Деньги и их функции(MONEY)
MONEY.
MONEY IS USED FOR BUYING OR SELLING GOODS, FOR MEASURING VALUE AND FOR
STORING WEALTH. Almost every society now has a money economy based on coins
and paper notes of one kind or another. However, this has not always been
true. In primitive societies a system of barter was used. Barter was a
system of direct exchange of goods. Somebody could exchange a sheep, for
example, for anything in the market place that they considered to be equal
value. Barter however was a very unsatisfactory system because people’s
precise needs seldom coincided. People needed a more practical system of
exchange, and various money systems developed based on goods, which the
members of a society recognized as having a value. Cattle, grain, teeth,
shells, features, skulls, salt, elephant tusks and tobacco have all been
used. Precious metals gradually took over because, when made into coins,
they were portable, durable, recognizable, and divisible into larger and
smaller units of value.
A coin is a piece of metal, usually disc-shaped, which bears
lettering, designs or numbers showing its value. Until the 18th and 19th
centuries coins were given monetary worth based on the exact amount of
metal contained in them, but most modern coins are based on face value, the
value the governments choose to give them, irrespective of the actual metal
content. Coins have been made of gold (Au), silver (Ag), copper (Cu),
aluminum (Al), nickel (Ni), lead (Pb), zinc (Zn), plastic and in China even
from pressed tealeaves. Most governments now issue paper money in the form
of notes, which are “promises to pay". Paper money is obviously easier to
handle and much more convenient in the modern world. Checks, bankers, cards
and credit cards are being used increasingly and it is possibly to imagine
a world where “money” in the form of coins and paper currently will no
longer be used. Even today, in the U.S many places-especially filling
stations-will not accept cash at night for security reasons.
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Barter and the Double Coincidence of Wants
As long as specialization was limited, desirable trades were relatively
easy to uncover. As the economy developed, however, greater specialization
in the division of labor increased the difficulty of finding goods that
each trader wanted to exchange. Rather than just two possible types of
producers, there were, say, a hundred types of producers, ranging from
potters to shoemakers. The potter in need of new shoes might have trouble
finding a shoemaker in need of pots. Barter depends on a double coincidence
of wants, which occurs only when traders are willing to exchange their
product for what the other is selling. The cobbler must be willing to
exchange shoes for the pots offered by the potter, and the potter must be
willing to exchange pots for the shoes offered by the cobbler. Not only
might this double coincidence of wants be hard to find but after the two
traders connect they would also need to agree upon a rate of exchange—that
is, how many pots should be exchanged for a pair of shoes? Increased
specialization made the barter system of exchange more time-consuming and
cumbersome.
When only two goods are produced, only one exchange rate must be
determined, but as the number of goods produced in the economy increases,
the number of exchange rates grows sharply. Negotiating the exchange rates
among commodities is complicated in a barter economy because there is no
common measure of value. Sometimes the differences in the value of the
products made barter difficult. For example, suppose the cobbler wanted to
buy a home. If a home exchanged for 2000 pairs of shoes, the cobbler would
be hard-pressed to find a home seller in need of that many shoes. These
difficulties with barter have led even very simple and primitive economies
to use money, as we will see next.
Earliest Money and Its Functions
We have already discussed the movement from self-sufficiency to more
specialized production requiring barter. We saw that the greater the degree
of specialization in the economy, the more difficult it became to discover
a double coincidence of wants and then to negotiate mutually beneficial
exchanges. We should note that nobody actually recorded the emergence of
money. Thus, we can only speculate about how money first came into use.
Through repeated exchanges, traders may have found that there were certain
goods for which there was always a ready market. If a trader could not find
a desired match or did not need goods for immediate consumption, some good
with a ready market could be accepted instead. So traders began to accept
certain goods not for immediate consumption but because these goods would
be acceptable to others and therefore could be retraded later. For example,
corn might become accepted because traders knew corn was always in demand.
As one good became generally acceptable in return for all other goods, that
good began to function as money. As we will see, anything that is used as
money serves three important functions: a medium of exchange, a standard of
value, and a store of wealth.
Medium of Exchange If a community, by luck or by design, can find one
commodity that everyone accepts in exchange for whatever is sold, traders
can save much time, disappointment, and sheer aggravation. Separating the
sale of one good from the purchase of another requires something acceptable
to all parties involved in the transaction. Suppose corn plays this role, a
role that clearly goes beyond its usual function as food. We call corn a
medium of exchange because corn is accepted in exchange by all buyers and
sellers, whether or not they want corn for its own uses. A medium of
exchange is anything that is generally accepted in return for goods and
services sold. Corn is no longer an end but a means to an end. The end may
be shoes, meat, pots, whatever. The person who accepts corn in exchange for
some product may already have more corn than the entire family could eat in
a year, but the corn is not accepted with a view toward consumption. It is
accepted because it can be readily exchanged for other goods. Corn can be
used to purchase whatever is desired whenever it is desired. Because in
this example corn both is a commodity and serves as money, we call corn a
commodity money. The earliest money was commodity money.
Standard of Value As one commodity, such as corn, became widely accepted,
the prices of all goods came to be quoted in terms of corn. The chosen
commodity became a common standard of value. The price of shoes or pots
could be expressed in bushels of corn. Thus, not only does corn serve as a
medium of exchange but it also becomes a yardstick for measuring the value
of all goods and services. Rather than having to quote the rate of exchange
for each good in terms of every other good, as was the case in the barter
economy, the price of everything could be measured in terms of corn. For
example, if a pair of shoes sells for two bushels of corn and a five-gallon
pot sells for one bushel of corn, then one pair of shoes exchanges for two
five-gallon pots.
Store of Wealth Because people often do not want to make purchases at the
same time they sell an item, the purchasing power acquired through sales
must somehow be preserved. Money serves as a store of wealth by retaining
purchasing power over time. The cobbler exchanges shoes for corn in the
belief that other suppliers will accept corn in exchange for whatever the
cobbler demands later. Corn represents a way of deferring purchasing power
yet conserving that power until consumption is desired. The better money is
at preserving purchasing power, the better it serves as a store of wealth.
When we think of someone selling one good in order to be able to buy a
second good, then the exchange of the first good for corn is only half of
the exchange. Goods are first exchanged for the commodity money, corn; corn
is -later exchanged for other goods. Breaking the exchange in two is much
more convenient than trying to work out a barter arrangement, with its
frequent delays and disappointments. With money, the buyers and sellers
need to have only one good in common instead of two.
Any commodity that acquires a high degree of acceptability throughout the
economy thereby becomes money. Consider some commodities used as money over
the centuries. Cattle served as money, first for the Greeks and then for
the Romans. In fact, the word pecuniary comes from the Latin word pecus,
meaning "cattle." Other commodity moneys used at various times include
tobacco and wampum (polished strings of shells) in colonial America, tea
pressed into small cakes in Russia, and dates in North Africa.
Whatever serves as a medium of exchange is called money, no matter what it
is, no matter how it first came to serve as a medium of exchange, and no
matter why it continues to serve this function. So long as there is
something that sellers willingly accept in exchange for whatever they
sell—rather than looking around for goods they in particular would like to
consume—that article is money, whether it is animal, vegetable, or mineral.
The only test for money is that it be widely accepted in return for goods
and services. Some kinds of money perform this function well, others not so
well. But good or bad, it is all money.
Problems with Commodity Money
Corn does as well as some other commodities that have served as money
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