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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Robin Plunder who wrote (99954)	11/26/2008 5:09:06 PM
From: studdog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

Robin: Maybe you should read The History of Money by Jack Weatherford. You would come to see that money's natural evolution is to "become more and more god-like, abstract, and without corporeal body"

To: Robin Plunder who wrote (99954)	11/26/2008 8:50:52 PM
From: pogohere	2 Recommendations Respond to of 110194

"....I think gold was in use as money, well, long before the romans in antiquity.." Yes, and later, in fact, the Europeans fought amongst themselves to control the trade routes to India and to develop their silver mines in Europe because the gold/silver ratio in India was better than in the west. Therefore, it behooved them to gather as much western silver, carry it to India, and get a better exchange for gold than they could get anywhere else. That begins to explain why the Italian city states were so jealous about their access to and control over the trade routes to the east. I think it likely that the Portuguese exploited the same ratio differential once they succeeded in sailing around the Cape and on to India. The Romans, during their republic phase, used bronze coinage as money for many years. It seems to have puzzled numismatists, as the value of the metal in the coins didn't match the exchange value of the same coins as money. For those monetarists who think metal has an intrinsic value, this is hard to explain. Furthermore, the use of silver as money was banned within the area under Roman dominion for quite a long period. I believe it was during the wars with Carthage that silver coinage came into use within the Roman state. The gold Constantine took from temples to create the coinage had its value set by law. By fiat of the ruler. Not by any notion of some "intrinsic " value because it was gold. Alexander Del Mar: "History of Monetary Systems," p.82