 This has not been the week for the U.S. dollar. The dollar has experienced the worst quarterly plunge since 2004 and the most significantly negative weekly decline since April of this year. The dollar has plunged against the euro, the yen, the pound, the Swiss franc, the Australian dollar and the Canadian dollar. Indeed, the dollar has even plunged in relation to the currencies of some Third World nations. The falling dollar will impact the costs associated with everything from meat, orange juice, precious metals and sugar. In addition, the plunging dollar is driving up the cost of living while forcing down the value of consumer savings and investment.
Money history, Stone rai:
On the islands of Yap, part of the Federal States of Micronesia, in the western Pacific since ancient times there is an unusual means of payment-round limestone millstone with a hole in the middle, or the rai. Diameter of stones ranges from a dozen centimeters to several meters, and weight - up to several tons. Rai is mined in the neighboring archipelago of Palau, located 400 km south-west of the islands of Yap, but not at any time, but strictly as directed by the elders.
Mechanism for determining the value of stone money suppresses the possibility of inflation: as such millstone extracted with greater effort and delivered to Yap at the cost of death of someone of the members of the expedition, is valued much higher than the mill, seized with the help of iron tools brought to Yap by the Europeans. Thus, millstones can be described as fiat or fiduciary, money, value of which is based on the confidence of market agents to each other and to the state.
Grinders do not perform all the functions of money with equal ease, despite the fact that this is a very successful means of preserving the valuable (even accidentally stones lost in the sea are objects of ownership and the owners may change). Payment transactions on Yap are made with baskets of harvest, and the exchange of goods is most often not associated with millstones - simply because their cost is too high (for a stone of 60 cm in diameter at the beginning of XX century it was possible to get a pig). And Yap stone money has an important collateral function and acts as gifts.
History of ancient coins:
Coins for the first time in the history appeared in Lydia, presently the Asian part of Turkey, in 687 BC. and half a century later the coins were produced in large numbers.
Lydian coins were minted from electrum - a form of native gold, with a high content of silver, and at first they did not have monetary face value, but assessed with reference to certain measures of grain or flour. However, these products possessed all those properties, which are ascribed to modern means of payment - durability, divisibility, transportability, interchangeability and complexity of counterfeiting.
From Lydia, manufacture of money quickly spread to Greece, where, like the Lydians, embossing lion king on all coins, every city minted its own coins with the patron god of the city. From mid VI century BC to facilitate trade and to accurately determine the value of money, coins led to the same standard and were minted only from silver or gold, although the symbols, indicating the place of production, were retained.
Greek coinage culture greatly influenced the modern money. The Greeks were the first to knock images of living people on the coins. With the conquest of Alexander the Macedonian coinage technology, using two molds for the obverse and reverse, spread to all subject territories, including Persia, and formed as the basis of the monetary system of Muslim countries. Based on this technology, Rome and subsequently Western Europe began to mint coins.
With the emergence of commodity-money relations, problems familiar to us, including inflation, i.e., currency devaluation and, consequently, increase in prices, which is perhaps the most dramatic. As soon as the coins came into circulation, they were counterfeited in a variety of ways - cuts, erasing or adding cheap impurities – reducing the content of precious metal in the coin. Rome, where by 269 BC silver coins were minted mostly, with the end of the Second Punic War, i.e. by 201 BC, was forced to take the measure of reducing the content of silver in the coin – so as to pay to its troops, which eventually led to inflation.
A Brief History of the Roman currency - denarius generally produces a very sad impression. Since its adoption in 269 BC and to the III century, when the denarius coinage ceased, mainly due to the lack of metal, the actual value of this coin slowly but steadily declined. Initially denarius was made of pure silver, one coin weighed 4.5 grams. But in times of war, chaos and disorder of the noble, metal content decreased in the denarius, and the coin got undervalued. Thus, during the time of Nero amount of silver in the coin was equal to 3.8 grams. Subsequent emperors even more "cut down" denarius, and by the beginning of 3rd century silver was only a few percent of the weight of the coin, and thus the coin has lost its original appearance. |
