issuing
bank would have to proceed in order to keep the chosen value
of its currency constant. The basis of the daily decisions on its
lending policy (and its sales and purchases of currencies on the
currency exchange) would have to be the result of a constant
calculation provided by a computer into which the latest in-
formation about commodity prices and rates of exchange would
be constantly fed as it arrived. The character of this calculation
can be illustrated by the following abridged table (Table II).
(I am neglecting here the question howfar the costs of transport
from the chief market to some common centre, or perhaps
separate items representing the costs of different forms of
transport, should be considered or not.)
The essential information would be the guide number at the
lower right-hand corner, resulting either from the quantities of
the different commodities being so chosen that at the base
date their aggregate price in Ducats was 1,000, or 1,000 was
used as the base of an index number. This figure and its
current changes would serve as a signal telling all executive
officers of the bank what to do. A 1,002 appearing on the
Commodity Quantity
Aluminium x tons
Currency in Price in
which quoted that curreniy
Rate of
Price in own
Total 1,000
screen would tell them to contract or tighten controls, i.e.
restrict loans by making them dearer or being more selective,
and selling other currencies more freely; 997 would tell
them that they could slightly relax and expand. (A special
write-out of the computer in the chairman's office would
currently inform him which of his officers did promptly
respond to these instructions.) The effect of this contraction
or expansion on commodity prices would be chiefly indirect
through the rates of exchange with the currencies in which
these commodities were chiefly traded, and direct only with
regard to commodities traded chiefly in ducats.
The same signal would appear on the currency exchange and,
if the bank was known for taking prompt and effective measures
to correct any deviation, would lead to its efforts being assisted
by more of its currency being demanded when it was expected
to appreciate because its value was below normal (the guide
number showing 1,002), and less being demanded when it was
expected slightly to depreciate (because the guide number had
fallen to 997). It is difficult to see how such a policy consistently
pursued would not result in the fluctuations of the value of the
currency around the chosen commodity standard being reduced
to a very small range indeed.
The crucial factor: demand for currency to hold
But, whether directly or indirectly via the price of other cur-
rencies, it would seem clear that, if an institution acts in the
knowledge that the public preparedness to hold its currency,
and therefore its business, depends on maintaining the currency
value, it will be both able and compelled to assure this result
by appropriate continuous adjustments of the quantity in
circulation. The crucial point it must keep in mind will be
that, to keep a large and growing amount of its currency
in circulation, it will be not the demand for borrowing it but the
willingness of the public to hold it that will be decisive. An
incautious increase of the· current issue may therefore make
the flow back to the bank grow faster than the public demand
to hold it.
The press, as pointed out, would closely watch the results
of the efforts of each issuing bank and daily quote how much the
various currencies deviate from the self-set standards. From the
point ofview of the issuing banks it would probably be desirable
to allow a small, previously-announced, tolerance or standard
of deviation in either direction. For in that event, and so long
as a bank demonstrated its power and resolution to bring rates
of exchange (or commodity prices in terms of its currency)
promptly back to its standard, speculation would come to its
aid and relieve it of the necessity to take precipitate steps to
assure absolute stability.
So long as the bank had succeeded in keeping the value of
its currency at the desired level, it is difficult to see that it
should for this purpose have to contract its circulation so
rapidly as to be embarrassed. The usual cause of such develop-
ments in the past was circumstances which increased the
demand for liquid 'cash', but the bank would have to reduce
the aggregate alTIOunt outstanding only to adjust it to a
shrunken total demand for both forms of its currency. If it had
lent mainly on short term, the normal repayment of loans would
have brought this result fairly rapidly. The whole matter
appears to be very simple and straightforward so long as we as-
sume that all the competing banks try to control their currencies
\vith the aim of keeping their values in some sense constant.
Would cornpetition disrupt the system?
What, however, would be the consequences if one competitor
attempted to gain in this competition by offering other ad-
vantages such as a low rate of interest, or if it granted book
credits or perhaps even issued notes (in other words, incurred
debts payable on demand) in terms of the currency issued by
another bank? Would either practice seriously interfere with
the control the issuing banks can exercise over the value of
their currencies?
There will of course always be a strong temptation for any
bank to try and expand the circulation of its currency by
lending cheaper than competing banks; but it would soon
discover that, insofar as the additional lending is not based on
a corresponding increase of saving, such attempts would
inevitably rebound and hurt the bank that over-issued. While
people will no doubt be very eager to borrow a currency
offered at a lower rate of interest, they will not want to hold a
larger proportion of their liquid assets in a currency of the
increased issue of which they would soon learn from various
reports and symptoms.
It is true that, so long as the currencies are almost instan-
taneously exchangeable against one another at a known rate
of exchange, the relative prices of commodities in terms of
them will also remain the same. Even on the commodity
markets the prices of those commodities (or, in regions where
a high proportion of the demand is expressed in terms of the
increased currency, prices in terms of all currencies) will tend
to rise compared with other prices. But the decisive events
will take place on the currency exchange. At the prevailing
rate of exchange the currency that has increased in supply
will constitute a larger proportion of the total of all currencies
than people have habitually held. Above all, everybody
indebted in the currencies for \vhich a higher rate of interest
has to be paid will try to borrow cheap in order to acquire
currencies in which he can repay the more burdensome loans.
And all the banks that have not reduced their lending rate
,vill promptly return to the bank that lends more cheaply all
of its currency they receive. The result must be the appear-
ance on the currency exchange of an excess supply of the over-
issued currency, which will quickly bring about a fall in the
rate at which it can be exchanged into the others. And it will
be at this new rate that commodity prices normally quoted in
other currencies will be translated into the offending currency;
while, as a result of its over-issue, prices normally quoted in it
will be immediately driven up. The fall in the Inarket quotation
and the rise of commodity prices in terms of the offending
currency would soon induce habitual holders to shift to
another currency. The consequent reduction in the demand for
it would probably soon more than offset the temporary gain
obtained by lending it more cheaply. If the issuing bank
nevertheless pursued cheap lending, a general flight from
the currency would set in; and continued cheap lending would
mean that larger and larger amounts would be dumped on the
currency exchange. We can confidently conclude that it
would not be possible for a bank to pull down the real value
of other currencies by over-issue of its currency-certainly
not if their issuers are prepared, so far as necessary, to counter
such an attempt by temporarily curtailing their issues.
Would parasitic currencies prevent control of currency value?
A more difficult question, the answer to which is perhaps not
so clear, is how far the unavoidable appearance of what one
may call parasitic currencies, Le. the pyramiding of a super-
structure of circulating credit through other banks carrying
cheque accounts and perhaps even issuing notes in the
denomination of the currency of the original issuer, would
interfere with the issuer's control over the value of his own
currency. So long as such parasitic issues were clearly labelled
as debts to be paid in the currency of the issuer it is difficult to
see how this could be or should be prevented by law.
Clearly not all banks would wish to issue, or probably could
issue, a currency of their own. Those that did not would have
no choice but to accept deposits and grant credits in terms of
some other currency, and would prefer to do so in the best
currency available. Nor would the original issuer wish
altogether to prevent this, although he might dislike the issue
of notes more than the mere running of accounts subject to
cheque in terms of his currency. Notes issued by a secondary
issuer would, of course, have to show clearly that they were not
the original ducats issued by the bank that owned that trade
mark, but merely claims for ducats, since otherwise they would
simply be a forgery. Yet I do not see how the ordinary legal
protection of brand names or trade marks could prevent the
issue of such claims in the form of notes, and very much doubt
whether it would be desirable to prevent it by law, especially in
view of the essential similarity between such notes and deposits
subject to cheque which .even the issuing banks would hardly
wish to prevent.
What the original issuer of"such a currency could do and
would have to do is not to repeat the mistakes governments
have made; as "a. result of which control of these secondary or
parasitic issues has slipped from their hands. It must make
clear that it would not be prepared to bail out secondary issuers
by supplying the 'cash' (i.e. the original notes) they will need
to redeem their obligations. We shall see later (Section XVI)
how governments were led into this trap .and allowed their
monopoly of the issue of money to be watered down in the
most undesirable manner. .(They shared the responsibility
for· control of the total amount of the standard denomination,
yielding to the constant pressure for cheap money that was
supposed to be met by the rapid spread of banks which they
assisted by securing their liquidity; and in the end nobody had
full power over the total quantity of money.)
The answer to the most serious problem arising from the
scheme seems to me that, though private issuers will have to
tolerate the appearance of parasitic circulations of deposits
and notes of the same denomination, they ought not to assist
but rather restrain it by making it clear .in advance that they
would not be prepared to provide the notes needed to redeem
parasitic issues except against 'hard cash', i.e. by sale against
some other reliable currency. By adhering strictly to this
principle they would force the secondary issuer to practise
something very close to '100 per cent banking'. So far as there
would still be limited fiduciary parasitic issues they would have
to be kept in circulation by a policy which assured that their
value was never questioned. Though this policy might limit
the circulation and thus the profit of the original issuer, it
should not seriously impair his ability to keep the value of his
currency constant.
To achieve this the original issuer of a currency with a certain
label would have to anticipate the effects of the over-issue of
such a parasitic currency (or any other currency claiming to
maintain a value equal to its own) and ruthlessly to refuse to
buy it at par even before the expected depreciation manifests
itself in the rise of some commodity prices in terms of that other
currency. The dealings of an issue bank in other currencies
would therefore never be a purely mechanical affair (buying
and selling at constant prices) guided only by the observed
changes in the purchasing power of the other currencies; nor
could such a bank undertake to buy any other currency at a
rate corresponding to its current buying power over the stan-
dard batch of commodities; but it would require a good deal of
judgement effectively to defend the short-run stability of one's
own currency, and the business will have to be guided in some
measure by prediction of the future development of the value
of other currencies.
Since it is my thesis that the public would select from a number
of competing private currencies a better money than govern-
ments provide, I must now examine the process and the
criteria by which such a selection would take place.
This is a question on which we have little empirical know-
ledge. It would be of little use to try asking the people (perhaps
by an opinion poll). Never having been in such a position,
most people have never thought or formed an opinion about
what they would do. We can merely attempt to derive the
probable character of individual decisions from our general
knowledge of the purpose for which people want money, and
the manner in which they act in similar situations. This is,
after all, the procedure by which most of economic theory has
been built up and has arrived at conclusions usually confirmed
by later experience. We must not,. of course, assume that
people will at once act rationally in a new situation. But, if
not by insight, they would soon learn by experience and
imitation of the most successful what conduct best serves
their interests.! A major change like the one considered here
might at first cause much uncertainty and confusion. Yet I
do not think there is much reason to doubt that people would
1 Cf. C. Menger [43], p. 261: 'There is no better way in which men can become
more enlightened about their economic interests than by observation of the
economic success of those who employ the correct means of achieving their
soon discover what rational consideration could have told
them at once. Whether in practice the process would be fast
or slow may differ from country to country.
Four uses of money
There are four kinds of uses of ~ o n e y that would chiefly affect
the .choice among available kinds of currency: its use,· first,
for cash purchases of commodities and services, second, for
holding reserves for future needs, third, in contracts for
deferred payments, and, finally, as a unit of account, especially
in keeping books. To treat these uses as different 'functions' of
money is common but not really expedient. They are in effect
simply consequences of the basic function of money as a
medium of exchange, and will only in exceptional conditions,
such as a rapid depreciation of the medium of exchange, come
to be· separated from it. They are also interdependent in such
a way that, although at first different attributes of money
may seem desirable for its different. uses, money renders one
service, namely that as a unit of account, which makes stability
of value the most desirable of all. Although at first convenience
in daily purchases might be thought decisive in the selection,
I believe it would prove that suitability as a unit of account
would rule the roost.
(i) Cash purchases
To the great mass of wage- and salary-earners the chief
interest will probably be that they can make their daily pur-
chases in the currency in which they are paid, and that they
find prices everywhere indicated in the currency they use.
Shopkeepers, on the other hand, so long as they know they
can instantaneously exchange any currency at a known rate
of exchange against any other, would be only too willing to
accept any currency at an appropriate price. Electronic cash
registers would probably be developed rapidly, not only to
show instantaneously the equivalent of any price in any
1 We must not entirely overlook the possibility that the practices and expectations
of business men based on past experience, and particularly the experience of the
last fifty years or so, are so much adjusted to the probability of a continuous up-
ward trend of prices, that the realisation that average prices in future are likely
to remain constant may at first have a discouraging effect. This may even make
SOIne business men prefer to deal and keep accounts in a slowly depreciating
currency. I believe, however, that in the end those who have chosen a stable
currency will prove more successful.
currency desired, but also to be connected through the com-
puter with banks so that firms would immediately be credited
with the equivalent in the currency in which they kept their
accounts. (Cash balances in the currencies would be collected
every evening.) On the other hand, shopkeepers would find it
expedient, if two or three currencies were in common local
use, to mark their wares in an easily distinguishable manner,
for example in different colours for each currency, so as to ease
price comparisons between shops and currencies.
(ii) Holding reserves for future payments
Beyond the desire to use his regular receipts for his ordinary
expenditure, the wage- and salary-earner would probably be
interested chiefly in stability. And although in his mortgage
and instalment payments he might for a while profit from a
depreciating currency, his wage or salary contract would
incline his wishes towards an appreciating currency.
All holders of cash, that is, everybody, would prefer an
appreciating currency and for this reason there might be a
substantial demand for such money; but it would clearly not
be to the advantage of borrowers to borrow in it, or for banks
to have to maintain a value higher than that at which they
issued a currency. It is conceivable that a limited amount of
notes of such an appreciating currency might be issued and
used for special purposes, but it would seem most unlikely
that they would become generally used. The chief demand for
holding would probably be for the currency in which people
expected to have to pay debts.
(iii) Standard of deferred payments
When we come to the third use, as a standard of deferred
payments, the primary interests of the parties to the contract
would of course be precisely opposite: lenders preferring an
appreciating and borrowers a depreciating currency. But each
group would be of a very mixed composition, the creditors
including all wage- and salary-earners as well as the owners of
capital, and the debtors including the banks as well as enter-
prises and farmers. It therefore seems unlikely that market
forces would produce a predominant bias in one direction.
And, though they would all in the short run either lose or gain
from changes in the value of the currency on their borrowing
or lending business, they would probably all soon discover
that these losses or gains were merely temporary and tended to
disappear as soon as interest rates adapted themselves to
expected price movements.
(iv) A reliable unit of account
It. seems to me that the decisive factor that would create a
general preference for a currency stable in value would be that
only in such a currency is a realistic calculation· possible, and
therefore in the long run a successful choice between alternative
currencies for use in. production and trade. In particular, the
chief task of accounting, to' ensure that the stock of capital of
the business is not' eaten into and only true net gains shown
as profits available for- disposal by the 'shareholders, can be
realised only if the value of the unit of account is approximately
An attempt to explain further why successful economic
calculation is possible only with a stable value of money
raises the question of what precisely we mean by 'the value of
money' and the various respects in which it may be kept stable.
This we must leave to Section XIII. For the present we
content ourselves with the empirical fact that effective
capital maintenance and cost control is possible only if accounts
are kept in a unit that in some sense remains tolerably stable.
So we will provisionally leave the present subject with the
conclusion that, in the long run at least, the effective choice
between competitive offers of currencies will be the usual one
of competition. The currency that will prevail will be the one
preferred by the people who are helped to succeed and who in
consequence will be imitated by others.
Strictly speaking, in a scientific sense, there is no such thing as
a perfectly stable value of money-or of anything else. Value
is a relationship, a rate of equivalence, or, as W. S. Jevons
said, 'an indirect mode of expressing a ratio',l which can be
stated only by naming the quantity of one object that is valued
1 W. S.Jevons [34], p. 11. Cf. also ibid., p. 68: 'Value merely expresses the essenti-
ally variable ratio in which two commodities exchange, so that there is no
reason to suppose that any substance does for two days together retain the same
equally with the 'equivalent' quantity of another object. Two
objects may keep a constant relative value in terms of each
other, but unless we specify the other, the statement that the
value of something is unchanged has no definite meaning.
