Rede von FED Governor Laurence Meyer über den Goldstandard und Fiat money

verfasst von Fontvieille, 15.12.2001, 01:50

“The Future of Money and of Monetary Policy,” Federal Reserve Governor Laurence Meyer’s speech this week at Swarthmore College


"... Then we had the gold standard. The whole idea of the gold standard was to remove discretion. People at the time wanted to stabilize the value of the currency and wanted to get the government out of the picture. They wanted to avoid government manipulation, because they didn’t have confidence in the government doing the job. And so the idea was they put into place what in effect were rules. And the rule was that money should be backed by gold, so it’s essentially gold that determines the supply of money and the price level. And that doesn’t say that prices will be stable. It just depends on what happens to the supply of gold. But it’s out of the hands of government. What happens to the price level simply depends on gold discovery…So I think the gold standard has a sense of automaticity and attempts to take policy out of the picture and to produce a stable price level…

Now one other aspect of this is that when the gold standard broke down what happened was that after WWII countries got together in Bretton Woods and tried to design a new system for international relations, and it was called the pegged rate exchange system. And basically participating governments agreed…to a system of fixed exchange rates but ones that were fixed most of the time, but could be adjusted under certain prescribed circumstances - with agreement. So what we have here was an attempt to re-impose some sense of discipline but also with a little more flexibility than we had under the gold standard. And fixed-exchange rate systems by their very nature impose a kind of discipline. They impose constraints on monetary policy. And think about it this way: If you have a fixed-exchange rate system and imbalances in payments are settled by flows of acceptable assets - in this case gold and the dollar - so you have to be very careful because you have a limited amount of official reserves. Let’s say you are France, and your supply of international reserves are gold and dollars. So you have a limit to that. So you have to be very careful that you don’t follow policies that cause your reserves to decline to zero and you still have payment imbalances. You can’t do that. So it imposed discipline. You have to set your monetary policy so it is consistent in maintaining an appropriate level of reserves.

Now, the U.S. was in a slightly different position. We actually, what we did is, we agreed that we would set the dollar relative to gold. That was our commitment. And everybody else would agree that they would stabilize their currencies relative to the dollar. But the dollar was an international asset -- the so-called reserve currency. And we could produce it as much as we wanted. And as much as we produced it they had to accept it, because they had to stabilize their exchange rate relative to the dollar. This was really nice. We liked it a lot. They didn’t like it so much. But we told them, of course, “don’t worry, after all, the dollars are as good as gold; they’re linked.” And after awhile people sort of realized that the dollars were growing faster than the gold, and there wasn’t enough gold if everybody decided to redeem it. But we said, “Remember, it’s as good as gold” with one asterisk: “as long as you don’t ask for the gold.” Ok, we told them “don’t ask.” And then somebody asked, and of course we had to go off fixed-exchange rate system. It collapsed and we ended up with flexible exchange rates.

And now, we are finally at a system with The Ultimate Discretionary Power of Monetary Policy. We’ve got fiat money that the government sort of creates, so no backing of commodities, and we’ve got flexible exchange rates. No restraint imposed on monetary policy. WE HAVE THE ULTIMATE IN DISCRETIONARY POLICY AND ALL THE SUDDEN NOW CENTRAL BANKS REALLY BECOME IMPORTANT. Because now discretionary policy is what determines the price level and inflation, and that depends on the judgments and decisions made by central banks around the world. So central banks had to learn how to exercise that discretion. And government had to learn how to give mandates to central banks, and tell them what kind of objectives to have - typically price stability, in the U.S. promoting price stability and full employment..."




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gesamter Thread:

• Rede von FED Governor Laurence Meyer über den Goldstandard und Fiat money - Fontvieille, 15.12.2001, 01:50
  • Re: Übersetzung - R.Deutsch, 15.12.2001, 16:09
    • Re: Danke! Das Buch"Der große Irrtum" ist übrigens echt prima! (owT) - FlyingCondor, 16.12.2001, 01:33
    • Re: Übersetzung / Danke dafür, Reinhard! Du bist töffte! (owT) - JüKü, 16.12.2001, 01:47