Preview

The Introspection of the Gold Standard

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1421 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Introspection of the Gold Standard
Introduction of the Gold Standard

The Gold Standard era started from 1870 to 1914. With the help of historical accidents centering on Britain, Britain tied the pound sterling more closely to gold than to silver. In addition, Britain’s UK dollar became the supplier of reserve currency. Under the gold standard, each country’s government fixed its currency to a specified quantity of gold, and promised full convertibility to gold. Each country’s government would sell and or buy gold at mint parity. Furthermore, changes in the government’s gold holdings were directly linked to changes in the country’s money supply, contributed to country’s average price level, inflation rate, and some parts of its macroeconomic performance. Furthermore, the gold standard era was also a period of unprecedented economic growth with relatively free trade in gods, labor, and capital. Retrospect to the prewar era, the gold standard seems like successful, based on its function that defending the inflation. The gold standard was a domestic standard regulating the quantity and the growth rate of a country’s money supply. Pick U.S. as an example, we suppose that U.S. as home country with import lager than export. The BOP deficit creates market pressure for dollar depreciating and pound appreciating from official exchange rate. U.S. defends the floating of the official exchange rate by selling gold to the foreign country and buy U.S. dollar. As the gold leaves home, U.S. money supply falls down thus to domestic price and wages falling down in a short turn. This conduct leads the American export enhancement, which could eliminates home’s BOP deficit. As long as U.S. restores mint parity with export and import balance, the gold flows will stop. The gold standard appears to work automatically to restore country’s BOP balance and mint parity that the country’s Central Bank would not need to intervention, and it also seen as defense against

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Furthermore, though not one of their original intentions, the National Government were responsible for shelving the Gold Standard in September of 1931 which proved to aid economic recovery. It allowed the value of the pound to depreciate from $4.86 to $3.40, which as a result made British exports cheaper so more goods were sold internationally. The timing however proved to be a limiting factor as other currencies were leaving the gold standard and also depreciated in value resulting in a wide range of foreign competition. This was a key reason why so many countries introduced protective tariffs, making exporting goods more difficult. Britain did however sell more exports to countries within the…

    • 710 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Gold Standard Dbq

    • 218 Words
    • 1 Page

    The Gold Standard, formally instituted in the United States in 1834, was a way to secure the prices of domestic currency in terms of a tangible, valuable commodity–gold. With a single ounce worth $20.67 ($384.35 in today’s money), people freely converted their earnings into gold and vise versa. Originally on a bimetallic system, that is a silver and gold standard, the United States followed the British in their transition to a strictly gold standard. During this time, a great number of countries adopted this system to varying degrees, leading to a groundbreaking period of free trade and economic growth. This period was limited, however, and was dismantled during World War II due to aggressive inflation.…

    • 218 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Econ 1740 notes

    • 2231 Words
    • 9 Pages

    Designated both gold and silver as the monetary standard for the U.S. = Bimetallic Standard and lasted for almost 75 years…

    • 2231 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Bimetallism Pros And Cons

    • 1459 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The Gold Standard Act put the United States on the Gold Standard in 1900. This means the standard economic unit of account is based on a fixed quantity of gold. This act declared that the gold dollar "shall be the standard unit of value, and all forms of money issued or coined by the United States shall be maintained at a parity of value with this standard"(Gold Standard). The Gold Standard Act was the pinnacle of Republican monetary conservatism, making gold the standard for all of the nation’s currency. The Treasury was required to maintain a minimum of $150 million in gold reserves and the price of gold was set at $20.67 per ounce in. The Gold Standard had dropped the silver dollar sharply and stopped bimetallism.…

    • 1459 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    First of all, Anna, the message that Herbert Hoover was trying to convey was defined in my initial post if you read it and comprehended it correctly. Second, it is whatever not hwtaever. Hoover being a new president, he obviously would have had terrible circumstances thrown at him, the same as Donald Trump is right now. Hoover first responded to the Depression by attempting to restore public confidence in the…