What we mean when we habitually but carelessly use such
expressions as 'Beer is more stable in value than beetroot' (and
this is the most we can ever assert with any meaning) is that
the relative value of beer, or its rate of exchange, tends to
remain more stable with a larger number of other goods or
over longer periods, than is true of beetroot and many other
goods. For ordinary goods or services we have in mind in the
first instance usually their relation to money. When we apply
the term 'value' to money itself what is meant is that the price
of most commodities will not tend to change predominantly
in one direction, or will change only little, over short periods.
IA stable value of money'
But some prices always change on a free ma.rket. We will
sometimes feel that the value of money has remained approxi-
mately constant although many prices have changed, and at
other times that the value of money has definitely decreased
or increased, although the prices of only a few important
commodities have changed but all in the same direction.
What then do we call, in a world of constantly changing
individual prices, a stable value of money?
In a rough sense it is of course fairly obvious that the
command over commodities in general conferred by a sum of
money has decreased if it brings a smaller amount of most of
them and more of only a few of them. It is then sensible to
say that the command over commodities has remained about
the same if these two changes in command over commoditie&
just balance. But for our purposes we need, of course, a more
precise definition of 'a stable value of money' and a more
exact definition of the benefits we expect from it.
Balancing errors
As we have seen, the chief disturbances which changes in the
value of money will cause operate through the effects on
contracts for deferred payments and on the use of money units
as the basis of calculation and accounting. Decisions in both
have to cope with the unalterable truth that for the individual
the future movement of most prices is unpredictable (because
14 -16
Aggregate price of commodities
sold at prices changed (against
previous period) by percentage
(a) stable prices
1----------..,...---1.... 1 _
Figure 1
they serve as signals of events of most of which he cannot know).
The resulting risk can best be reduced by basing calculations on
expectations of future prices from which current prices are
quite as likely to deviate in the one direction as in the other
by any given percentage. This median value of probable future
changes will be correctly estimated only if it is zero and thus
coincides with the probable behaviour of the large number of
prices that are fairly rigid or sluggish (chiefly public utility
rates but also the prices of most branded articles, goods sold
by mail order houses, and the like).
The position is best illustrated by two diagrams. If the value
of money is so regulated that an appropriate average of prices
is kept constant, the probabilities of future price movements
Aggregate price of commodities
sold at prices changed (against
previous period) by percentage
(b) in
1----__----.--1 ... 1 _
Figure 2
with which all planning of future activities will have to cope
can be represented as in Figure I. Though in this case the
unpredictability of particular future prices, inevitable in a
functioning market economy, remains, the fairly high long-run
chances are that for people in general the effects of the unfore-
seen price changes will just about cancel out. They will at least
not cause a general error of expectations in one direction but on
the whole make fairly successful calculations based on the
assumption of the continuance of prices (where no better
information is available).
Where the divergent movement of individual prices results
in a rise in the average of all prices, it will look somewhat as
in Figure 2.
Since the individual enterprise will have as little foundation
for correctly foreseeing the median of all the movements as for
predicting the movements of individual prices, it could also not
base its calculations and decisions on a known median from
which individual movements of prices were as likely to diverge.
in the direction as in the other. Sqccessful calculations, or
effective capital and, cost. accounting, would then· im-
possible. People would mor'e and more for a unit of
account whose value moved more closely together with the
general trend, and might even be driven to use as the unit of
account something that could not be used as a medium ·of
Criteria ofchoice
These skewed shifts of the distribution of price changes to -one
side of constancy which changes in the quantity of money may.
cause, and the resulting difficulty of foresight, calculation and
accounting, must not be confused with the merely temporary
changes in the structure of relative prices the same process
also brings about which will cause misdirections of production.
We shall have to consider (Section XVII) how a stabilisation
of the value of money will also substantially prevent those
misdirections of production which later inevitably lead to
reversals of the process of growth, the loss of much investment,
and periods of unemployment. We shall argue that this would
1 The curve representing the dispersion of price changes by showing the percentage
of all sales effected at one period at prices increased or decreased compared
with an earlier period would, of course, if drawn on a logarithmic scale, have
the same shape whether we used money or any commodity as the measure of
price. If we used as standard the commodity whose price had fallen more than
that of any other, all price changes would merely appear as increases, but an
increase of the relative price compared with that of another would still be shown
as, say, a 50 per cent increase, whatever measure we used. We would probably
obtain a curve of the general shape of a normal (Gaussian) curve of error-the,
so far as we could have predicted, accidental deviations from the mode on
either side just offsetting each other and becoming less numerous as the devia-
tions increase. (Most price changes will be due to a shifting of demand with
corresponding falls of some prices and rises of others; and relatively small
transfers of this kind seem likely to be more frequent than large ones.) In terms
of a money with stable value in this sense, the price of the commodities repre-
sented by the mode would then be unchanged, while the amount of transactions
taking place at prices increased or decreased by a certain percentage would just
balance each other. This will minimise errors, not necessarily of particular
individuals, but in the aggregate. And though no practicable index number can
fully achieve what we have assumed, a close approximation to the effect ought
to be possible.
be one of the chief benefits of a stable currency. But it is hardly
possible to argue that the users of ~ o n e y will for this reason
select a currency'with a stable value. This is an effect they are
not .likely to perceive and take into account in their individual
decision of what money to use-although the observation of
the smooth course of business in regions using a stable currency
may induce the people of other regions to prefer a similar
currency. The individual also could not protect himself against
this effect by himself using a stable currency, because the
structure of relative prices will be the same in terms of the
different concurrent currencies and those distortions cannot
therefore be avoided so long as side by side with stable cur-
rencies fluctuating currencies are used to a significant extent.
The reason why people will tend to prefer a currency with
a value stable in terms of commodities will thus be that it will
help them to minimise the effects of the unavoidable uncertainty
about price movements because the effect of errors in opposite
directions will tend to cancel each other out. This cancelling
will not take place if the median around which the deviation
of individual prices clusters is not zero but some unknown
magnitude. Even if we agree that the stable money people
will prefer to use will be such that they expect the individual
prices in which they are chiefly interested to be as likely to
increase in terms of it as to decrease, this does not yet tell us
which price level most people will want to see constant.
Different people or enterprises will evidently be interested in
the prices of different commodities. And the aggregate prices
of different collections of commodities would of course move
Effectivenessfor accounting again decisive
While one probably is at first again inclined to think in terms
of retail prices or cost of living, and even most individual
consumers might prefer a money stable in these terms, it is not
likely that an extensive circulation could be built up for a
currency so regulated. The cost of living differs from place to
place and is apt to change at varying rates. Business would
certainly prefer a money acceptable over wide regions. What
would be most important for calculation and accounting in
each enterprise (and therefore for the efficient use of re-
sources), relying on the general stability of prices rather than
its specialised knowledge of a particular market, would be the
prices of widely traded products such as raw materials, agri-.
cultural foodstuffs and certain standardised semi-fimshed
industrial products. They have the further advantage that they
are traded on regular markets, their prices are promptly
reported and, at least with raw materials, are particularly
sensitive and would therefore make it possible by early action
to forestall tendencies towards general price movements (which
often show themselves in such commodities first).
Indeed it may well be that a regulation of the issue which
directly aimed at stabilising raw material prices might result
in a greater stability even of the prices of consumers' goods
than a management which aimed directly at the latter object.
The considerable lag which experience has shown to prevail
between changes in the quantity of money and changes in the
price level of consumers' goods may indeed mean that, if
adjustment of circulation were postponed until the effects of an
excess or shortage of the issue showed itself in changes in the
prices of consumers' goods, quite noticeable changes in their
prices could not be avoided; while, in the case of raw materials,
where this lag seems to be shorter, an earlier warning would
make prompter precautionary measures possible.
Wage- and salary-earners would probably also discover that
it was advantageous to conclude collective bargains in average
raw material prices or a similar magnitude, which would
secure for earners of fixed incomes an automatic share in an
increase of industrial productivity. (The underdeveloped
countries would also prefer an international currency that
gave raw materials in general an increasing purchasing power
over industrial products-though they are likely to spoil the
possibility by insisting on the stabilisation of individual raw
material prices.) I hope, at any rate, that this will be the
predominant choice because a currency stable in terms of
raw material prices is probably also the nearest approach we
can hope to achieve to one conducive to stability of general
economic activity.
Wholesale commodity prices as standard of value
for currencies over international regions
My expectation would be that, at least for large regions much
exceeding present national territories, people would agree on
a standard set of wholesale prices of commodities to treat as
the standard of value in which they would prefer to have their
currencies kept constant. A few banks that had established
wide circulation by accommodating this preference, and issued
currencies ofdifferent denominations but with roughly constant
rates of exchange with one another, might continue to try and
refine the' .precise composition of the' standard 'basket' of
commodities 'whose' price they tried to keep 'constant in their
currency.! But this practice would not cause substantial fluc-
tuations in the relative values of the chief currencies circulating
in the region. Regions with different compositions of the
currencies in circulation would, of course, overlap, and
currencies whose value was based chiefly on commodities im-
portant for one way of life, or for one group of predominant
industries, might fluctuate relatively .more against others but
yet retain their distinct clientele among people with particular
occupations and habits.
The usual assumptions of monetary theory, that there is only
one kind of currency, the money, and that there is no sharp
distinction between full money and mere money substitutes,
thus disappear. So does the applicability of what is called the
quantity theory of the value of money-even as a rough
approximation to a theoretically more satisfactory explanation
of the determination of the value of money, which is all that it
can ever be.
The quantity theory presupposes, of course, that there is
only one kind of money in circulation within a given territory,
the quantity of which can be ascertained by counting its
homogeneous (or near-homogeneous) units. But if the different
currencies in circulation within a region have no constant
1 Indeed emulation would probably lead them to refine the technique for main-
taining maximum stability to a point far beyond any practical advantage.
S But, as I wrote 45 years ago [24, p. 3] and would still maintain, ' ... from a
practical point of view, it would be one of the worst things which could befall
us if the general public should ever again cease to believe in the elementary
propositions of the quantity theory'.
relative value, the aggregate amount in circulation can only
be derived from the relative value of the currencies and has
no meaning apart from it. A theory which is of use only in a
particular situation, even if it happened to prevail during a
long period, evidently suffers from a serious defect. Though we
are apt to take it for granted, it is by no means of the essence
of money that within a given territory there should exist only
one kind, and it is usually true only because governments have
prevented the use of other kinds. Even so, it is never fully true
because there are always significant differences in the demand
for different forms of money and money substitutes of varying
degrees of liquidity. But if we assume that issuers of currency
continually compete with one another for additional users of
their currency, we cannot also assume, as the quantity theory
can assume with some justification with respect to a currency
of a single denomination, that there exists a fairly constant
demand for money in the sense that the aggregate value of the
total stock will tend to be approximately constant (or change
in a predictable manner with the size of the population, the
gross national product, or similar magnitudes).
The cash balance approach • • •
For the problems discussed in this Paper we certainly require
a more generally applicable tool. It is fortunately available in
the form of a theory which is more satisfactory even for dealing
with the simpler situations: the cash balance approach deriving
from Carl Menger, Leon Walras and Alfred Marshall. It
enables us not merely to explain the ultimate effect of changes
in 'the quantity of money' on 'the' general price level, but also
to account for the process by which changes in the supplies of
various kinds of money will successively affect different prices.
It makes possible an analysis which admittedly cannot pretend
to the pseudo-exactness of the quantity theory, but which has
a much wider reach and can take account of the preferences
of individuals for different kinds of money.
The decisive consideration to keep in mind for our present
purpose is that in a multi-currency system there is no such
thing as the magnitude of the demand for money. There will be
different demands for the different kinds of currency; but since
these different currencies will not be perfect substitutes, these
distinct demands cannot be added up into a single sum. There
may be little demand for (but large supply of) depreciating
currencies, there will, we hope, be an equality of demand and
supply for stable currencies (which is what will keep their
values stable), and a large demand for (but little supply of)
appreciating currencies. Though, so long as there exists a free
market. for currencies, people will be prepared to sell (at some
price) for any currency, they will not be prepared to hold any
currency; and the character of the available substitutes would
affect the demand for any particular currency. There would
therefore be no single quantity the magnitude of which could
be said to be decisive for the value of money.
. . . and the velocity of circulation
It can be maintained that the analyses in terms of the demand
for cash balances and the use of the concept of velocity of
circulation by the quantity theory are formally equivalent.
The difference is important. The cash balance approach
directs attention to the crucial causal factor, the individuals'
desire for holding stocks of money. The velocity of circulation
refers to a resultant statistical magnitude which experience
may show to be fairly constant over the fairly long periods for
which we have useful data-thus providing some justification
for claiming a simple connection between 'the' quantity of
money and 'the' price level-but which is often misleading
because it becomes so easily associated with the erroneous
belief that monetary changes affect only the general level of
prices. They are then often regarded as harmful chiefly for
this reason, as if they raised or lowered all prices simultaneously
and by the same percentage. Yet the real harm they do is due
to the differential effect on different prices, which change
successively in a very irregular order and to a very different
degree, so that as a result the whole structure of relative prices
becomes distorted and misguides production into wrong
Unfortunately, Lord Keynes made practically no use of this
most important contribution to monetary theory of the
Cambridge tradition deriving from Marshall. Though criticis-
ing the alleged tendency of all contemporary monetary theory
to argue as if prices all changed simultaneously, he moved
almost entirely within the framework of (or argued against)
the Irving Fisher type of quantity theory. It is one of the chief
damages the Keynesian flood has done to the understanding of
the economic process that the comprehension of the factors
determining both the value ofmoney and the effects of monetary
events on the value of particular commodities has been largely
lost. I cannot attempt here even a concentrated restatement of
this .c e n t r a ~ chapter of monetary theory but must content
myself ,vith recommendin'g economists who have had the
misfortune to study monetary theory at institutions wholly
dominated by Keynesian views but who still wish to under-
stand the theory of the value of money to fill this gap by first
working through the two volumes of A. W. Marget's Theory
of Prices [42] and then skip most of the literature of the next 25
years until Professor Axel Leijonhufvud's recent book [37],1
which will guide them to works of the interval they ought not
to miss.
A note on (monetarism'
It has become usual, since the reaction against the dominance
of the 'Keynesian' dogma set in, to lump together as 'monetar-
ists' all who regard as mistaken Keynes's denial 'that an
inflationary or deflationary movement was normally caused or
necessarily accompanied' by 'changes in the quantity of money
and velocity of its circulation'.
This 'monetarism' is of course
a view held before Keynes by almost all economists except a
very few dissenters and cranks, including in particular those
Continental economists who by their advice on policy became
responsible for the great inflations of the I920S. I agree with
these 'monetarists' in particular on what is now probably
regarded as their defining characteristic, namely that they
believe that all inflation is what is now called 'demand-pull'
inflation, and that there is, so far as the economic mechanism
is concerned, no such thing as a 'cost-push' inflation-unless
one treats as part of the economic causation the political
decision to increase the quantity of money in response to a rise
of wages which otherwise would cause unemployment.
1 [A short guide to Professor Leijonhufvud's book is his Keynes and the Classics,
Occasional Paper 30, lEA, 1969 (7th Impression, 1981) .-ED.]
2 R. F. Harrod [23a, p. 513].
3 In another sense I stand, however, outside the Keynes-monetarists controversy:
both are macro-economic approaches to the problem, while I believe that
[Contd. on page 80]
Where I· differ from the majority of other 'monetarists' and
in particular from the leading representative of the school,
Professor Milton Friedman, is that I regard the simple quantity
theory of money, even. for situations where in a given territory
only one kind of money is employed, as no more than' a useful
rough approximation to a really adequate explanation, which,
however, becomes wholly useless where several concurrent
distinct kinds of money are simultaneously in use in. the same
territory. Though this defect becomes serious only with· the
multiplicity of concurrent currencies which we· ar.e considering
here, the phenomenon of substitution of things not counted as
money by the theory for 'what is counted as money by it
always impairs the strict validity ofits conclusions.
