Fiat money

is currency, which is declared by a government to be legal tender, i.e. it is not backed by a physical commodity and has value solely because a government accepts it for payments of taxes and debts. Virtually, almost all of the worlds currency today is fiat money with the most popular ones being the US Dollar, the Euro, the Japanese Yen, and the British Pound. Fiat money is the opposite of honest money. Fiat money is money that is declared to have value even if it does not. Honest money has value regardless of what people say. Gold and silver are often referred to as honest money and since they have been dug out of the ground at considerable expense, they do have value regardless. People will pay variable sums for them. Fiat money is also known as paper money, or electronic money. Since there is nothing behind paper money but the obligation of a state to redeem it in more paper or electronic money, fiat money's ultimate worth is questionable at best. In fact, there is a history of states walking away from the face value of the fiat money that has been printed (created). But if one has it in one's possession, it is impossible to walk away from the value of gold and silver and contrary to fiat money, they have an inherent quality. Mainly an outgrowth of central banking, in the modern age, fiat money probably would not be attractive without state support. That's because fiat money, unlike fractional reserve money, has no inherent value. Fractional reserve banking, in fact, is a private market phenomenon in which private banks provide paper notes the face value of which adds up to more than the reserves held by the bank. There is a history of successful fractional reserve banking efforts within the private marketplace; however fiat money always collapses, as it is impossible to issue a substance of value year after year and generation after generation that has no value.

History of fiat money

Ancient history

Song Dynasty Jiaozi, the world's earliest paper money The Song Dynasty in China was the first to issue paper money, jiaozi, around the 10th century AD. Although the notes were valued at a certain exchange rate for gold, silver, or silk, conversion was never allowed in practice. The notes were initially to be redeemed after three years' service, to be replaced by new notes for a 3% service charge, but, as more of them were printed without notes being retired, inflation became evident. The government made several attempts to support the paper by demanding taxes partly in currency and making other laws, but the damage had been done, and the notes fell out of favor. The successive Yuan Dynasty was the first dynasty in China to use paper currency as the predominant circulating medium. The founder of the Yuan Dynasty, Kublai Khan, issued paper money known as Chao in his reign. The original notes during the Yuan Dynasty were restricted in area and duration as in the Song Dynasty. However, in the later course of the dynasty, facing massive shortages of specie to fund their ruling in China, the Yuan Dynasty began printing paper money without restrictions on duration. This eventually caused hyperinflation. By 1455, in an effort to rein in economic expansion and end hyperinflation, the new Ming Dynasty ended the use of paper money.

18th and 19th century Early forms of fiat currency were "bills of credit. Provincial governments produced notes which were fiat currency, with the promise to allow holders to pay taxes in those notes. The notes were issued to pay current obligations and could be called by levying taxes at a later time. Since the notes were denominated in the local unit of account, they were circulated from man to man in non-tax transactions. These types of notes were issued in the British colonies in America, particularly in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Massachusetts. Such money was sold at a discount of silver, which the government would then spend, and would expire at a fixed point in time later. Bills of credit were controversial when they were first issued, and have remained controversial to this day. Those who have wanted to highlight the dangers of inflation have focused on the colonies where the bills of credit depreciated most dramatically New England and the Carolinas. Those who have wanted to defend the use of bills of credit in the colonies have focused on the middle colonies, where inflation was practically nonexistent. Colonial powers consciously introduced fiat currencies backed by taxes, e.g. hut taxes or poll taxes, to mobilise economic resources in their new possessions, at least as a transitional arrangement. The repeated cycle of deflationary hard money, followed by inflationary paper money continued through much of the 18th and 19th centuries. Often nations would have dual currencies, with paper trading at some discount to specie backed money. Examples include the Continental issued by the U.S. Congress before the Constitution; paper versus gold ducats in Napoleonic era Vienna, where paper often traded at 100:1 against gold; the South Sea Bubble, which produced bank notes not backed by sufficient reserves; and the Mississippi Company scheme of John Law. During the American Civil War, the Federal Government issued United States Notes, a form of paper fiat currency popularly known as 'greenbacks'. Their issue was limited by Congress at a little over $340 million. During the 1870s, withdrawal of the notes from circulation was opposed by the United States Greenback Party. The term 'fiat money' was used in the resolutions of an 1878 party convention.[10] 20th century By World War I most nations had a legalized government monopoly on bank notes and the legal tender status thereof. In theory, governments still promised to redeem notes in specie on demand. However, the costs of the war and the massive expansion afterward made governments suspend redemption in specie. Since there was no direct penalty for doing so, governments were not immediately responsible for the economic consequences of printing more money, which led to hyperinflation for example in Weimar Germany. Attempts were made to reassert currency stability by anchoring it to wholesale gold bullion rather than making it payable in specie. This money combined pure fiat currency, in that the currency was limited to central bank notes and token coins that were current only by government fiat, with a form of convertibility, via gold bullion exchange, or via exchange into US dollars which were convertible into gold bullion, under the 1945 Bretton Woods system.

Further knowledge on fiat money

In the United States, the world's largest and most dominant economy, the greenback became a fiat currency when President Richard Nixon broke the final link between gold and the dollar in 1971. He did this because the French were apparently threatening to redeem their dollars in gold and neither the US central bank and/or Treasury did not have enough gold to redeem French greenbacks or chose not to. In any event, Nixon severed the dollar's relationship to gold and ever since then the world has embarked on a "bold experiment" in which the global, anchor currency has no specific relationship to an underlying asset. Predictably, this has meant that the United States has continually created more and more fiat dollars, thus inflating the overall stock of dollars and making them worth less and less.

China, one of the world's most ancient civilizations, is said to have had no less than eight separate interregnums of fiat currency each collapsing and then being replaced by another. In the 1800s, fiat money was even banned by the Chinese. Today, however, the Chinese government is once again a user of fiat money along with the rest of the world. Fiat money has never been so prevalent perhaps as in the modern age. But that doesn't make it any healthier or less prone to failure. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

Sources: http://thedailybell.com/803/Fiat-Money.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money http://www.centralbanksguide.com/fiat+money/

FIAT MONEY

Eco 5 Jacklyn Chriselle B. Pagarigan 3ECO1