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Financial Futures Markets and Tabular Standards

The goal of a monetary system that provides assurance against fluctuations in purchasing power is ancient. One frequently suggested and repeatedly rediscovered proposal is to attain that result by linking the currency unit to a price index. That device was proposed in the nineteenth century by W. Stanley Jevons and by Alfred Marshall, who named it a tabular standard. It has been repeatedly rediscovered. In Marshall's version it required no governmental action except the issuance of a price index number, something which has of course become widely prevalent. Individuals would simply in their own interest be led to make contracts specified not in terms of the nominal number of monetary units-the number of dollars-but in terms of the purchasing power equivalent of the present number of monetary units; that is, the contract would call for paying a given number of dollars multiplied by the ratio of a price index as of that date to the date on which the contract was entered into. Despite the theoretical attractiveness of this idea and the absence of any effective hindrance to its adoption, it has never become popular. It is a particular version of the generally attractive idea of widespread indexation. Yet indexation has been extensive only when inflation has been extremely high and variable as in some South American countries and Israel-and has generally fallen into disuse when inflation has been conquered. The only area in which there are any large number of indexed contracts is the area of labor contracts, and even here the use of indexation is by no means dominant and tends to rise and decline as inflation rises and declines.