I ts chief defect in any situation seems to me to be that by its
stress on the effects of changes in the quantity of money on the
general level of prices it directs all-too exclusive attention to
the harmful effects of inflation and deflation on the creditor-
debtor relationship, but disregards the even more important
and harmful effects of the injections and withdrawals ofamounts
of money from circulation on the structure of relative prices
and the consequent misallocation of resources and particularly
the misdirection of investments which it causes.
This is not an appropriate place for a full discussion of the
fine points of theory on which there exist considerable differ-
ences within the 'monetarist' school, though they are of great
importance for the evaluation of the effects of the present
(Contd. from page 79]
monetary theory neither needs nor ought to employ such an approach, even if
it can hardly wholly dispense with such an essentially macro-economic concept.
Macro-economics and micro-economics are alternative methods of dealing with
the difficulty that, in the case of such a complex phenomenon as the market, we
never command all the factual information which we would need to provide a
full explanation. Macro-economics attempts to overcome this difficulty by
referring to such magnitudes as aggregates or averages which are statistically
available. This gives us a useful approximation to the facts, but as a theoretical
explanation of causal connections is unsatisfactory and sometimes misleading,
because it asserts empirically observed correlations with no justification for the
belief that they will always occur.
The alternative micro-economic approach which I prefer relies on the con-
struction of models which cope with the problem raised by our inescapable
ignorance of all the relevant facts by 'reducing the scale' by diminishing the
number of independent variables to the minimum required to form a structure
which .is capable of producing all the kinds of movements or changes of which a
market system is capable. It is, as I have tried to explain more fully elsewhere
[30], a technique which produces merely what I have called 'pattern' predictions
but is incapable of producing those predictions of specific events which macro-
economics claims, as I believe mistakenly, to be able to produce.
proposals. My fundamental objection to the adequacy of the
pure quantity theory of money is that, even with a single
currency in circulation within a territory, there is, strictly
speaking, no such thing as the quantity of money, and that any
attempt to delimit certain groups of the media of exchange
expressed in terms of a single unit as if they were homogeneous
or perfect substitutes is misleading even for the usual situation.
This objection becomes of decisive importance, of course, when
we contemplate different concurrent currencies.
A stable price level and a high and stable level of employ-
ment do not require or permit the total quantity of money to
be kept constant or to change at a constant rate. It demands
something similar yet still significantly different, namely that
the quantity of money (or rather the aggregate value of all the
most liquid assets) be kept such that people will not reduce or
increase their outlay for the purpose of adapting their balances
to their altered liquidity preferences. Keeping the quantity of
money constant does not assure that the money stream will
remain constant, and in order to make the volume of the
money stream behave in a desired manner the supply of money
must possess considerable elasticity.
Monetary management cannot aim at a particular pre-
determined volume of circulation, not even in the case of a
territorial monopolist of issue, and still less in the case of
competing issues, but only at finding out what quantity will
keep prices constant. No authority can beforehand ascertain,
and only the market can discover, the 'optimal quantity of
money'. It can be provided only by selling and buying at a
fixed price the collection of commodities the aggregate price
of which we wish to keep stable.
As regards Professor Friedman's proposal of a legal limit on
the rate at which a monopolistic issuer of money was to be
allowed to increase the quantity in circulation, I can only say
that I would not like to see what would happen if under such
a provision it ever became known that the amount of cash in
circulation was approaching the upper limit and that therefore
a need for increased liquidity could not be met.!
1 To such a situation the classic account of Walter Bagehot [3, penultimate
paragraph] would apply: 'In a sensitive state of the English money market the
near approach to the legal limit of reserve would be a sure incentive to panic; if
one-third were fixed by law, the· moment the banks were close to one-third,
alarm would begin and would run like magic.'
Why indexation is not a substitute for a stable currency
The usual emphasis on the most generally perceived and most
painfully felt harm done by inflation, its effect on debtor-
creditor relations and in particular on the receivers of fixed
incomes, has led to the suggestion that these effects be mitigated
by stipulating long-term obligations in terms of a 'tabular
standard', the nominal sum of the debt being continuously
corrected according to the changes in an index number of
prices. It is, of course, correct that such a practice would
eliminate the most glaring ipJustices caused by inflation and
would remove the most severe suffering visibly due to it. But
these are far from being the most severe damage which inflation
causes, and the adoption of such a partial remedy for some of
the symptoms would probably weaken the resistance against
inflation, thus prolonging and increasing it, and in the long
run considerably magnify the damage it causes and particu-
larly the suffering it produces by bringing about unemployment.
Everybody knows of course that inflation does not affect all
prices at the same time but makes different prices rise in
succession, and that it therefore changes the relation between
prices-although the familiar statistics of average price move-
ments tend to conceal this movement in relative prices. The
effect on relative incomes is only one, though to the superficial
observer the most conspicuous, effect of the distortion of the
whole structure of relative prices. What is in the long run even
more damaging to the functioning of the economy and even-
tually tends to make a free market system unworkable is the
effect of this distorted price structure in misdirecting the use of
resources and drawing labour and other factors of production
(especially the investment of capital) into uses which remain
profitable only so long as inflation accelerates. It is this effect
which produces the major waves of unemployment,
but which
1 A remarkable recognition of this fundamental truth occurs in the opening
paragraphs of the final communique of the Downing Street 'summit' meeting
of 8 May, 1977, chaired by the Prime Minister of the UK and attended by the
President of the USA, the Chancellor of West Germany, the President or
France, the Prime Minister of Japan and the Prime Minister of Italy. The first
few lines said: 'Inflation is not a remedy for unemployment, but is one of its
major causes'. This is an insight for which I have been fighting, almost single-
handed, for more than forty years. Unfortunately, however, that statement
over-simplified the issue. In many circunlstances inflation indeed leads to a
temporary reduction of unemployment, but only at the price of causing much
more unemployment later. This is exactly what makes inflation so seductive and
politically almost irresistible, but for that reason particularly insidious.
the economists using a macro-economic approach to the prob-
lem usually neglect or underrate.
This crucial damage done by inflation would in no way be
eliminated by indexation. Indeed, government measures of
this sort, which make it easier to live with inflation, must in
the long run make things \vorse. They would certainly not
make it easier to fight inflation, because people would be less
aware that their suffering was due to inflation. There is no
justification for Professor Friedman's suggestion that
'by removing distortions in relative prices produced by
inflation, widespread escalator clauses would make it easier
for the public to recognise changes in the· rate of inflation,
would thereby reduce t.he time-lag in adapting to· such
changes, and thus make the nominal price level more sensitive
and variable.'1
Such inflation, with some of its visible effect mitigated, would
clearly be less resisted and last correspondingly longer.
It is true that Professor Friedman explicitly disclaims any
suggestion that indexation is a substitute for stable money,
but he attempts to make it more tolerable in the short run
and I regard any such endeavour as exceedingly dangerous.
In spite of his denial it seems to me that to some degree it
would even speed up inflation. It would certainly strengthen
the claims of groups of workers whose real wages ought to fall
(because their kind of work has become less valuable) to have
their real wages kept constant. But that means that all relative
increases of any wages relatively to any others would have to
find expression in an increase of the nominal wages of all
except those workers whose wages were the lowest, and this
itself would make continuous inflation necessary.
It seems to me, in other words, like any other attempts to
accept wage and price rigidities as inevitable and to adjust
monetary policy to them, the attitude from which 'Keynesian'
economics took its origin, to be one of those steps apparently
dictated by practical necessity but bound in the long run to
make the whole wage structure more and more rigid and
thereby lead to the destruction of the market economy. But
the present political necessity ought to be no concern of the
economic scientist. His task ought to be, as I will not cease
1 M. Friedman [2Gb], p. 31.
2 Ibid., p. 28.
repeating, to make politically possible what today may be
politically impossible. To decide what can be done at the
moment is the task of the politician, not of the economist, who
must continue to point out that to persist in this direction will
lead to disaster.
I am in complete agreement with Professor Friedman on the
inevitability of inflation under the existing political and
financial institutions. But I believe that it will lead to the
destruction of our civilisation unless we change the political
framework. In this sense I will admit that my radical proposal
concerning money will probably be practicable only as part of
a much more far-reaching change in our political institutions,
but an essential part of such a reform which will be recognised
as necessary before long. The two distinct reforms which I am
proposing in the economic and the political order! are indeed
complementary: the sort of monetary system I propose may be
possible only under a limited government such as we do not
have, and a limitation of government may require that it be
deprived of the monopoly of issuing money. Indeed the latter
should necessarily follow from the former.
The historical evidence
Professor Friedman has since
more fully explained his doubts
about the efficacy of my proposal and claimed that
'we have ample empirical and historical evidence that
suggests that [my] hopes would not in fact be realised-that
private currencies which offer purchasing power security
would not drive out governmental currencies.'
I can find no such evidence that anything like a currency of
which the public has learnt to understand that the issuer can
business only if he maintains its currency constant,
for which all the usual banking facilities are provided and
which is legally recognised as an instrument for contracts,
accounting and calculation has not been preferred to a deterior-
ating official currency, simply because such a situation seems
never to have existed. It may well be that in many
countries the issue of such a currency is not actually prohibited,
but the other conditions are rarely if ever satisfied. And every-
body knows that if such a private experiment promised to
succeed, governments would at once step in to prevent it.
I F. A. Hayek [31a], vol. III.
2 In an interview given to Reason magazine, IX: 34, New York, August 1977, p. 28.
If we want historical evidence of what people will do where
they have free choice of the currency they prefer to use, the
displacement of sterling as the general unit of international
trade since it began continuously to depreciate seems to me
strongly to confirm my expectations. What we know about the
behaviour of individuals having to cope with a bad national
money, and in the face of government using every means at
its disposal to force them to use it, all points to the probable
success of any money which has the properties the public wants
if people are not artificially deterred from using it. Americans
may be fortunate in never having experienced a time when
everybody in their country regarded some national currency
other than their own as safer. But on the European Continent
there were many occasions in which, if people had only been
permitted, they would have used dollars rather than their
national currencies. They did in fact do so to a much larger
extent than was legally permitted, and the most severe penalties
had to be threatened to prevent this habit from spreading
rapidly-witness the billions of unaccounted-for dollar notes
undoubtedly held in private hands all over the world.
I have never doubted that the public at large would be slow
in recognising the advantages of such a new currency and
have even suggested that at first, if given the opportunity, the
masses would turn to gold rather than any form of other paper
money. But as always the success of the few who soon recognise
the advantages of a really stable currency would in the end
induce the others to imitate them.
I must confess, however, that I am somewhat surprised that
Professor Friedman of all people should have so little faith that
competition will make the better instrument prevail when he
seems to have no ground to believe that monopoly will ever
provide a better one and merely fears the indolence produced
by old habits.
xv. THE DESIRABLE BEHAVIOUR OF THE SUPPLY
We have so far provisionally assumed that the kind of money
individuals will prefer to use will also be most conducive to
the smooth functioning of the market process as a whole.
Although this is plausible and, as we shall see, approximately
true in practice, it is not self-evident. We have still to examine
the validity of this belief. It is at least conceivable that the use
of one particular kind of currency might be most convenient
for each separate individual but that each might be better
off if all the others used a different kind.
We have seen (Section XIII) that successful economic
action (or the fulfilment of the expectations which prompted
it) depends largely on the approximately correct prediction of
future prices. These predictions will be based on current prices
and the estimation of their trend, but future prices must
always be to some degree uncertain because the circumstances
which determine them will be unknown to most individuals.
Indeed, the function of prices is precisely to communicate, as
rapidly as possible, signals of changes of which the individual
cannot know but to which his plans must be adjusted. This
system works because on the whole current prices are fairly
reliable indications of what future prices will probably be,
subject only to those 'accidental' deviations which, as we have
seen, if average prices remain constant, are likely to offset
each other. We have also seen how such an offsetting of
opposite disappointments becomes impossible if a substantial
general movement of prices in one direction takes place.
But the current prices of particular commodities or groups
of commodities can also be positively misleading if they are
caused by non-recurring events, such as temporary inflows or
outflows of money to the system. For such apparent changes in
demand from a particular direction are in a peculiar manner
self-reversing: they systematically channel productive efforts
into directions where they cannot be maintained. The most im-
portant recurrent misdirections of the use of resources of this
sort occur when, by the creation (or withdrawal) of amounts
of money, the funds available for investment are increased
substantially above (or decreased substantially below) the
amounts currently transferred from consumption to investment,
or saved.
Although this is the mechanism by which recurrent crises
and depressions are caused, it is not a specific effect of a
particular kind of currency which the users are likely to be
aware of and which might therefore lead them to switch to
another. We can expect the selection of the currency they
use to be influenced only by such attributes as recognisably
affect their actions, but not by indirect effects of changes of
its amount which will operate largely through their effects on
the decisions of others.
The supply of currency, stable prices, and the equivalence of
investment and saving
While the modern author who first drew attention to the
crucial importance of these divergences between investment
and saving, Knut Wicksell, believed that they would disappear
if the value of money were kept constant, this has unfortunately
proved to be not strictly correct. It is now generally recognised
that even those additions to the quantity of money that in a
growing economy are necessary to secure a stable price level
may cause an excess of investment over saving. But though I
was among those who early pointed out this difficulty,l I am
inclined to believe that it is a problem of minor practical
significance. If increases or decreases of the quantity of money
never exceeded the amount necessary to keep average prices
approximately constant, we would come as close to a condition
in which investment approximately corresponded to saving as
weare likely to do by any conceivable method. Compared,
anyhow, with the divergences between investment and saving
which necessarily accompany the major swings in the price level,
those which would still occur under a stable price level would
probably be of an order of magnitude about which we need
not worry.
'Neutral money' fictitious
My impression is that economists have become somewhat
over-ambitious concerning the degree of stability that is either
achievable or even desirable under any conceivable economic
order, and that they have unfortunately encouraged political
demands concerning the certainty of employment at a hoped-
for wage which in the long run no government can satisfy. That
perfect matching or correspondence of the individual plans,
which the theoretical model of a perfect market equilibrium
derives on the assumption that the money required to make
indirect exchange possible has no influence on relative prices,
is a wholly fictitious picture to which nothing in the real world
can ever correspond. Although I have myself given currency to
the expression 'neutral money' (which, as I discovered later, I
1 Hayek [25], pp. 114 fr.
had unconsciously borrowed from Wicksell), it was intended to
describe this almost universally made assumption of theoretical
analysis and to raise the question whether any real money
could ever possess this property, and not as a model to be
aimed at by monetary policy.1 I have long since come to the
conclusion that no real money can ever be neutral in this
sense, and that we must be content with a system that rapidly
corrects the inevitable errors. The nearest approach to such a
condition which we can hope to achieve would appear to me
to be one in which the average prices of the 'original factors of
production' were kept constant. But as the average price of
land and labour is hardly something for which we can find a
statistical measure, the nearest practicable approximation
would seem to be precisely that stability of raw material and
perhaps other wholesale prices which we could hope com-
petitively issued currencies would secure.
I will readily admit that such a provisional solution (on
which the experimentation of competition might gradually
improve), though giving us an infinitely better money and
much more general economic stability than we have ever had,
leaves open various questions to which I have no ready answer.
But it seems to meet the most urgent needs much better than
any prospects that seemed to exist while one did not contem-
plate the abolition of the monopoly ofthe issue ofmoney and the
free admission of competition into the business of providing
Increased demandfor liquidity
To dispel one kind. of doubt which I myself at one stage
entertained about the possibility of maintaining a stable price
level, we may briefly consider here what would happen if at
one time most members of a community wished to keep a
much larger proportion of their assets in a highly liquid form
than they did before. Would this not justify, and even require,
that the value of the most liquid assets, that is, of all money,
should rise compared with that of commodities?
The answer is that such needs of all individuals could be met
not only by increasing the value of the existing liquid assets,
money, but also' by increasing the amounts they can hold. The
wish of each individual to have a larger share of his resources
1 Hayek [26].
in a very liquid form can be taken care of by additions to the
total stock of money. This, paradoxically, increases the sum
of the value to the individuals of all existing assets and thereby
also the share of them that is highly liquid. Nothing, of course,
can increase the liquidity of a closed community as a whole,
if that concept has any meaning whatsoever, except, perhaps,
if one wishes to extend its meaning to a shift from the produc-
tion of highly specific to very versatile goods which would
increase the ease of adaptation to unforeseen events.
