Typography

By Harcourt Romanticist [ source ] This post is dedicated to the protesters in Hong Kong. I am awed at how courageous they have been in the face of continuing pressure from China's Communist party. The same regime is complicit in persecuting Uighur Muslims and imprisoning two Canadians , Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig. There are all sorts of creative forms of non-violent mischief that citizens can use to protest against oppressive governments. This post explores a sub-category of non-violent mischief: monetary mischief . Money stamping One of the most popular forms of monetary protest is to overstamp currency. This involves stamping banknotes or countermarking coins. Coins and banknotes are vital to trade and circulate widely. Which makes them a great way to advertise a cause or complaint. The message automatically propagates itself via hand-to-hand commerce. The monetary authorities will react to the threat by hastily withdrawing marked notes and coins from circulation. When b...

In 2011, hedge fund manager Kyle Bass reportedly bought $1 million worth of nickels. Why on earth would anyone want to own 20 million nickels? Let's work out the underlying logic of this trade. A nickel weighs five grams, 75% of which is copper and the rest is nickel. At the time that Bass bought his nickels, the actual metal content of each coin was worth around 6.8 cents. So Bass was buying 6.8 cents for 5 cents, or $1.36 million worth of base metals for just $1 million. To realize this 6.8 cents, Bass would have to sell the copper and nickel as metal , not coin. But liberating the actual metal from each token isn't so easy. Since 2006 it's been illegal to melt pennies and nickels down. As a regulated hedge fund manager, Bass probably isn't willing to break the law. Which means he'd only be able to realize the metal content of nickels indirectly, by on-selling them to a buyer who is willing take on the risks of melting nickels. That wouldn't be me, mind you....

  Over on the discussion board, Oliver and Antti suggest that I read two essays from Alfred Mitchell-Innes. Here are a few thoughts.  A British diplomat, Mitchell-Innes was appointed financial advisor to King Chulalongkorn of Siam in the 1890s as well as serving in Cairo. He eventually ended up in the British Embassy in Washington where he penned his two essays on money. The first, What is Money , attracted the attention of John Maynard Keynes, while the second essay, The Credit Theory of Money —which was written in 1914—expounded on his views. Both are interesting essays and worth your time. One of Mitchell-Innes's main points is that all money is credit. This may have been a controversial stance back in 1914, when people were still very much focused on metallic money, but I don't think anyone would find it terribly controversial today. If we look at the instruments that currently function as money, all of them are forms of credit, that is, they are obligations or "cred...

While our modern monetary system certainly has plenty of detractors, one of its successes is that we no longer need the services of the local gold regulator . In the late 1700s, the job of a gold regulator was to assay gold coins to determine if they were of the appropriate weight and fineness, modifying (ie 'regulating') the coin if necessary. When he was done, the gold regulator stamped the coin with his seal of approval and put it back into circulation. The job of regulating coins may seem strange to us. But it was an ingenious way to cope with the lack of standardization that bedeviled monetary systems in the 1600 and 1700s, particularly in the colonies. There was no domestic supply of coins in North America back then, so settlers relied on a bewildering array of foreign coins as their media of exchange, each with its own weight and fineness, and most of poor quality. This included not only silver coins such as Spanish dollars, pistareens, and English crowns, but also a gam...

A few centuries ago, lack of fungibility used to be a big weakness of monetary systems. But technological and legal developments eventually solved the problem. Nascent systems like bitcoin are finding that they must wrestle all over again with fungibility issues. Fungibility exists when one member of a population of items is perfectly interchangeable with another. So for instance, because your grain of wheat can be swapped out with my grain without causing any sort of change to our relative status, we would say that wheat grains are fungible. Fungibility is a desirable property of a monetary system. If all monetary items are interchangeable, then trade can proceed relatively smoothly. If monetary items are not fungible, then sellers cannot accept the monetary item without pausing for a few moments to verify and assay it, and this imposes frictions on trade.    In this post I argue that there are two ways for something to be fungible. They can be fungible for physical reasons or for leg...

Archaic and ignored monetary technologies can be very interesting, especially when they teach us about newer attempts to update our monetary system. I recently stumbled on a neat monetary innovation from the bimetallic debate of the late 1800s, Nicholas Veeder's Republic of Eutopia coin: During the bimetallic debates of the late 1800s, one of the more interesting compromises put forward was Nicolas Veeder's cometallic standard. His model 'Republic of Eutopia' coins (1866) had a plug with 12.9 grains of gold and ring with 206¼ grains of silver. A good idea or no? pic.twitter.com/6eZN2YAq6o — JP Koning (@jp_koning) May 28, 2018 If you've read this blog for a while, you'll know that I like to talk about monetary technology. Unlike financial technology, monetary tech involves a technological or sociological upgrade to the monetary system itself. And since we are all unavoidably users of the monetary system—we all think and calculate in terms of our nations unit of ...

The (Great) Tower of Babel , 1563, Bruegel the Elder. "Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth" People bandy the term fiat currency around a lot, but what exactly does it mean? None of us wants to live in a Babel where people use fiat to indicate twenty different thing. So let's try to zero in on what most people mean by playing a game called fiat-or-no t. I will describe a monetary system as it evolves away from a pure commodity arrangement and you will tell me when it has slipped into being a fiat system. (The technique I am using in this post cribs from a classic Nick Rowe post ). So let's start the game. 1) An economy in which gold coins circulate as the medium of exchange. Fiat or not? I think we can all agree that there is nothing fiat at all here. (For simplicity's sake let's assume for the duration of this post that taxes can be paid with anything, and that there is no legal tender.)...