The Economist：On the origin of specie——Theories on where money comes from say something about where the dollar and euro will go

　　LIBOR is badly broken. But for now, a flawed number is better than none

　　THE furore over alleged manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) and its European cousin, the Euro Interbank Offered Rate (EURIBOR), continues to rage. In Britain, the deputy governor of the Bank of England and the chairman of Barclays were hauled over the coals this week by a parliamentary committee. In America, it emerged that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York may have been informed of alleged manipulation of LIBOR some time after 2007; the Senate Banking Committee plans to look into the affair.
 
　　Yet all the while the basic mechanism of LIBOR trundles on. Each morning at 11am in London, submitters at panels of some of the world’s biggest banks send their estimates of borrowing costs in various currencies and for various terms. A few minutes later the benchmark figures flash to life on tens of thousands of traders’ machines around the world, and ripple out into the pricing of loans, derivatives and other financial instruments.

　　Be generous, and assume that attempts to manipulate LIBOR are in the past. A deeper problem still besets these numbers: they are almost entirely fanciful even if the banks that submit them are providing honest estimates. That is because the unsecured interbank funding market, which is supposed to be where banks borrow from each other, is frozen solid. In the euro area in particular, banks are lending almost no money to one another. Most banks that now have cash prefer to deposit funds at the European Central Bank (ECB), which in turn lends it on to those that are short of it. At the moment banks have more than €800 billion ($980 billion) parked at the ECB, where it earns no interest. LIBOR and EURIBOR measure an activity that barely exists.
 
　　Even if markets were functioning properly, some of the banks submitting estimates would struggle to borrow at any interest rate, let alone the one they have been submitting. This problem is starkest for EURIBOR, where individual banks have been submitting rates that are likely to be a good deal lower than the rates they would have to pay in actual transactions. The biggest banks in Italy and Spain generally estimate the cost of borrowing euros for a year at about 1.1%. This rate is much lower than the 4% and 5% their governments (and ultimate guarantors) pay to borrow for the same period.
 
　　There is nothing necessarily untoward in this. Unlike LIBOR submitters, EURIBOR banks are not asked to provide estimates of what they think they would have to pay to borrow, merely estimates of what the borrowing rate between two “prime” banks should be. Yet the definition of “prime” is essentially now “German”, leading to a widening disconnect between the actual costs of bank borrowing across most of Europe and the benchmark rates that supposedly reflect them. “The reference to EURIBOR is completely useless for Italian banks,” says Giovanni Sabatini, the managing director of the Italian Banking Association. “EURIBOR is less than 1% and our banks are paying 350-400 basis points above EURIBOR.”
MONEY is perhaps the most basic building-block in economics. It helps states collect taxes to fund public goods. It allows producers to specialise and reap gains from trade. It is clear what it does, but its origins are a mystery. Some argue that money has its roots in the power of the state. Others claim the origin of money is a purely private matter: it would exist even if governments did not. This debate is long-running but it informs some of the most pressing monetary questions of today.
 
　　Money fulfils three main functions. First, it must be a medium of exchange, easily traded for goods and services. Second, it must be a store of value, so that it can be saved and used for consumption in the future. Third, it must be a unit of account, a useful measuring-stick. Lots of things can do these jobs. Tea, salt and cattle have all been used as money. In Britain’s prisons, inmates currently favour shower-gel capsules or rosary beads.

　　The use of money stretches back millennia. Electrum, an alloy of gold and silver, was used to make coins in Lydia (now western Turkey) in around 650BC. The first paper money circulated in China in around 1000AD. The Aztecs used cocoa beans as cash until the 12th century. The puzzle is how people agreed what to use.
 
　　Karl Menger, an Austrian economist, set out one school of thought as long ago as 1892*. In his version of events, the monetisation of an economy starts when agricultural communities move away from subsistence farming and start to specialise. This brings efficiency gains but means that trade with others becomes necessary. The problem is that operating markets on the basis of barter is a pain: you have to scout around looking for the rare person who wants what you have and has what you want.
 
　　Money evolves to reduce barter costs, with some things working better than others. The commodity used as money should not lose value when it is bought and sold. So clothing is a bad money, since no one places the same value on second-hand clothes as new ones. Instead, something that is portable, durable (fruit and vegetables are out) and divisible into smaller pieces is needed. Menger called this property “saleableness”. Spices and shells are highly saleable, explaining their use as money. Government plays no role here. The origin of money is a market-led response to barter costs, in which the best money is that which minimises the costs of trade. Menger’s is a good description of how informal monies, such as those used by prisoners, originate.
 
　　But the story just doesn’t match the facts in most monetary economies, according to a 1998 paper** by Charles Goodhart of the London School of Economics. Take the widespread use of precious metals as money. A Mengerian would say that this happens because metals are durable, divisible and portable: that makes them an ideal medium of exchange. But it is incredibly hard to value raw metals, Mr Goodhart argued, so the cost of using them in trade is high. It is much easier to assess the value of a bag of salt or a cow than a lump of metal. Raw metals fail Menger’s own saleableness test.
 
　　This problem explains why metal money has circulated not in lumps but as coins, with a regulated amount of metal in each coin. But history shows that minting developed not as a private-sector attempt to minimise the costs of trading, but as a government operation. It was state intervention, not the private market, that made metal specie work as money.
 
　　That suggests another theory is needed, in which the state plays a bigger role in the origin of money. Mr Goodhart called this the “Cartalist” theory. The fiscal wing of government has a huge incentive to move its economy away from barter. Once money exists, income and expenditure can be measured. That means they can be taxed. And the public purse gets a second boost from seigniorage, the difference between the value of the coins and the cost of producing them. On this account, governments impose taxes payable only in money, creating a demand for money that means it will be widely accepted as payment for goods. The state forces the economy away from barter for its own fiscal purposes.
 
　　Mr Goodhart used monetary history to test these competing theories. He examined the overthrow of Rome and a period in the tenth century when the Japanese government stopped minting coins. If the origin of money were purely private, these shocks should have had no monetary effects. But after Rome’s collapse, traders resorted to barter; in Japan they started to use rice instead of coins. There is a clear link between fiscal power and money.
 
　　The struggle for life
 
　　The evidence suggests that only “informal” monies can spring up purely privately. But informal money can exist on the grandest scale. The dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency is not mandated by any government, for example. Its pre-eminence outside America rests on it being the best option for international transactions. Once a competitor currency becomes preferable, firms and other governments will move on. The good news for the dollar is that the Chinese yuan is not yet widely accepted and suffers from higher inflation, reducing its usefulness. But a shift in the world’s reserve currency could be swifter than many assume.
 
　　The dollar’s other competitor, the euro, has deeper problems. Its origins were not private. Nor is it a proper Cartalist money, backed by a nation state. This means it lacks a foundation in the power of either the market or the state. In his paper, written a year before the euro was introduced, Mr Goodhart was prescient, highlighting “an unprecedented divorce between the main monetary and fiscal authorities”. Cartalists, he said “worry whether the divorce may not have some unforeseen side effects”.

* “On the Origins of Money”, the Economic Journal, June 1892
** “The two concepts of money: implications for the analysis of optimal currency areas”, European Journal of Political Economy, August 1998
Source：The Economist, Aug 18th 2012