There is no need to be afraid of spurious demands for more
money on the ground that more money is needed to secure
adequate liquidity.. The amount required of any currency will
always be that which can be issued or kept in circulation
without causing an increase or decrease of the aggregate
(direct or indirect) price of the 'basket' of commodities sup-
posed to remain constant. This rule will satisfy all legitimate
demands that the variable 'needs of trade' be satisfied. And
this will be true in so far as the stated collection of goods can
be bought or sold at the stated aggregate price, and the
absorption or release of currency from cash balances does not
· interfere with this condition.
I t remains true, however, that so long as good and bad
currencies circulate side by side, the individual cannot wholly
protect himself from the harmful effects of the bad currencies
by using only the good ones in his own transactions. Since the
relative prices of the different commodities must be the same
in terms of the different concurrent currencies, the user of a
stable currency cannot escape the effects of the distortion of the
price structure by the inflation (or deflation) of a widely used
competing currency. The benefit of a stable course of the
economic activities which, we shall argue, the use of a stable
money would produce, would therefore be achieved only if the
great majority of transactions were effected in stable currencies.
Such a displacement of most bad money by good would, I
believe, come about fairly soon, but occasional disturbances of
the whole price structure and in consequence of general
economic activity cannot be wholly excluded until the public
has learnt rapidly to reject tempting offers of cheap money.
Some of the problems we are encountering were discussed
extensively in .the course of a great debate on 'free banking'
during the middle of the last century, mainly in France and
Germany.l This debate turned on the question whether com-
mercial banks should have the right to issue bank notes
redeemable in the established national gold or silver currency.
Bank notes were then very much more important than the
scarcely yet developed use of chequing accounts which became
important only after (and in part perhaps because) the com-
mercial banks were in the end definitely denied the right to
issue bank notes. This outcome of the debate resulted in the
establishment in all European countries of a single bank
privileged by government to issue notes. (The United States
followed only in 1914.)
A single national currency, not several competing currencies
It should be specially observed that the demand for free banking
at that time was wholly a demand that the commercial banks
should be allowed to issue notes in terms of the single estab-
lished national currency. So far as I am aware, the possibility
of competing banks issuing different currencies was never con-
templated. That was of course a consequence of the view that
only bank notes redeemable in gold or silver were practicable,
and therefore that notes for other than the standard quantity
of precious metal would seem to be merely inconvenient and
not serve any useful purpose.
The older legitimate argument for freedom of the note issue
by banks became, however, invalid once the notes they issued
were no longer to be redeemed in gold or silver, for the supply
of which each individual bank of issue was fully responsible,
but in terms of a legal tender money provided by a privileged
central bank of issue, which then was in effect under the
necessity of supplying the cash needed for the redemption of
the notes of the private banks of issue. That would have been
a wholly indefensible system which was prevented (at least so
1 A good survey of this discussion will be found in V. C. Smith [55].
far as the issue of notes, though not the issue of cheque deposits,
was concerned) by the prohibition of private note issue.
The demands for free banking (i.e. for the free issue of bank
notes) were mostly based on the ground that banks would
thereby be enabled to provide more and cheaper credit. They
were for the same reason resisted by those who recognised that
the effect would be inflationary-although at least one advo-
cate of the freedom of note issue had supported it on the ground
'what is called freedom of banking would result in the total
suppression of bank notes in France. I want to give every-
body the right to issue bank notes so that nobody should
take any bank notes any longer'.
The idea was, of course, that the inevitable abuse of this right,
Le. the issue of an amount of notes which the banks could not
redeem from their own reserves, would lead to their failure.
The ultimate victory of the advocates of the centralisation
of the national note issue was, however, in effect softened by a
concession to those who were mainly interested in the banks
being able to provide cheap credit. It consisted in the acknow-
ledgement of a duty of the privileged bank of issue to supply
the commercial banks with any notes they needed in order to
redeem their demand deposits-rapidly growing in importance.
This decision, or rather recognition of a practice into which
central banks had drifted, produced a most unfortunate hybrid
system in which responsibility for the total quantity of money
was divided in a fatal manner so that nobody was in a position
to control it effectively.
Demand deposits are like bank notes or cheques
This unfortunate development came about because for a long
time it was not generally understood that deposits subject to
cheque played very much the same role, and could be created by
the commercial banks in exactly the same manner, as bank
notes. The consequent dilution of what was still believed to be
a government monopoly of the issue of all money resulted in
the control of the total circulation of money being divided
between a central bank and a large number of commercial
1 H. Cernuschi [9], as quoted by L. v. Mises [47], p. 446; also V. C. Smith [55],
banks whose creation of credit it could influence only indirectly.
Not till much later did it come to be understood that the
'inherent instability of credit'
under that system was a neces-
sary outcome of this feature; that liquid means was mostly
supplied by institutions which themselves had to keep liquid
in terms of another form of money) so that they had to reduce
their outstanding obligations precisely when everybody else
also desired to be more liquid. By that time this kind ofstructure
had become so firmly established that, in spite of the 'perverse
elasticity of the supply of credit'2 it produced, it came to be
regarded as unalterable. Walter Bagehot had clearly seen this
dilemma a hundred years ago but despaired of the possibility
of remedying this defect of the firmly established banking
And Wicksell and later von Mises made it clear
that this arrangement must lead toviolent recurring fluctuations
of business activity-the so-called 'trade-cycle'.
New controls over currencies; new banking practices
Not the least advantage of the proposed abolition of the
the government monopoly of the issue of money is that it would
provide an opportunity to extricate ourselves from the impasse
into which this development had led. It would create the
conditions in which responsibility for the control of the quantity
of the currency is placed on agencies whose self-interest would
make them control it in such a manner as to make it most
acceptable to the users.
This also shows that the proposed reform requires a complete
change in the practices not only of the banks which take up the
business of issuing currency but also of those which do not.
For the latter could no longer rely on being bailed out by a
central bank if they could not meet from their own reserves
1 The expression was originally coined by R. G. Hawtrey.
2 Cf. L. Currie [12].
I W. Bagehot [3], p. 160: 'I have tediously insisted that the natural system of
banking is that of many banks keeping their own reserves, with the penalty
of failure before them if they neglect it. I have shown that our system is that of
a single bank keeping the whole reserve under no effectual penalty of failure.
And yet I propose to retain that system and only attempt to mend and palliate
it because I am quite sure that it is of no manner of use proposing to alter
it there is no force to be found adequate to so vast a reconstruction, and
so vast a destruction, and therefore it is useless proposing them.' That was
almost certainly true so long as the prevailing system worked tolerably, but not
after it had broken down.
their customers' demands for cash-not even if they chose to
keep their accounts in terms of the currency issued by a still
existing governmental central bank which, to maintain its
circulation, would have to adopt the practices of the other
issuing banks with which it competed.
Opposition to new fYstem from established bankers
This necessity of all banks to develop whoJIy new practices
will undoubtedly be the cause of strong opposition to the
abolition of the government monopoly. It is unlikely that most
of the older bankers, brought up in the prevailing routine of
banking, will be capable of coping with those problems. I am
certain that many of the present leaders of the profession will
not be able to conceive how it could possibly work and therefore
will describe the whole system as impracticable and impossible.
Especially in countries where competition among banks
has for generations been restricted by cartel arrangements,
usually tolerated and even encouraged by governments, the
older generation of bankers would probably be completely
unable even to imagine how the new system would operate and
therefore be practically unanimous in rejecting it. But this
foreseeable opposition of the established practitioners ought not
to deter us. I am also convinced that if a new generation of
young bankers were given the opportunity they would rapidly
develop techniques to make the new forms of banking not only
safe and profitable but also much more beneficial to the whole
community than the existing one.
. . . andfrom banking cranks
Another curious source of opposition, at least once they had
discovered that the effects of 'free banking' would be exactly
the opposite of those they expected, would be all the numerous
cranks who had advocated 'free banking' from inflationist
motives.! Once the public had an alternative, it would become
1 The list is very long and, apart from the well-known writers whose works are
noted under numbers [13], [22], [44] and [51] in the Bibliography (pp. 140,
141, 143, and 144), the series of studies by Edward Clarence Riegel (1879-1953)
published between 1929 and 1944 deserves special mention as an instance of how
the results of acute insights and long reflection which seem to have gained the
attention of an economist of the rank of Irving Fisher may be completely invali-
dated by an ignorance of elementary economics. A posthumous volume by
Riegel, entitled Flightfrom Inflation. The Monetary Alternatiz1e, has been announced
by the Hecthcr Foundation, San Pedro, California.
impossible to induce it to hold cheap money, and the desire
to get rid of currency that threatened to depreciate would
indeed rapidly turn it into a dwindling money. The inflationists
would protest because in the end only very 'hard' money would
remain. Money is the one thing competition would not make cheap,
because its attractiveness rests on it preserving its 'dearness'.
• The problem ofa Idear' (stable) money
A competition the chief merit of which is that it keeps the
products of the competitors dear raises various interesting
questions. In what will the suppliers compete once they have
established somewhat similar reputations and trust for keeping
their currencies stable? The profits from the issuing business
(which amounts to borrowing at zero interest) will be very
large and it does not seem probable that very many firms can
succeed in it. For this reason services to the enterprises basing
their accounting on a bank's currency would be likely to
become the chief weapon of competition, and I should not be
surprised if the banks were practically to take over the
accounting for their customers.
Though even very large profits of the successfully established
issuers of currency would not be too high a price for a good
money, they would inevitably create great political difficulties.
Quite apart from the inevitable outcry against the profits of
the money monopoly, the real threat to the system would be
the cupidity of Ministers of Finance who would soon claim a
share in them for the permission to allow a currency to circulate
in their country, which would of course spoil everything. It
might indeed prove to be nearly as impossible for a democratic
government not to interfere with money as to regulate it
The real danger is thus that, while today the people sub-
missively put up with almost any abuse of the money preroga-
tive by government, as soon as it will be possible to say that
money is issued by 'rich financial institutions', the complaint
about their abuse ofthe alleged monopoly will become incessant.
To wring from the money power their alleged privilege will
become the constant demand of demagogues. I trust the banks
would be wise enough not to desire even a distant approach to
a monopoly position, but to limit the volume of their business
may become one of their most delicate problems.
[ ~ 4 ]
Neither a general increase nor a general decrease of prices
appears to be possible in normal circumstances so long as
several issuers of different currencies are allowed freely to
compete without the interference of government. There will
always be one or more issuers who find it to their advantage
to regulate the supply of their currency so as to keep its value
constant in step with the aggregate price of a bundle of widely
used commodities. This would soon force any less provident
issuers of competing currencies to put a stop to a slide in the
value of their currency in either direction if they did not wish
to lose the issue business altogether or to find the value of their
currency falling to zero.
No such thing as oil-price (or any other) cost-push inflation
It is, of course, taken for granted here that the average prices
in terms of a currency can always be controlled by appropriate
adjustments of its quantity. Theoretical analysis and experience
seem to me alike to confirm this proposition. We need therefore
pay no attention to the views always advanced in periods of
prolonged inflation in attempts to exculpate governments by
contending that the continued rise in prices is not the fault of
policy but the result of an initial rise in costs. To this claim it
must be replied emphatically that, in the strict sense, there is
simply no such a thing as a 'cost-push' inflation. Neither higher
wages nor higher prices of oil, or perhaps of imports generally,
can drive up the aggregate price of all goods unless the purchasers
are given more money to buy them. What is called a cost-push
inflation is m e r ~ l y the effect of increases in the quantity of
money which governments feel forced to provide in order to
prevent the unemployment resulting from a rise in wages (or
other costs), which preceded it and which was conceded in the
expectation that government would increase the quantity of
money. They mean thereby to make it possible for all the
workers to find employment through a rise in the demand for
their products. If government did not increase the quantity of
money such a rise in the wages ofa group of workers would not
lead to a rise in the general price level but simply to a reduction
in sales and therefore to unemployment.
It is, however, worth considering a little more fully what
would happen if a cartel or other monopolistic organisation,
such as a trade union, did succeed in substantially raising the
price of an important raw material or the wages of a large
group of workers, fixing them in terms of a currency which the
issuer endeavours to keep stable. In such circumstances the
stability of the price level in terms of this currency could be
achieved only by the reduction of a number of other prices. If
people have to pay a larger amount of money for the oil or the
books and printed papers they consume, they will have to
consume less of some other things.
The problem of rigid prices and wages
No currency, of course, can remove the rigidity of some prices
which has developed. But it can make impossible the policies
which have assisted this development by making it necessary
for those who hold prices rigid in the face of a reduced demand
to accept the consequent loss of sales.
The whole difference of approach between the dominant
'Keynesian' school and the view underlying the present
exposition rests in the last resort on the position taken with
regard to the phenomenon of rigid prices and wages. Keynes
was largely led to his views by his belief that the increasing
rigidity of wages was an unalterable fact which had to be
accepted and the effect of which could be mitigated only by
accommodating the rate of money expenditure to the given
rate of wages. (This opinion was in some measure justified in
the British.position in the 1920S, when, as a result of an injudi-
cious attempt to raise the external value of the pound, most
British wages had become out of line with international
commodity prices.) I have maintained ever since that such an
adaptation of the quantity of money to the rigidity of some
prices and particularly ,vages would greatly extend the range
of such rigidities and must therefore, in the long run, entirely
destroy the functioning of the market.
The error of the (beneficial mild inflation'
All inflation is so very dangerous precisely because many
people, including many economists, regard a mild inflation as
harmless and even beneficial. But there are few mistakes of
policy with regard to which it is more important to heed the
old maxim principiis obsta.
Apparently, and surprisingly, the
self-accelerating mechanism of all engineered inflation is not
yet understood even by some economists. The initial general
stimulus which an increase of the quantity of money provides
is chiefly due to the fact that prices and therefore profits turn
out to be higher than expected. Every venture succeeds, includ-
ing even some which ought to fail. But this can last only so long
as the continuous rise of prices is not generally expected. Once
people learn to count on it, even a continued rise of prices at
the same rate will no longer exert the stimulus that it gave at
Monetary policy is then faced with an unpleasant dilemma.
In order to maintain the degree of activity it created by mild
inflation, it will have to accelerate the rate of inflation, and
will have to do so again and again at an ever increasing rate
every time the prevailing rate ofinflation comes to be expected.
If it fails to do so and either stops accelerating or ceases to
inflate altogether, the economy will be in a much worse
position than when the process started. Not only has inflation
allowed the ordinary errors ofjudgement to accumulate which
are normally promptly eliminated and will now all have to be
liquidated at the same time. It will in addition have caused
misdirection of production and drawn labour and other
resources into activities which could be maintained only if the
additional investment financed by the increase in the quantity
of money could be maintained.
Since it has become generally understood that whoever
controls the total supply of money of a country has thereby
power to give in most situations almost instantaneous relief to
unemployment, even if only at the price of much unemploy-
ment later, the political pressure on such an ag.ency must
become irresistible. The threat of that possibility has always
been understood by some economists, who for this reason have
ever been anxious to restrain the monetary authorities by
barriers they could not break. But since the betrayal, or
ignorance, of this insight by a school of theorists which thereby
bought themselves temporary popularity, political control of
the supply of money has become too dangerous to the preserva-
tion of the market order to be any longer tolerated. However
1 ['Resist beginnings' (or, colloquially, 'nip it in the bud'): Ovid, Remedia Amoris,
91, trans. Showerman, Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, OUP. - ED.]
much political pressure might be brought on the most import-
tant private banks of issue to make them relax their credit
conditions and extend their circulation, if a non-monopolistic
institution gave in to such pressure it would soon cease to be
one of the most important issuers.
The 'money illusion', i.e. the belief that money represents a
constant value, could arise only because it was useless to worry
about changes in the value of money so long as one could not
do anything about it. Once people have a choice they will
become very much aware of the different changes of the value
of the different currencies accessible to them. It would, as it
should, become common knowledge that money needs to be
watched, and would be regarded as a praiseworthy action
rather than as an unpatriotic deed to warn people that a
particular currency was suspect.