    • 71 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    History Study Notes

    • 1472 Words
    • 6 Pages

    It is a fiscally responsible way to manage the United State’s money. It regulated currency and did good in this respect.…

    • 1472 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    To cope with universally floating exchange rates, the IMF developed special drawing rights (SDRs), one of its more useful inventions. Because both gold and the U.S. dollar have lost their utility as the basic medium of financial exchange, most monetary statistics relate to SDRs rather than dollars. The SDR is in effect “paper gold” and represents an average base of value derived from the value of a group of major currencies. Rather than being denominated in the currency of any…

    • 1154 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Farmers dbq

    • 435 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The debate over United States currency was a huge obstacle for farmers to overcome because they were in direct relation to the money crisis. In 1890 and 1892 with the Ocala and Omaha Platforms, farmers wanted free and unlimited coinage of silver so they could pay off any debt. A chart showing United States Population and Money in Circulation in 1865-1895 (Document C), shows how after a period of less money in circulation in the 1870s was resolved in the 1880s by the Bland-Allison Act which was later replaced by the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1890. Both of these acts were passed in Congress to provide free coinage of silver. The reasoning for the silver standard in the Populist platform in 1892 (Document A) was justified by the same reasoning as William Jennings Bryan in his “Cross of Gold” speech. Both describe how the conspiracy that the gold standard is better because England still uses it questions why America became an independent nation. However, the farmers still remained defeated on the currency debate because of the gold bug president gaining control of office.…

    • 435 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    This further restricted the availability of money for business. As another result, more bankruptcies followed. When the stock market crashed, investors turned to the currency markets. Since gold standard supported the dollar, speculators, or desperate investors, began trading in their dollars for gold. This created a run on the dollar.…

    • 899 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Essay

    • 300 Words
    • 2 Pages

    balance between countries. The policies were to also maintain the balance of gold, and silver.…

    • 300 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    i. Owens (2013) Countries stayed on the Gold standard to long (not until 1933). Fed could not alter money supply and deflation remained.…

    • 3626 Words
    • 15 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Part of the New Deal helped the United States government get off the gold standard. Instead of a dollar being worth a certain amount in gold the market decided…

    • 561 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The government inability to establish a standard currency system, trickled down into the agricultural industry, whose income was inconsistent to begin with. The farmer’s favored the free and unlimited system of silver coinage. The government, however was opposed, creating the Gold Standard, which made the currency of the nation gold. This disagreement caused feuding, that would later remain as gold currency resulted in a decrease in money circulation for farmers. Inequitable freight rates in relation the transportation, followed this standard, and goods became very expensive.…

    • 991 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    First we should know what the gold standard was. The gold standard was a monetary system where a country's currency especially paper money has a value directly linked to gold. With this standard, countries agreed to convert their paper money into a fixed amount of gold. A country that uses the gold standard sets a fixed price for gold and buys and sells gold at that price. That fixed price is used to determine the value of the currency. For example, if the U.S. sets the price of gold at $700 an ounce, the value of the dollar would be 1/700th of an ounce of gold. So what committed America to adapt this…

    • 114 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The international monetary system shows three fundamental problems .The first one, which was highlighted by John M. Keynes during the debates that led up to the Bretton Woods agreements, is that the present international monetary system has a bias against countries running balance of payments deficits (Keynes, 1942-43). The countries in external surplus have no strong incentive to adjust, and thus the burden of adjustment falls mainly on deficit countries. Adjustment generally takes place with a lag and rather abruptly when deficit financing suddenly dries out. The asymmetric adjustment tends to generate a global recessionary effect if the corrections that deficit countries need to adopt to balance their external ac¬counts do not find financing in adequate quantities, and if those adjustments are not offset by expansionary policies in surplus countries. This problem can be called the anti-Keynesian bias of the system.…

    • 533 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays