Gold's overly long farewell as money

Hansjörg Herr

No 237/2024, IPE Working Papers from Berlin School of Economics and Law, Institute for International Political Economy (IPE)

Abstract: Today all countries have fiat money issued by a central bank. There is no obligation by a central bank to exchange its money for gold or any other good. Central banks have the monopoly to issue central bank money and have the power to create their money out of nothing. Creating such a monetary system is functional for a capitalist economy and must be regarded as a major feat of civilization, which could only be completed after around 200 years of capitalist development. This article traces the painful farewell from gold from the Classical Gold Standard in the early 19th century up to the end of the Bretton Woods system in the mid-20th century.

Keywords: money; gold standard; currency systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E40 N20 P20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-fdg, nep-his, nep-mon and nep-pay
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/300844/1/1897698763.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ipewps:300844

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IPE Working Papers from Berlin School of Economics and Law, Institute for International Political Economy (IPE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().