Responsibility for unemployment would be traced back to trade unions
Depriving government of the power of thus counteracting the
effects of monopolistically enforced increases in wages or prices
by increasing the quantity of money would place the responsi-
bility for the full use of resources back to where it belongs:
where the causally effective decisions are taken-the monopol-
ists who negotiate the wages or prices. We ought to understand
by now that the attempt to combat by inflation the unemploy-
ment caused by the monopolistic actions of trade unions will
merely postpone the effects on employment to the time when
the rate of inflation required to maintain employment by
continually increasing the quantity of money becomes unbear-
able. The sooner we can make impossible such harmful mea-
sures, probably unavoidable so long as government has the
monetary power to take them, the better for all concerned.
The scheme proposed here would, indeed, do somewhat more
than prevent only inflations and deflations in the strict sense
of these terms. Not all changes in the general level of prices are
caused by changes in the quantity of money, or its failure to
adapt itself to changes in the demand for holding money; and
only those brought about in this manner can properly be called
inflation or deflation. It is true that there are nowadays
unlikely to be large simultaneous changes in the supply of many
of the most important goods, as happened when variations in
harvests could cause dearths or gluts of most of the main food-
stuffs and clothing materials. And, even today, perhaps in
wartime in a country surrounded by enemies or on an island,
an acute scarcity (or glut) of the products in which the country
has specialised is perhaps conceivable. At least if the index
number of commodity prices that guided the issue of the
currency in the country were based chiefly on national prices,
such a rule might lead to changes in the supply of currency
designed to counteract price movements not caused by monetary
Preventing general deflation
The reader may not yet feel filly reassured that, in the kind of
competitive money system we are here contemplating, a general
deflation will be as impossible as a general inflation. Experience
seems indeed to have shown that, in conditions ofsevere uncer-
tainty or alarm about the future, even very low rates ofinterest
cannot prevent a shrinking of a bank's outstanding loans. What
could a bank issuing its own distinct currency do when it finds
itself in such a situation, and commodity prices in terms of its
currency threaten to fall? And how strong would be its interest
in stopping such a fall of prices if the same circumstances
affected the competing institutions in the same way?
There would of course be no difficulty in placing additional
money at a time when people in general want to keep very
liquid. The issuing bank, on the other hand, would not wish
to incur an obligation to maintain by redemption a value of
its currency higher than that at which it had issued it. To
maintain profitable investments, the bank would presumably be
driven to buy interest-bearing securities and thereby put cash
into the hands of people looking for other investments as well
as bring down the long-term rates of interest, with a similar
effect. An institution with a very large circulation of currency
might even find it expedient to buy for storage quantities of
commodities represented in the index that tended to fall
particularly strongly in price.
This would probably be sufficient to counteract any down-
ward tendency of general prices produced by the economic
process itself, and if it achieved this effect it is probably as
much as can be accomplished by any management of money.
But it is of course not to be wholly excluded that some events
may cause such a general state of discouragement and lethargy
that nothing could induce people to resume investment and
thereby stop an impending fall of prices. So far as this were due
to extraneous events, such as the fear of an impending world
catastrophe or of the imminent advent of communism, or in
some region the desire to convert all private possessions into
cash to be prepared for flight, probably nothing could prevent a
general fall in the prices of possessions that are not easily
portable. But so long as the general conditions for the effective
conduct of capitalist enterprise persisted, competition would
provide a money that caused as little disturbance to its working
as possible. And this is probably all we can hope.!
It is true that under the proposed arrangements monetary
policy as we now know it could not exist. It is not to be denied
that, with the existing sort of division of responsibility between
the issues of the basic money and those of a parasitic circulation
based on it, central banks must, to prevent matters from
getting completely out of hand, try deliberately to forestall
developments they can only influence but not directly control.
But the central banking system, which only 50 years ago was
regarded as the crowning achievement of financial wisdom,
has largely discredited itself. This is even more true since, with
the abandonment of the gold standard and fixed exchange
rates, the central banks have acquired fuller discretionary
powers than when they were stiJl trying to act on firm rules.
And this is true no less where the aim of policy is still a reason-
able degree of stability, as in countries overwhelmed by
Government the major source of instability
We have it on the testimony of a competent authority who
was by no means unsympathetic to those modern aspirations
that, during the recent decade 1962 to 1972 when the believers
in a 'fine tuning' of monetary policy had an influence which we
must hope they will never have again, the larger part of the
1 The remaining doubt concerns the question whether in such circumstances the
holders of cash might wish to switch towards an appreciating currency, but such
a currency would then probably not be available.
fluctuations were a consequence of budgetary and monetary
policy.1 And it is certainly impossible to claim that the period
since the abandonment of the semi-automatic regulation of the
quantity of money has generally been more stable or free from
monetary disturbances than the periods of the gold standard
or fixed rates of exchange.
We indeed begin to see how completely different an econ-
omic landscape the free issue of competitive currencies would
produce when we realise that under such a system what is
known today as monetary policy would neither be needed
nor even possible. The issuing banks, guided solely by their
striving for gain, would thereby serve the public interest
better than any institution Q.as ever done or could do that
supposedly aimed at it. There neither would exist a definable
quantity of money of a nation or region, nor would it be
desirable that the individual issuers of the several currencies
should aim at anything but to make as large as possible the
aggregate value of their currency that the public was prepared
to hold at the given value of the unit. If we are right that,
being able to choose, the public would prefer a currency whose
purchasing power it could expect to be stable, this would
provide a better currency and secure more stable business
conditions than have ever existed before.
The supposed chief weakness of the market order, the recur-
rence of periods of mass unemployment, is always pointed
out by socialists and other critics as an inseparable and un-
pardonable defect of capitalism.
It proves in fact wholly
to be the result of government preventing private enterprise
from working freely and providing itself with a money that
would secure stability. We have seen that there can be no
doubt that free enterprise would have been both able to provide
a money securing stability and that striving for individual gain
would have driven private financial institutions to do so if they
1 O. Eckstein [14], especially p. 19: 'Traditionally, stabilisation theory has viewed
private, capitalist economy as a mechanism which produces fluctuations....There
is no question that government is a major source of instability.' And p. 25: 'The
rate of inflation [in the US between 1962 and 1972] would have been sub-
stantially less, real growth would have been smoother, the total amount of
unemployment experienced would have been little changed but the variations
would have been milder, and the terminal conditions at the end of the period
would have made it possible to avoid the wage and price controls.'
2 The long depression of the 1930s, which led to the revival of Marxism (which
would probably have been dead today without it), was wholly due to the mis-
management of money by government-before as well as after the crisis of 1929.
had been permitted. I am not sure that private enterprise would
adopt the manner of performing the task I have suggested, but
I am inclined to think that, by its habitual procedure of
selecting the most successful, it would in time throw up better
solutions to these problems than anyone can foresee today.
Monetary policy a cause of depressions
What we should have learned is that lTIOnetary policy is much
more likely to be a cause than a cure of depressions, because
it is much easier, by giving in to the clamour for cheap money,
to cause those misdirections of production that make a later
reaction inevitable, than to assist the economy in extricating
itself from the consequences of overdeveloping in particular
directions. The past instability of the market economy is the conse-
quence of the exclusion of the most important regulator of the market
mechanism, money, from itself being regulated by the market process.
A single monopolistic governmental agency can neither
possess the information which should govern the supply of
money nor would it, if it knew what it ought to do in the
general interest, usually be in a position to act in that manner.
Indeed, if, as I am convinced, the main advantage of the
market order is that prices will convey to the acting individuals
the relevant information, only the constant observation of the
course of current prices of particular commodities can provide
information on the direction in which more or less money ought
to be spent. Money is not a tool of policy that can achieve
particular foreseeable results by control of its quantity. But
it should be part of the self-steering mechanism by which indi-
viduals are constantly induced to adjust their activities to
circumstances on which they have information only through
the abstract signals of prices. It should be a serviceable link
in the process that communicates the effects of events never
wholly known to anybody and that is required to maintain
an order in which the plans of participating persons match.
Government cannot act in the general interest
Yet even if we assumed that government could know what
should be done about the supply of money in the general
interest, it is highly unlikely that it would be able to act in that
manner. As Professor Eckstein, in the article quoted above,
concludes from his experience in advising governments:
'Governments are not able to live by the rules even if they
were to adopt the philosophy [of providing a stable frame-
Once governments are given the power to benefit particular
groups or sections of the population, the mechanism of majority
government forces them to use it to gain the support of a
sufficient number of them to command a majority. The
constant temptation to meet local or sectional dissatisfaction
by manipulating the quantity of money so that more can be
spent on services for those clamouring for assistance will often
be irresistible. Such expenditure is not an appropriate remedy
but necessarily upsets the proper functioning of the market.
In a true emergency such as war, governments would of
course still be able to force upon people bonds or other pieces
of paper for unavoidable payments which cannot be made from
current revenues. Compulsory loans and the like would
probably be more compatible with the required rapid readjust-
ments of industry to radically changed circumstances than an
inflation that suspends the effective working of the price
No more balance-oj-payment problems
With the disappearance of distinct territorial currencies there
would of course also disappear the so-called 'balance-of-pay-
ment problems' believed to cause intense difficulties to present-
day monetary policy. There would, necessarily, be continuous
redistributions of the relative and absolute quantities of
currency in different regions as some grew relatively richer and
others relatively poorer. But this would create no more diffi-
culties than the same process causes today within any large
country. People who grew richer would have more money
and those who grew poorer would have less. That would be
all. The special difficulties caused by the fact that under
existing arrangements the reduction of the distinct cash basis
of one country requires a contraction of the whole separate
superstructure of credit erected on it would no longer exist.
Similarly, the closer connections of the structure of the prices
1 O. Eckstein [14], p. 26.
prevailing within anyone country as against prices in neigh-
bouring countries, and with it the statistical illusion of the
relative movement of distinct national price levels, would
largely disappear. Indeed it would be discovered that 'balance-
of-payment problems' are a quite unnecessary effect of the
existence of distinct national currencies, which is the cause of
the wholly undesirable closer coherence of national prices
than of international prices. From the angle of a desirable
international economic order the 'balance-of-payment prob-
lem' is a pseudo-problem about which nobody need worry but
a monopolist of the issue of money for a given territory. And
not the least advantage of the disappearance of distinct
national currencies would be that we could return-to the happy
days of statistical innocence in which nobody could know what
the balance of payment of his country or region was and thus
nobody could worry or would have to care about it.
The addictive drug of cheap monry
The belief that cheap money is always desirable and beneficial
makes inevitable and irresistible the pressure on any political
authority or monopolist known to be capable of making money
cheap by issuing more of it. Yet loanable funds made artificially
cheap by creating more money for lending them, not only help
those to whom they are lent, though at the expense of others,
but for a while have a general stimulating effect on business
activity. That at the same time such issues have the effect of
destroying the steering mechanism of the market is not so easily
seen. But supplies of such funds for additional purchases of
goods produce a distortion of the structure of relative prices
which draws resources into activities that cannot be lastingly
maintained and thereby become the cause of an inevitable
later reaction. These indirect and slow effects are, however, in
their nature very much more difficult to recognise or under-
stand than the immediate pleasant effects and particularly the
benefits to those to whom the additional money goes in the
first instance.
To provide a medium of exchange for people who want to
hold it until they wish to buy an equivalent for what they
have supplied to others is a useful service like producing any
other good. If an increase in the demand for such cash balances
is met by an increase of the quantity of money (or a reduction
of the balances people want to hold by a corresponding
decrease of the total amount of money), it does not disturb
the correspondence between demand and supply of all other
commodities or services. But it is really a crime like theft to
enable some people to buy more than they have earned by
more than the amount which other people have at the same
time foregone to claim.
When committed by a monopolistic issuer of money, and
especially by government, it is however a very lucrative crime
which is generally tolerated and remains unpunished because
its consequences are not understood. But for the issuer of a
currency which has to compete with other currencies, it would
be a suicidal act, because it would destroy the service for which
people did want to hold his currency.
Because of a lack of general understanding, the crime of
over-issue by a monopolist is still not only tolerated but even
applauded. That is one of the chief reasons why the smooth
working of the market is so frequently upset. But today almost
any statesman who tries to do good in this field, and certainly
anyone forced to do what the large organised interests think
good, is therefore likely to do much more harm than good. On
the other hand, anyone who merely knows that the success of
his business of issuing money rests wholly on his ability to keep
the buying power of his currency constant, will do more for
the public good by aiming solely at large profits for himself
than by any conscious concern about the more remote effects
of his actions.
The abolition of central banks
Perhaps a word should be explicitly inserted here about the
obvious corollary that the abolition of the government mono-
poly of the issue of money should involve also the disappearance
of central banks as we know them, both because one might
conceive of some private bank assuming the function of a
central bank and because it might be thought that, even
without a government monopoly of issue, some of the classic
functions of central banks, such as that of acting as 'lender of
last resort' or of 'holder of the ultimate reserve',
might still
be required.
The need for such an institution is, however, entirely due to
the commercial banks incurring liabilities payable on demand
1 The standard description of this function and of how it arose is still W. Bagehot,
who could rightly speak [3, p. 142] of 'a natural state of banking, that in which
all the principal banks kept their own reserve'.
in a unit of currency which some other bank has the sole right
to issue, thus in effect creating money redeemable in terms of
another money. This, as we shall have still to consider, is indeed
the chief cause of the instability of the existing credit system,
and through it of the wide fluctuations in all economic activity.
Without the central bank's (or the government's) monopoly of
issuing money, and the legal tender provisions of the law, there
would be no justification whatever for the banks to rely for
their solvency on the cash to be provided by another body. The
'one reserve system', as Walter Bagehot called it, is an insepar-
able accompaniment of the monopoly of issue but unnecessary
and undesirable without it.
It might still be argued that central banks are necessary to
secure the required 'elasticity' of the circulation. And though
this expression has probably in the past been more abused than
any other to disguise inflationist demands, we must not over-
look its valid kernel. The manner in which elasticity of supply
and stability of value of the money can be reconciled is a
genuine problem, and it will be solved only if the issuer of a
given currency is aware that his business depends on so regulat-
ing the quantity of his currency that the value of its unit
remains stable (in terms of commodities). If an addition to the
quantity would lead to a rise of prices, it would clearly not be
justified, however urgently some may feel that they need
additional cash-which then will be cash to spend and not to
add to their liquidity reserves. What makes a currency a
universally acceptable, that is really liquid, asset ,vill be
precisely. that it is preferred to other assets because its buying
power is expected to remain constant.
What is necessarily scarce is not liquidity but buying power-
the command over goods for consumption "Or use in further
production, and this is limited because there is no more than a
given amount of these things to buy. So far as people \vant
more liquid assets solely to hold them but not to spend them,
they can be manufactured without thereby depreciating their
value. But if people want more liquid assets in order to spend
them on goods, the value of such credits will melt between their
No fixing of rates of interest
With the central banks and the monopoly of the issue of money
would, of course, disappear also the possibility of deliberately
determining the rate of interest. The disappearance of what is
called 'interest policy' is wholly desirable. The rate of interest,
like any other price, ought to record the aggregate effects of
thousands ofcircumstances affecting the demand for and supply
of loans which cannot possibly be known to anyone agency.
The effects of most price changes are unpleasant to some, and,
like other price changes, changes in the rate of interest convey
to all concerned that an aggregate of circumstances which
nobody knows has made them necessary. The whole idea that
the rate of interest ought to be used as an instrument of policy
is entirely mistaken, since only competition in a free market
can take account of all the circumstances which ought to be
taken account of in the determination of the rate of interest.
So long as each separate issue bank in its lending activity
aiIned at regulating the volume of its outstanding currency so
as to keep its buying power constant, the rate of interest at
which it could do so would be determined for it by the market.
