When gold and silver from the Americas was exported abroad, the effects on the rest of the world were tremendous. In Europe, and in Spain especially, the imports of these precious metals caused lasting inflation. In China, foreign supply overcame a previous scarcity of silver, transforming the composition of the local money supply. In…
Some currencies are essentially abandoned when they become increasingly worthless due to hyperinflation. The public simply transitions to using foreign currencies instead. However, it’s also possible for a government to officially dispense with its own money and adopt that of another country as its official legal tender. Ecuador experienced a major economic crisis in…
The history of paper money in China began when merchants attempted to work around shortages of metal coins during the Tang Dynasty. Government issued paper money became well established during the Song Dynasty about 860 years ago, or about five centuries before paper money appeared at any particularly notable scale in the West. However,…
After the First World War, the world set about restoring the international gold standard that existed before the fighting. It took years to bring to fruition and the restoration fell apart almost as quickly. After the Second World War, the world once again went about recreating a monetary order largely along pre-war lines, albeit…
Today, Singapore ranks as one of the world’s largest financial centers. The city’s financial industry is underpinned by its role as a center for foreign exchange trading and foreign currency lending. It developed this role not so much organically or spontaneously but as a result of planning. Still, this doesn’t tell the whole story. A…
This post is a continuation of The Gold Standard Between the Wars (Part I). In that post, the international gold standard was rebuilt as countries fixed their exchange rates, whether at pre-war rates or newer sharply reduced valuations. As was recounted, the speed with which countries restored their currencies’ link to gold masked the difficulty…
Throughout the 19th century, steadily more countries joined the international gold standard led by Britain and the Bank of England. During the First World War, this system was suspended virtually everywhere and currencies were allowed to float freely for the first time. The 20th century would see several changes in the global monetary order, in…
The invention of coins brought about a commercial revolution as a new market economy began to develop in the midst of more primitive means of distributing production across consumers. However, money also had negative side effects. It provided a new way of storing wealth that served no productive end in itself; unlike an estate, a…
In the 17th and 18th centuries, Europe instituted mercantilist economic policies designed to promote the accumulation of money by running trade surpluses with other countries. Since several European states pursued this policy, they couldn’t all run trade surpluses with each other, so it tended to be with their colonies that European countries sought to accumulate…
In early modern Europe, currency was far less standardized than it is today. There were several different metals with monetary significance: gold, silver, and copper. Countries usually struck coins from all of these metals and often combinations of them together. In addition to local coins, circulating in any given place would be foreign coins made…