And, on the whole, the lending for investment purposes of all
the banks together, if it was not to drive up the price level,
could not exceed the current volume of savings (and conversely,
if it was not to depress the price level, must not fall short of the
current volume of savings) by more than was required to
increase aggregate demand in step with a growing volume of
output. The rate of interest would then be determined by
balancing the demand for money for spending purposes with
the supply required for keeping the price level constant. I
believe this would assure as close an agreement between saving
and investment as we cali hope to achieve, leaving a balance
of change in the quantity of money to take account of changes
in the demand for money caused by changes in the balances
people want to hold.
Of course, government would still affect this market rate of
interest by the net volume of its borrowing. But it could no
longer practise those most pernicious manipulations of the rate
of interest which are intended to enable it to borrow cheaply-
a practice which has done so much harm in the past that this
effect alone would seem an adequate reason why government
should be kept away from the tap.
Readers who know of my consistent support over more than
40 years of fixed rates of exchange between national currencies,
and of my critique of a system of flexible rates of foreign
even after most of my fellow defenders of a free
market had become converts to this system, will probably feel
at first that my present position is in conflict with, or even
represents a complete reversal of, my former views. This is
not so. In two respects my present proposal is a result of the
further development of the considerations which deterluined
my former position.
In the first instance, I have always regarded it as thorough-
ly undesirable that the structure of the prices of commodities
and services in one country should be lifted and lowered as a
whole relatively to the price structure of other countries in
order to correct some alteration in the supply of or demand for
a particular commodity. This was erroneously thought to be
necessary chiefly because the availability of statistical informa-
tion in the form of index numbers of the average movement of
prices in one country gave the misleading impression that 'the
internal value' of one currency as such had to be changed
relatively to the value of other currencies, while what was re-
quired were primarily changes of the relations between particu-
lar prices in all the countries concerned. So far as the assumed
necessity of changes in relation between general prices in the
countries was true, this was an artificial and undesirable effect
of the imperfection of the international monetary system which
the gold standard with a superstructure of deposit money
produced. We will consider these questions further in the next
Remove protection of official currency from competition
Secondly, I had regarded fixed rates of exchange as necessary
for the same reason for which I now plead for completely free
1 The first systematic exposition of my position will be found in my 1937 Geneva
lectures on Monetary Nationalism and International Stability [27]. It contains a
series of lectures hastily and badly written on a topic to which I had earlier
committed myself but which I had to write when I was pre-occupied with other
problems. I still believe that it contains important arguments against flexible
exchange rates between national currencies which have never been adequately
answered, but I am not surprised that few people appear ever to have read it.
markets for all kinds of currency, namely that it was required
to impose a very necessary discipline or restraint on the
agencies issuing money. Neither I, nor apparently anybody else,
then thought of the much more effective discipline that would
operate if the providers of money were deprived of the power
of shielding the money they issued against the rivalry of
competing currencies.
The compulsion to maintain a fixed rate of redemption in
terms of gold or other currencies has in the past provided the
only discipline that effectively prevented monetary authorities
from giving in to the demands of the ever-present pressure for
cheap money. The gold standard, fixed rates of exchange, or
any other form of obligatory conversion at a fixed rate, served
no other purpose than to impose upon the issuers of money
such a discipline and, by making its regulation automatic, to
deprive them of the power arbitrarily to change the quantity
of money. It is a discipline that has proved too weak to
prevent governments from breaking it. Yet, though the
regulations achieved by those automatic controls were far from
ideal or even tolerably satisfactory, so long as currencies were
thus regulated they were much more satisfactory than anything
the discretionary powers of governmental monopolies have ever
achieved for any length of time. Nothing short of the belief that
it would be a national disgrace for a country not to live up to its
obligations has ever sufficed adequately to strengthen the resist-
ance of monetary authorities against pressures for cheap money.
I should never have wanted to deny that a very wise and politi-
cally independent monetary authority might do better than it is
compelled to do in order to preserve a fixed parity with gold or
another currency. But I can see no hope of monetary authorities
in the real world prevailing for any length of time in their good
Better even than gold-the 'wobbly anchor'
It ought by now of course to be generally understood that the
value of a currency redeemable in gold (or in another currency)
is not derived from the value of that gold, but merely kept at
the same value through the automatic regulation ofits quantity.
The superstition dies only slowly, but even under a gold
standard it is no more (or perhaps even less) true that the
value of the currency is determined by the value in other uses
of the gold it contains (or by its costs of production) than is
the converse, that the value of gold is determined by the value
of the currencies into which it can be converted. Historically
it is true that all the money that preserved its value for any
length of time was metallic (or money convertible into metal-
gold or silver) ; and governments sooner or later used to debase
even metallic money, so that all the kinds of paper money
of ,vhich we have experience \vere so much worse. Most people
therefore. now believe that relief can come only from returning
to a metallic (or other commodity) standard. But not only is a
metallic money also exposed to the risks of fraud by govern-
ment; even at its best it would never be as good a money as
one issued by an agency whose whole business rested on its
success in providing a money the public preferred to other
kinds. Though gold is an anchor-and any anchor is better
than a money left to the discretion of government-it is a
very wobbly anchor. It certainly could not bear the strain if
the majority of countries tried to run their own gold standard.
There just is not enough gold about. An international gold
standard could today mean only that a few countries maintained
a real gold standard while the others hung on to them through
a gold exchange standard.
Competition would provide better money than would government
I believe ,,ye can do much better than gold ever made possible.
Governn1ents cannot do better. Free enterprise, i.e. the
institutions that would emerge from a process of competition
in providing good money, no doubt would. There would
in that event also be no need to encumber the money
supply with the complicated and expensive provision for
convertibility which was necessary to secure the automatic
operation of the gold standard and which made it appear as at
least more practicable than what would ideally seem much
more suitable-a commodity reserve standard. A very attrac-
tive scheme for storing a large variety of raw materials and
other standard commodities had been worked out for such a
standard to ensure the redeemability of the currency unit by a
fixed combination of such commodities and thereby the
stability of the currency. Storage would however be so expensive,
and practicable only for such a small collection of commodities,
as to reduce the value of the proposal.
But some such pre-
1 cr. Friedman [19].
, [110]
caution to force the issuer to regulate the amount of his
currency appears necessary or desirable only so long as his
interest would be to increase or decrease its value above or
below the standard,. Convertibility is a safeguard necessary to
impose upon a monopolist, but unnecessary with competing
suppliers who cannot maintain themselves in the business
unless they provide money at least as advantageous to the
user as anybody else.
Governrnent monopoly of money unnecessary
Not so very long ago, in 1960, I myself argued that it is not only
impracticable but probably undesirable even if possible to
deprive governments of their control over monetary policy. 1
This view was still based on the common tacit assumption that
there must be in each country a single uniform kind of money.
I did not then even consider the possibility of true competition
between currencies within any given country or region. If
only one kind of money is permitted, it is probably true that
the monopoly of its issue must be under the control of govern-
ment. The concurrent circulation of several currencies might
at times be slightly inconvenient, but careful analysis of its
effects indicates that the advantages appear to be so very much
greater than the inconveniences that they hardly count in
comparison, though unfamiliarity with the new situation
makes them appear much bigger than they probably would
DijJerence between voluntarily accepted and enforced paper money
Much as all historical experience appears to justify the deep
mistrust most people harbour against paper money, it is well
founded only \vith regard to money issued by government.
Frequently the term 'fiat money' is used as if it applied to all
paper money, but the expression refers of course only to money
which has been given currency by the arbitrary decree or
other act of authority. Money which is current only because
people have been forced to accept it is wholly different from
money that has come to be accepted because people trust the
issuer to keep it stable. Voluntarily accepted paper money
therefore ought not to suffer from the evil reputation govern-
ments have given paper money.
1 Hayek [29], pp. 324 et seq.
Money is valued because, and in so far as, it is known to be
scarce, and is for this reason likely to be accepted at the going
value by others. And any money which is voluntarily used
only because it is trusted to be kept scarce by the issuer, and
which will be held by people only so long as the issuer justifies
that trust, will increasingly confirm its acceptability at the
established value. People will know that the risk they run in
holding it will be smaller than the risk they run in holding any
other good on which they do not possess special information.
Their willingness to hold it will rest on the experience that
other people will be ready to accept it at an approximately
known range of prices because they also have learnt to hold
the same expectation, and so on. This is a state of affairs that
can continue indefinitely and will even tend to stabilise itself
lnore and more as confirmed expectations increase the trust.
Some people apparently find it difficult to believe that a
mere token money which did not give the holder a legal claim
for redemption in terms of some object possessing an intrinsic
value (equal to its current value) could ever be generally
accepted for any length of time or preserve its value. They seem
to forget that for the past 40 years in the whole Western World
there has been no other money than such irredeemable tokens.
The various paper currencies we have had to use have pre-
served a value which for some time was only slowly decreasing
not because of any hope of ultimate redemption, but only
because the monopolistic agencies authorised to issue the
exclusive kind of currency of a particular country did in some
inadequate degree restrict its amount. But the clause on a
pound-note saying '1 promise to pay to the bearer on demand
the sum of one pound', or whatever the figure be, signed for
the Governor and Company of the Bank of England by their
Chief Cashier, means of course no more than that they promise
to exchange that piece of paper for other pieces of paper.
It is entirely at the discretion of these institutions or govern-
ments to regulate the total amount of their issues in circulation
by exchanging some of the notes for other kinds of money or
for securities. This sort of redemption is just a method of
regulating the quantity of money in the hands of the public,
and, so long as public opinion was not misguided by specious
theories, it has always been taken as a matter of course that,
e.g., 'the value of [greenbacks] changes as the government
chooses to enlarge or to contract the issue'.1
History certainly disproves the suggestion that in this respect
government, which only profits from excessive issues, can be
trusted more than a private issuer whose whole business
depends on his not abusing that trust. Does anyone really
believe that in the industrial countries of the West, after the
experience of the last half-century, anybody trusts the value
of government-sponsored money more than he would trust
money issued by a private agency whose business was under-
stood to depend wholly on its issuing good money?
xx. SHOULD THERE BE SEPARATE CURRENCY
Weare so used to the existence in each country of a distinct
currency in which practically all internal transactions are
conducted that we tend to regard it also as natural and neces-
sary for the whole structure of internal prices to move together
relatively to the price structure of other countries. This is by no
means a necessary or in any sense natural or desirable state of
National currencies not inevitable or desirable
At least without tariffs or other obstructions to the free move-
ment of goods and men across frontiers, the tendency of
national prices to move in unison is an effect of, rather than
a justification for:, maintaining separate national currency
systems. And it has led to the growth of national institutions,
such as nation-wide collective bargaining, which have intensi-
fied these differences. The reason for this development is that
the control over the supply of money gives national govern-
ments more power over actions which are wholly undesirable
from the point of view of international order and stability. It
is the kind of arrangement of which only etatists of various
complexions can approve but which is wholly inimical to
frictionless international relations.
There is indeed little reason why, apart from the effects of
1 W. Bagehot [3], p. 12.
monopolies made possible by national protection, territories
that happen to be under the same government should form
distinct national economic areas which would benefit by having
a common currency distinct from that of other areas. In an
order largely dependent on international exchange, it was
rather absurd to treat the often accidental agglomeration of
different regions under the same government as a distinct
economic area. The recognition of this truth has however only
recently led a few economists to ask what would be desirable
currency areas-a question they found rather difficult to
While historically distinct national currencies were simply
an instrument to enhance the power of national governments,
the modern argument for monetary nationalism favours an
arrangement under which all prices in a region can simul-
taneously be raised or lowered relatively to all prices in other
regions. This is regarded as an advantage because it avoids
the necessity to lower a group of particular prices, especially
wages, when foreign demand for the products concerned has
fallen and shifted to some other national region. But it is a
political makeshift; in practice it means that, instead of lowering
thefew prices immediately affected, a very much larger number of
prices will have to be raised to restore international equilibrium
after the international price of the local currency has been
reduced. The original motive for the agitation for flexible rates
of exchange between national currencies was therefore purely
inflationist, although a foolish attempt was made to place the
burden of adjustment on the surplus countries. But it was
later also taken up in countries which wanted to protect
themselves against the effects of the inflationist policies of
There is no better case for preventing the decrease of the
quantity of money circulating in a region or sector of a larger
community than there is for governmental measures to prevent
a decrease of the money incomes of particular individuals or
groups-even though such measures might temporarily relieve
the hardships of the groups living there. It is even essential for
honest government that nobody should have the power of
relieving groups from the necessity of having to adapt them-
1 McKinnon [40] and Mundell [49J.
selves to unforeseen changes, because, if government can do so,
it will be forced by political necessity to do so all the time.
Rigidity of wage-rates: raising national price structure is no solution
Experience has shown that what was believed to be the easy
way out from the difficulties created by the rigidity of wages,
namely, raising the whole national price level, is merely making
matters worse, since in effect it relieves trade unions of the
responsibility for the unemployment their wage demands
would otherwise cause and creates an irresistible pressure on
governments to rnlitigate these effects by inflation. I remain
therefore as opposed to monetary nationalism
or flexible
rates of exchange between national currencies as ever. But I
prefer now abolishing monetary frontiers altogether to merely
making national currencies convertible into each other at a
fixed rate. The whole conception of cutting out a particular
sector from the international structure of prices and lifting or
lowering it, as it were, bodily against all the other prices of the
same commodities still seems to me an idea that could be
conceived only in the brains of men who have come to think
exclusively in terms of national ('macro') price levels, not of
individual ('micro') prices. They seem to have thought of
national price levels as the acting determinants of human
action and to have ceased to understand the function of
relative prices.
Stable national price level could disrupt economic activity
There is really no reason why we should want the price level
of a region interconnected by a large number of commodity
streams with the rest of the world economy to have a stable
price level. To keep this price level stable in spite of shifts of
demand towards or away from the region only disturbs and
does not assist the functioning of the market. The relation
between regions or localities is in this respect not essentially
different from the relations between countries. The transfer of
demand for airplanes from Seattle to Los Angeles will indeed
lead to a loss ofjobs and a decline of incomes and probably of
1 The historical origin of the preoccupation with national price levels as well as
the other aspects of Monetary Nationalism were discussed in my book with that
title [27], especially p. 43.
retail prices in Seattle; and if there is a fall in wages in Seattle,
it will probably attract other industries. But nothing would be
gained, except perhaps for the moment, by increasing the
quantity of money in Seattle or the State of Washington. And
it would not ease the problem if the whole North West of the
United States had a currency of its o\"n which it could keep
constant or even increase to meet such a misfortune for some of
its inhabitants.
But while we have no foundations for desiring particular
areas to have their individual currencies, it is of course an
altogether different question whether the free issue of com-
petitive currencies in each area would lead to the formation of
currency areas-or rather of areas where different currencies
were predominant, although others could be used. As we have
seen (Section XII), there might develop different preferences as
regard the commodity equivalent of the currency that should
be kept constant. In a primitive country where people used
little but rice, fish, pork, cotton and timber, they would be
chiefly concerned about different prices-though local tend-
encies of this sort would probably be offset by those of the
users to be guided in their preferences by the greater trust they
had in an internationally-reputed issuer of money than in one
who adapted his currency specially to local circumstances. Nor
would I be surprised to find that in large areas onlyone currency
was generally used in ordinary dealings, so long as potential
competition made its issuer keep it stable. As everywhere else,
so long as it does not come to trying out innovations or improve-
ments, competition in posse
is likely to be nearly as effective
as competition in esse.! And the ready convertibility of the
generally used currency would make all those who had any
traffic beyond the region change their holdings quickly
enough into another currency if their suspicions about the
commonly accepted one were aroused.
Such areas in which one currency predominates would
however not have sharp or fixed boundaries but would largely
overlap, and their dividing lines would fluctuate. But once
the principle were generally accepted in the economically
leading countries, it would probably spread rapidly to wher-
ever people could choose their institutions. No doubt there
would remain enclaves under dictators who did not wish to
1 [In posse: potential; in esse: in being.-ED.]
let go their power over money-even after the absence of
exchange control had become the mark of a civilised and
honest country.
The two goals of public finance and of the regulation of a
satisfactory currency are entirely different from, and largely
in conflict with, each other. To place both tasks in the hands
of the same agency has in consequence always led to confusion
and in recent years has had disastrous consequences. It has
not only made money the chief cause of economic fluctuations
but has also greatly facilitated an uncontrollable growth of
public expenditure. If we are to preserve a functioning market
economy (and with it individual freedom), nothing can be more
urgent than that we dissolve the unholy marriage between monetary and
fiscal policy, long clandestine but formally consecrated with the
victory of 'Keynesian' economics.
We need not say much more about the unfortunate effects of
the 'needs' of finance on the supply of money. Not only have
all major inflations until recently been the result of govern-
ments covering their financial 'needs' by the printing press.
Even during relatively stable periods the regular necessity for
central banks to accommodate the financial 'needs' of govern-
ment by keeping interest rates low has been a constant em-
barrassment: it ha.s interfered with the banks' efforts to secure
stability and has given their policies an inflationist bias that
was usually checked only belatedly by the mechanism of the
gold standard.
Good national monf:Y impossible under democratic government dependent
on special interests
I do not think it an exaggeration to say that it is wholly
impossible for a central bank subject to political control, or
even exposed to serious political pressure, to regulate the
quantity ofmoney in a way conducive to a smoothly functioning
market order. A good money, like good law, must operate
without regard to the effects that decisions of the issuer will
have on known groups or individuals. A benevolent dictator
might conceivably disregard these effects; no democratic
government dependent on a number of special interests can
possibly do so. But to use the control of the supply of money as
an instrument for achieving particular ends destroys the
equilibrating operation of the price mechanism, which is
required to maintain the continuing process of ordering the
market that gives individuals a good chance of having their
expectations fulfilled.
Government monopoly of money and government expenditure
But we have probably said enough about the harm that
monetary policy guided by financial considerations is likely
to do. What we must still consider is the effect that power over
the supply of money has had on financial policy. Just as the
absence of competition has prevented the monopolist supplier
of money from being subject to a salutary discipline, the power
over money has also relieved governments of the necessity to
keep their expenditure within their revenue. It is largely for
this reason that 'Keynesian' economics has become so rapidly
popular among socialist economists. Indeed, since ministers
of finance were told by economists that running a deficit was
a meritorious act, and even that, so long as there were un-
employed resources, extra government expenditure cost the
people nothing, any effective bar to a rapid increase in govern-
ment expenditure was destroyed.
There can be little doubt that the spectacular increase in
government expenditure over the last 30 years, with govern-
ments in some Western countries clain1ing up to half or more
of the national income for collective purposes, was made pos-
sible by government control of the issue of money. On the one
hand, inflation has constantly pushed people with a given real
income into much higher tax brackets than they anticipated
when they approved the rates, and thus raised government
revenue more rapidly than they had intended. On the other,
the habitual large deficits, and the comparative ease with
which budgeted figures could be exceeded, still further in-
creased the share of the real output governments were able to
claim for their purposes.
Government money and unbalanced budgets
In a sense it is arbitrary to require governments to balance
their budget for the calendar year. But the alternations of the
seasons and the firlnly established business practices of account-
ing provide a good reason; and the practice of business,
where receipts and expenditure are regularly balanced· over a
period with known fluctuations, further supports the usage. If
major economic fluctuations can be prevented by other arrange-
ments, the conventional annual budget is still the best term for
requiring such balancing. Assuming it to be true that the regu-
lation of the supply of money by competition between private
currencies would secure not only a stable value of money but
also stable business conditions, the argument that government
deficits are necessary to reduce unemployment amounts to the
contention that a government control of money is needed to
cure what it is itself causing. There is no reason why, with a
stable money, it should ever be desirable to allow government
to spend more than it has. And it is certainly more important
that government expenditure does not become a cause of
general instability than that the clumsy apparatus of govern-
ment should (in the most unlikely event that it acts in time) be
available to mitigate any slackening of economic activity.
The ease with which a minister of finance can today both
budget for an excess of expenditure over revenue and exceed
that expenditure has created a wholly new style of finance
compared with the careful housekeeping of the past. And since
the ease with which one demand after another is conceded
evokes ever new expectations of further bounty, the process is
a self-accelerating: one which even men who genuinely wish
to avoid it find it impossible to stop. Anyone who knows the
difficulty of restraining a bureaucratic apparatus not controlled
by profit-and-Ioss calculaitions from constantly expanding also
knows that without the rigid barrier of strictly limited funds
there is nothing to stop ian indefinite growth of government
Dnless we restore a s ~ t u a t i o n in which governments (and
other public authorities) lfind that if they overspend they will,
like everybody else, be unable to meet their obligations, there
will be no halt to this growth which, by substituting collective
for private activity, threatens to suffocate individual initiative.
Under the prevailing form of unlimited democracy, in which
government has power to confer special material benefits on
groups, it is forced to buy the support of sufficient numbers to
add up to a majority. Even with the best will in the world, no
government can resist this pressure unless it can point to a
firm barrier it cannot cross. While governments will of course
occasionally be forced to borrow from the public to meet
unforeseen requirements, or choose to finance some invest-
ments in that manner, it is highly undesirable in any circum-
stances that these funds should be provided by the creation of
additional money. Nor is it desirable that those additions to the
total quantity of money which are required in a growing
economy to equip the suppliers of additional factors of pro-
duction with the needed cash balances should be introduced
into circulation in this manner.
Government power over money facilitates centralisation
There can be little doubt also that the ability of central
governments to resort to this kind of finance is one of the
contributory causes of the advance in the most undesirable
centralisation of government. Nothing can be more welcome
than depriving government of its power over money and so stop-
ping the apparently irresistible trend towards an accelerating
increase of the share of the national income it is able to claim.
If allowed to continue, this trend would in a few years bring us
to a state in which governments would claim 100 per cent
(in Sweden and Britain it already exceeds 60 per cent) of all
resources-and would in consequence become literally
The more completely public finance can be
separated from the regulation of the monetary circulation, the
better it will be. It is a power which always has been harmful.
Its use for financial purposes is always an abuse. And govern-
ment has neither the interest nor the capacity to exercise it in
the manner required to secure the smooth flow of economic
The suggestion of depriving government of the monopoly of
issuing money and of its power of making any money 'legal
tender' for all existing debts has been made here in the first
instance because governments have invariably and inevitably
grossly abused that power throughout the whole of history
and thereby gravely disturbed the self-steering mechanism of
lOne alarming feature, the threat of which is not yet sufficiently appreciated, is
the spreading tendency to regard a government pension as the. onlY trustworthy
provision for one's old age, because experience seems to demonstrate thaf
political expediency will force governments to maintain or even to increase
its real value.
the market. But it may turn out that cutting off government
from the tap which supplies it with additional money for its
use may prove as important in order to stop the inherent
tendency of unlimited government to grow indefinitely, which
is becoming as menacing a danger to the future of civilisation
as the badness of the money it has supplied. Only if people
are made to perceive that they must pay in undisguised taxes
(or voluntarily lend) all the money government can spend can
the process of buying majority support by granting special
benefits to ever-increasing numbers with particular interests
be brought to a stop.
For the vast majority of people the appearance of several con-
current merely offer themalternatives; itwould
not make necessary any change in their habitual use of money.
Experience would gradually teach them how to improve their
position by s\vitching to other kinds of money. Retail merchants
would soon be offered by the banks the appropriate calculating
equipment which would relieve them of any initial difficulties
in management or accounting. Since the issuer of the money
they used would be interested in supplying assistance, they
would probably discover they were better served than before.
In manufacture, trade and the service industries, learning to
take full advantage of the new opportunities might take a little
longer, but there would be no important necessary changes in
the conduct of business or unavoidably difficult adaptations.
Preventing rapid depreciation offormer!y exclusive currency
The two activities that would be most profoundly affected, and
in which an almost complete change of habitual practices and
routines would be required, are public finance and the whole
range of private finance, including banking, insurance, building
societies, saving and mortgage banks as well. For government,
apart from the changes in financial policy mentioned in
Section XXI, the chief task would be to guard against a
rapid displacement and consequent accelerating depreciation
of the currency issued by the existing central bank. This
could probably be achieved only by instantly gIVIng it
complete freedom and independence, putting it thus on the
same footing with all other issue banks, foreign or newly
created at home, coupled with a simultaneous return to a
policy of balanced budgets, limited only by the possibility of
borrowing on an open loan market which they could not
manipulate. The urgency of these steps derives from the fact
that, once the displacement of the hitherto exclusive currency
by new currencies had commenced, it would be rapidly
speeded up by an accelerating depreciation that would be
practically impossible to stop by any of the ordinary methods of
contracting the circulation. Neither the government nor the
former central banks would possess the reserves of other
currencies or· of gold to redeem all the old money the public
would want to get rid of as soon as it could change from a
rapidly depreciating currency to one it had reason to believe
would remain stable. It could be brought to trust such a cur-
rency only if the bank issuing it demonstrated a capacity to
regulate it in precisely the same manner as the new issue banks
competing with it.
Introduce new currencies at once, not gradually
The other important requirement of government action, if the
transition to the new order is to be successful, is that all the
required liberties be conceded at once, and no tentative and
timid attempt be made to introduce the new order gradually,
or to reserve powers of control 'in case anything goes wrong'.
The possibility of free competition between a multiplicity. of
issuing institutions and the complete freedom of all movements
of currency and capital across frontiers are equally essential to
the success of the scheme. Any hesitant approach by a gradual
relaxation of the existing monopoly of issue would be certain
to make it fail. People would learn to trust the new money
only if they were confident it was completely exempt from any
government control. Only because they were under the sharp
control of competition could the private banks be trusted to
keep their money stable. Only because people could freely
choose which currency to use for their different purposes would
the process of selection lead to the good money prevailing.
Only because there was active trading on the currency ex-
change would the issuing banks be warned to take the required
action in time. Only because the frontiers were open to the
movement of currency and capital would there be assurance
of no collusion between local institutions to mismanage the
local currency. And only because there were free commodity
markets would stable average prices mean that the process of
adapting supply to demand was functioning.
Commercial bank change in policy
If the government succeeded in handing over the business of
supplying money to private institutions without the existing
currency collapsing, the chief problem for the individual com-
mercial banks would be to decide whether to try and establish
their own currency, or to select the other currency or currencies
in which they would in future conduct their business. The great
majority clearly would have to be content to do their business
in other currencies. They would thus (Sections XI and XII)
have to practise a kind of' 100 per cent banking', and keep a
full reserve against all their obligations payable on demand.
This necessity '\vould probably prove the most far-reaching
change in business practice required by competing currencies.
Since these banks presumably would have to charge substanti-
ally for running chequing accounts, they would lose that
business largely to the issuing banks and be reduced to the
administration of less liquid kinds of capital assets.
So long as this change could be effected by a deliberate
transition to the use of a currency of their choice, it might prove
somewhat painful but not raise unmanageable problems. And
to do away with banks which, in effect, created currency
without bearing any responsibility for the results has been for
more than a hundred years the desideratum of econonlists who
perceived the inherent instability of the mechanism into which
we had drifted but who usually saw no hope of ever getting
out of it. An institution which has proved as harmful as
fractional reserve banking without responsibility of the in-
dividual bank for the money (Le. cheque deposits) it created
cannot complain if the support by a government monopoly
that has made its existence possible is withdrawn. There will
certainly also have to develop generally a much sharper
distinction between pure banking and the investment business,
or between what used to be regarded as the English and the
Continental types of banks (Depositenbanken and Spekulations-
banken as these types were once described in German). I expect
that it ",rill soon be discovered that the business of creating
money does not go along well with the control of large invest-
ment portfolios or even control of large parts of industry.
A wholly different set of difficulties would of course arise if
the government or its privileged bank did not succeed in
preventing a collapse of its currency. This would be a possi-
bility which the banks not able to issue their own currency
would rightly fear, since a large part of their assets, namely
all their loans, would dwindle away with most of their liabilities.
But this would merely mean that the danger of a high inflation,
of the kind that now always threatens and that others might
avoid by shifting to other currencies, would for them become
particularly threatening. But banks have usually claimed that
they have more or less succeeded in bringing their assets
through even a galloping inflation. Bankers who do not know
how to do it lnight perhaps consult their colleagues in Chile
and elsewhere where they have had plenty of experience with
this problem. At any rate, to get rid of the present unstable
structure is too important a task for it to be sacrificed to the
interests of some special groups.
Though under the proposed arrangement the normal provision
of money would be entirely a function of private enterprise, the
chief danger to its smooth working would still be interference
by the state.! If the international character of the issuing
business should largely protect the issuing banks against direct
political pressure (though it would certainly invite attacks by
demagogues), the trust in anyone institution would still
largely depend on the trust in the government under which it
was established. To obviate the suspicion of serving the political
interests of the country in which they were established, it
would clearly be important that banks with headquarters in
different countries should compete with one another. The
greatest confidence, at least so long as peace was regarded as
1 I use here for once the term 'state
because it is the expression which in the
context would be commonly used by most people who would wish to emphasise
the probability of the beneficial nature of these public activities. Most people
rapidly become aware of the idealistic and unrealistic nature of their argument
if it is pointed out to them that the agent who acts is never an abstract state
but always a very concrete government with all the defects necessarily inherent
in this kind of political institution.
assured, would probably be placed in institutions established
in small wealthy countries for which international business
was an important source of income and that would therefore
be expected to be particularly careful of their reputation for
financial soundness.
Pressures for return to national monetary monopolies
Many countries would probably try, by subsidies or similar
measures, to preserve a locally established bank issuing a
distinct national currency that would be available side by side
with the international currencies, even if they were only
moderately successful. There would then be some danger that
the nationalist and socialist· forces active in a silly agitation
against multinational corporations would lead governments,
by advantages conceded to the national institution, to bring
about a gradual return to the present system of privileged
national issuers of currency.
Recurring governmental control of currency and capital movements
The chief danger, however, would threaten from renewed
attempts by governments to control the international move-
ments of currency and capital. It is a power which at present is
the most serious threat not only to a working international
economy but also to personal freedom; and it will remain a
threat so long as governments have the physical power to
enforce such controls. It is to be hoped that people will gradu-
ally recognise this threat to their personal freedom and that
they will make the complete prohibition of such measures an
entrenched constitutional provision. The ultimate protection
against the tyranny of government is that at least a large
number of able people can emigrate when they can no longer
stand it. I fear that few Englishmen, most of whom thought the
statement which I now repeat unduly alarmist and exaggerated
when I published it more than 30 years ago, ,.vill still feel so:
'The extent of the control over all life that economic control
confers is nowhere better illustrated than in the field of
foreign exchanges. Nothing would at first seem to affect
private life less than a state control of the dealings in foreign
exchange, and most people will regard its introduction with
complete indifference. Yet the experience of most con-
tinental countries has taught thoughtful people to regard
this step as the decisive advance on the path to totalitarian-
ism and the suppression of individual liberty. It is in fact
the complete delivery of the individual to the tyranny of the
state, the final suppression of all means of escape-not merely
for the rich, but for everybody. Once the individual is no
longer free to travel, no longer free to buy foreign books or
journals, once all means of foreign contact can be restricted
to those whom official opinion approves or for whom it is
regarded as necessary, the effective control of opinion is
much greater than that ever exercised by any of the absolutist
governments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.'
Next to the barrier to the excessive gro'\vth of government
expenditure, the second fundamental contribution to the
protection of individual freedom which the abolition of the
government monopoly of issuing money would secure would
probably be the intertwining of international affairs, which
would make it more and more impossible for government to
control international movements, and thus safeguard the
ability of dissidents to escape the oppression of a government
with which they profoundly disagreed.
A hope one may cherish is that, as competition usually does, it
will lead to the discovery of yet unknown possibilities in cur-
rency. This makes any attempt at prediction of the long-run
effects of the proposed reform exceedingly hazardous, but we
will attempt to summarise briefly what would appear to be the
probable long-run developments if it were adopted.
I believe that, once the system had fully established itself and
competition had eliminated a number of unsuccessful ventures,
there would remain in the free world several extensively used
and very similar currencies. In various large regions one or
two of them would be dominant, but these regions would have
no sharp or constant boundaries, and the use of the currencies
dominant in them would overlap in broad and fluctuating
border districts. ,Most of these currencies, based on similar
1 Hayek [28], p. 69, note.
collections of conlm.odities, would in the short run fluctuate
very little in terms of one another, probably much less than
the currencies of the most stable countries today, yet somewhat
more than currencies based on a true gold standard. If the
composition of the commodity basket on which they are based
were adapted to the conditions of the region in which they are
nlainly used, they nlight slowly drift apart. But most of them
would thus concur, not only in the sense of running side by side,
but also in the sense of agreeing with one another in the
movement of their values.
After the experimLental process of finding the most favoured
collection of commodities to the price of ,,,,hich the currency
was to be tied, further changes would probably be rare and
minor. Competition between the issuing banks would con-
centrate on the avoidance of even minor fluctuations of their
value in terms of these commodities, the degree of information
provided about their activities, and various additional services
(such as assistance in accounting) offered to their customers.
The currencies issued by "-any surviving government banks
would often themselves be driven more and more to accept and
even to seek payment in currencies other than those issued by a
favoured national institution.
The possibility of a multiplicity of similar currencies
There exists, however, a possibility or even probability I did
not consider in the First Edition. After certain currencies
based on a particular batch of commodities have become
widely accepted, rnany other banks might, under different
names, issue currencies the value of which was based on the
same collection of commodities as the one successful first,
either in the same or smaller or larger units. In other words,
competition might lead to the extensive use of the same
commodity base by a large number of issue banks that would
still compete for the favour of the public through the constancy
of the value of their issues or other services they offer. The
public might then learn to accept a considerable number of
such nl0neys with different names (but all described as, say,
of 'Zurich Standard') at constant rates of exchange; and shops
might post lists of all the currencies which they were prepared
to accept as representing that standard. So long as the press
properly exercised its supervisory function and warned the
public in time of any dereliction of duty on the part of some
issuers, such a system might satisfactorily serve for a long time.
Considerations of convenience would probably also lead to
the adoption of a standard unit, i.e. based not only on the
same collection of commodities but also of the same magnitude.
In this case most banks could issue, under distinct names, notes
for these standard units which would be readily accepted
locally as far as the reputation of the individual bank extended.
The preservation of a standard of long-term debts even while currencies
may lose their value
With the availability of at least some stable currencies the
absurd practice of making 'legal tender' a mere token which
may become valueless but still remain effective for the dis-
charge of debts contracted in what had been an object of a
certain value is bound to disappear. It was solely the power of
government to force upon people what they had not meant in
their contracts which produced this absurdity. With the
abolition of the government monopoly of issuing money the
courts will soon understand, and, I trust, statute law recognise,
that justice requires debts to be paid in terms of the units of
value which the parties to the contracts intended and not in
what government says is a substitute for them. (The exception
is where the contract explicitly provides for a stated number
of tokens rather than for a value expressed in terms of an
amount of tokens. )
After the development of a widely preferred common
standard of value the courts would in most cases have no
difficulty in determining the approximate magnitude of the
abstract value intended by the parties to a contract for the
value of such and such an amount of a widely accepted unit
of currency. If one currency in terms of the value of which a
contract had been concluded seriously depreciated beyond a
reasonable range of fluctuation, a court would not allow the
parties to gain or lose from the malpractice of the third party
that issued the currency. They would without difficulty be
able to determine the amount of some other currency or cur-
rencies with which the debtor was entitled and obliged to
discharge his obligation.
As a result, even the complete collapse of one currency would
not have the disastrous far-reaching consequences which a
similar event has today. Though the holders of cash, either in
the form of notes or ofdemand deposits in a particular currency,
might lose their whole value, this would be a relatively minor
disturbance compared with the general shrinkage or wiping
out of all claims to third persons expressed in that currency.
The whole structure of long-term contracts would remain
unaffected, and people would preserve their investments in
bonds, mortgages and similar forms of claims even though
they might lose all their cash if they were unfortunate to use
the currency of a bank that failed. A portfolio of bonds and
other long-term claims might still be a very safe investment
even if it happened that some issuers of currency became
insolvent and their notes and deposits valueless. Completely
liquid assets would still involve a risk-but who wants, except
perhaps temporarily, to keep all his assets in a very liquid
form? There could never occur that complete disappearance
of any common standard of debts or such a wiping out of all
monetary obligations as has been the final effect of all major
inflations. Long before this could happen, everybody would
have deserted the depreciated unit and no old obligation
could be discharged in terms of it.
New legal framework for banking
While governments should not interfere in this development
by any conscious attempts at control (Le. any acts of interven-
tion in the strict sense of the term), it may be found that new
rules of law are needed to provide an appropriate legal frame-
work within which the new banking practices could successfully
develop. It would, however, seem rather doubtful whether it
would assist developments if such rules were at once made
generally applicable by international treaties and experimenta-
tion with alternative arrangements thereby prevented.
How long it would take for some countries no longer to
desire to have a currency of their own for purely nationalistic
or prestige reasons, and for governments to stop misleading the
public by complaining about an undue restriction of their
sovereign power, is difficult to say.! The whole system is of
course wholly irreconcilable with any striving for totalitarian
powers of any sort.
1 Indeed it would be the day of final triumph of the new system when governments
began to prefer to receive taxes in currencies other than those they issue!
xxv. CONCLUSIONS
~ r h e abolition of the government monopoly of money was
conceived to prevent the bouts of acute inflation and deflation
which have plagued the world for the past 60 years. It proves
on examination to be also the much needed cure for a more
deep-seated disease: the recurrent waves of depression and
unemployment that have been represented as an inherent and
deadly defect of capitalism.
Gold standard not the solution
One might hope to prevent the violent fluctuations in the
value of money in recent years by returning to the gold standard
or some regime of fixed exchanges. I still believe that, so long
as the management of money is in the hands of government, the gold
standard with all its imperfections is the only tolerably safe
systenl. But we certainly can do better than that, though not
through government. Quite apart from the undeniable truth
that the gold standard also has serious defects, the opponents
of such a move can properly point out that a central direction
of the quantity of Inoney is in the present circumstances
necessary to counteract the inherent instability of the existing
credit system. But once it is recognised that this inherent
instability of credit is itself the effect of the structure of deposit
banking determined by the monopolistic control of the supply
of the hand-to-hand money in which the deposits must be
redeemed, these objections fall to the ground. If we want free
enterprise and a market economy to survive (as even the sup-
porters of a so-called 'mixed economy' presumably also wish),
,-ve have no choice but to replace the governmental currency
monopoly and national currency systems by free competition
between private banks of issue. We have never had the control
of money in the hands of agencies whose sole and exclusive
concern was to give the public what currency it liked best
among several kinds offered, and which at the same time staked
their existence on fulfilling the expectations they had created.
It may be that, with free competition between different kinds
of money, gold coins might at first prove to be the most popular.
But this very fact, the increasing demand for gold, would
probably lead to such a rise (and perhaps also violent fluctua-
tions) of the price of gold that, though it might still be widely
used for hoarding, it would soon cease to be convenient as the
unit for business transactions and accounting. There should
certainly be the same freedom for its use, but I should not
expect this to lead to its victory over other forms of privately
issued money, the demand for which rested on its quantity
being successfully regulated so as to keep its purchasing power
The very same fact which at present makes gold nl0re
trusted than government-controlled paper money, namely
that its total quantity cannot be manipulated at will in the
service of political aims, would in the long run rnake it appear
inferior to token money used by competing institutions whose
business rested on successfully so regulating the quantity of
their issues as to keep the value of the units approximately
Good monf:Y can come onry from self-interest, not from benevolence
We have always had bad money because private enterprise
was not permitted to give us a better one. In a world governed
by the pressure of organised interests, the important truth to
keep in mind is that we cannot count on intelligence or under-
standing but only on sheer self-interest to give us the institutions
we need. Blessed indeed will be the day when it will no longer
be from the benevolence of the government that we expect
good money but from the regard of the banks for their own
'It is in this manner that we obtain from one another the
far greater part of those good offices we stand in need of'1
-but unfortunately not yet a money that we can rely upon.
It was not 'capitalism' but government intervention which
has been responsible for the recurrent crises of the past.
Government has prevented enterprise from equipping itself
with the instruments that it required to protect itself against its
efforts being misdirected by an unreliable money and that it
would be both profitable for the supplier and beneficial to all
others to develop. The recognition of this truth makes it clear
that the reform proposed is not a minor technicality of finance
1 Adam Smith [54], p. 26.
I A theme repeatedly argued by the late Ludwig von Mises [45-47].
but a crucial issue which may decide the fate offree civilisation.
What is proposed here seems to me the only discernible way
of completing the market order and freeing it from its main
defect and the cause of the chief reproaches directed against it.
Is competitive paper currency practicable?
We cannot, of course, hope for such a reform before the public
understands what is at stake and what it has to gain. But those
who think the whole proposal wholly impracticable and utopian
should remember that 200 years ago in The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith wrote that
'to expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be
entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect
that an Oceana or Utopia should ever be established in it'.l
It took nearly go years fronl the publication of his work in
1776 until Great Britain became the first country to establish
complete free trade in 1860. But the idea caught on rapidly;
and if it had not been for the political reaction caused by the
French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars no doubt it would
have taken effect much sooner. It was not until 1819 that an
effective movement to educate the general public on these
matters started and it was in the end due to the devoted efforts
of a few men who dedicated themselves to spread the message
by an organised Free Trade Movement that what Smith had
called 'the insolent outrage of furious and disappointed
monopolists' was overcome.
1 [54], p. 471. The whole paragraph beginning with the sentence quoted and
concluding with the phrase cited further on is well worth reading in the present
2 As a reviewer of the First Edition of this essay (John Porteous, New Statesman,
14 January, 1977) sensibly observed: 'It would have seemed unthinkable 400
years ago that governments would ever relinquish control over religious belief.'
3 It has been said that my suggestion to 'construct' wholly new monetary institu-
tions is in conflict with my general philosophical attitude. But nothing is further
from my thoughts than any wish to design new institutions. What I propose is
simply to remove the existing obstacles which for ages have prevented the
evolution of desirable institutions in money. Our monetary and banking system
is the product of harmful restrictions imposed by governments to increase their
powers. They are certainly not institutions of which it can said they have been
tried and found good, since the people were not allowed to try any alternative.
To justify the demand for freedom of development in this field it was necessary
to explain what consequences would probably result from granting such freedom.
But what it is possible to foresee is necessarily limited. It is one of the great merits
of freedom that it encourages new inventions, and they are in their very nature
[Contd. on page 133]
I fear that since 'Keynesian' propaganda has filtered through
to the masses, has made inflation respectable and provided
agitators with arguments which the professional politicians are
unable to refute, the only way to avoid being driven by
continuing inflation into a controlled and directed economy,
and therefore ultinlately in order to save civilisation, will be
to deprive governments of their power over the supply of
'Free Money Movement'
What we now need is a Free Money Movement comparable
to the Free Trade Movement ofthe Igthcentury, demonstrating
not merely the harm caused by acute inflation, which could
justifiably be argued to be avoidable even with present institu-
tions, but the deeper effects of producing periods of stagnation
that are indeed inherent in the present monetary arrangements.
The alarm about current inflation is, as I can observe as I
write, only too quickly dispelled whenever the rate of inflation
slows down only a little. I have not much doubt that, by the
time these lines appear in print, there will be ample cause for a
renewal of this alarm (unless, which would be even worse, the
resumed inflation is concealed by price controls). Probably even
the new inflationary boom already initiated will again have
collapsed. But it will need deeper insight into the super-
ficially invisible effects of inflation to produce the result
required to achieve the abolition of the harmful powers of
[eontd.from page 732]
unpredictable. I expect evolution to be much more inventive than I can possibly
be. Though it is always the new ideas of comparatively few which shape social
evolution, the difference between a free and a regulated system is precisely that
in the former it is people who have the better ideas who will determine develop-
ments because they will be imitated, while in the latter only the ideas and desires
of those in power are allowed to shape evolution. Freedom always creates some
new risks. All I can say is that if I were responsible for the fate of a country
dear to me I would gladly take that risk in the field I have been considering here.
1 Recent experience also suggests that in future governments may find themselves
exposed to international pressure to pursue monetary policies which, while
harmful to their own citizens, are supposed to help some other country, and
will be able to escape such pressure only by divesting themselves both of the
power and the responsibility of controlling the supply of money. We have
already reached a stage in which countries which have succeeded in reducing
the annual rate of inflation to 5 per cent are exhorted by others who lustily
continue to inflate at 1.5 per cent per annum to assist them by 'reflation'.
government on the control of money. There is thus an immense
educational task ahead before we can hope to free ourselves
from the gravest threat to social peace and continued prosperity
inherent in existing monetary institutions.
It will be necessary that the problem and the urgent need of
reform come to be widely understood. The issue is not one
which, as may at first appear to the layman, concerns a minor
technicality of the financial system 'which he has never quite
understood. It refers to the one way in which we may still
hope to stop the continuous progress of all government towards
totalitarianism which already appears to many acute observers
as inevitable. I wish I could advise that we proceed slowly. But
the time may be short. What is now urgently required is not
the construction of a new system but the prompt removal of
all the legal obstacles which have for two thousand years
blocked the way for an evolution which is bound to throw up
beneficial results which we cannot now foresee.
I. Examine the long-held view that there should be only one
currency in a country and that it should be controlled by
government. Illustrate your discussion with examples from
remote and recent history.
2. What are the origins of legal tender? Argue for and
against it as the necessary basis of a monetary system.
3. Define money. How is it distinguished from non-money?
Argue for and against the concept ofa 'quantity' ofmoney.
Apply the argument to the 'quantity' theory of money.
4. 'It is desirable for government to control money so that it
can vary its supply according to the needs ofthe economy.'
'People have been losing confidence in money because it
has been controlled by government.' Discuss.
5. History shows that there has sometimes been lack of con-
fidence in 'legal tender' paper currencies. How could a
regime of cornpeting paper currencies maintain the con-
fidence of the public?
6. 'To be trusted, paper money must be convertible into
valuable goods or precious metals.' Do you agree? Discuss
the condition in which convertibility is and is not essential.
7· Discuss the view that inflation and deflation would be
difficult or impossible if the quantity of money were not
controlled by government. Illustrate your answer from
the 1929-32 Great Depression and the 1972-75 'Great
Inflation' .
8. Boom and slump are associated with 'capitalism'. Are
they found in non-capitalist economies? Are they the
result of capitalism or other causes?
9. 'It is politically impossible for a monetary authority sub-
ject or exposed to severe sectional pressures to avoid in-
creasing the quantity of money to increase employment,
thus creating inflation. The gold standard, fixed exchange
rates and other restraints in the way of monetary ex-
pansion ~ a v e been found inadequate.' Discuss.
10. How would you remove the power of national govern-
ment to control the international movement of currency?
Would international agreement suffice? How could com-
petition in currency be more effective?
Korea, South
Viet Nam
United Kingdom
Decline in
in Cost-of-
Change in
Free or Black
Market Value*
*Vis-a-vis the US Dollar.
Source: Reprinted with permission of the author and publisher from Franz Pick,
Pick's Currency Tearbook: 1976-77 Edition, Pick Publishing Corporation,
New York, 1977.
Appendix: The Destruction of Paper Money (continued)
Percentage Percentage Percentage
Decline in Increase Change in
Purchasing in Cost-of- Free or Black
Country Power Living Market Value*
1 -22
0 n.a.
New Zealand
2 261
243 +7
Netherlands 68 216
Costa Rica
2°7 + 4-
South Africa
Syria 66
1 -6
Tunisia 62 160 n.a.
Belgium 61
Dominican Republic
58 13
6 -22
133 +63
United States
EI Salvador
57 13°
Germany, West
lIS +110
Sri Lanka
49 95
82 -22
44 77
*Vis-a-vis the US Dollar.
**Depreciation in terms of gold, based on US $141·00 per ounce free market gold
price at end of 1975 vs. US $35·00 per ounce official price in 1950.
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