The birth of the currency
The pound is 1200 years old, born about 775AD, when "sterlings" or silver coins were the main currency in Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
If you had 240 of them, you had one pound in weight - a vast fortune in the 8th century.
A century and a half later Athelstan, the first King of England, founded a series of mints and made sterling a national currency in 928.
In 1124, a disgusted Henry I had 94 mint workers castrated for producing bad coins.
Sterling retained importance through the middle ages. Before the foundation of the Bank of England, the Tower of London was the store for spare money. Silver penny were the only coins right through until the 13th century and silver was the currency standard till the 18th
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After the war, rumours swirled that sterling was to devalue, and so many countries converted their pounds to dollars.
The pound was devalued by 30 per cent in 1949. The enormous postwar balance of payments deficit was just too much for the UK. Sterling 's weakness and decline became too obvious. National banks wanted dollars not pounds.
Not a penny less: the 1967 Devaluation
In 1967 the currency wasdevalued again, this time by 14 per cent.
Overseas, the sterling currency was of lesser importance. Dollars were more alluring - and as many thought stable. But in 1971 President Nixon devalued the dollar - a response to damage done by the Vietnam War - and opened the gates to a new era of floating exchange. The stability of the postwar settlement was over.
The currency snake
Meanwhile 1972 saw the first efforts to fix the pound to other European currencies.
At the start of the year the four major European Economic Community currencies - sterling, the deutschemark, the French franc and the Italian lira - formed the so-called 'snake '. The economic bloc then floated their currencies together on the markets, each country having responsibility for the stability of its currency within parameters.
The experiment failed, though, not long off the ground. Sterling dropped out after only six weeks, weaker than ever, bowing to the dictates of the markets.
ERM to today
Since 1992 the pound has floated free although the Government has
All of this ties back into the original problem with pennies. Fiat currency cannot itself be worth more than the value it is given. It would make absolutely no sense to take a dollar worth of gold and make it into a 50 cent coin. If this was done, people would just use the coin as gold, not the 50 cent piece it was supposed to be. When the material fiat money is made out of is worth more than the government proclaimed value, the purpose of that currency has failed and it has turned back into commodity currency.
A law has passed in 1764 known as the Currency Act to resolve the currency scarcity and lack of proper economic structure. It is design to illegalize any new model dollars, not even reprint already used money. Additionally, it simply demolishes the colonial cash by having a more “hard currency” network using pound sterling. A huge repercussion occur, when there is a massive trade deficit and it only made the overall economy much more dire. This policy not only damages the merchant, but it also did not financial help the British troop to get the economic resources they need.
In 1864, the first pennies were made. In 1909, they were made with Abraham Lincoln’s face printed into it, in honor of his 100th birthday. That was 108 years ago, and pennies are still going around today, with the same president still printed on. However, many U.S. officials are saying the penny should be obsolete. More believe that the little copper and zinc coin should stay as a piece of U.S. money. This essay will give evidence on both sides, supporting them equally in their arguments on why the penny should stay, or go.
After World War II, the Bretton Woods Agreement established the gold standard and two support institutions called the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. This would lead to a shift, away from the gold standard, to more relaxed systems. The idea of currency purely backed by gold was slowly being shifted to a trust based currency. These institutions purpose was to regulate the economies by injecting or taking money in a process called sterilization. Sterilization is to protect certain countries from a going bankrupt. If a country goes bankrupt, it chain a chain reaction of bankruptcies. So, in order to maintain balance, currencies need to be stable enough, so that it can be in debt without having to declare bankruptcy. The idea is
It was one of the earliest monetary policies to institute the circulation of paper money on a national level. Customers would deposit their gold coins for storage into a bank for a small fee. In return, they received bank receipts, which were then used as paper money in place of valuable elements like gold. The idea of using bank notes as paper money quickly gained popularity because they were, of course, much easier and more convenient to transport and exchange than heavy gold coins.
To understand the reason, and perhaps necessity, for the conception of the Currency act of 1764, one must have a grasp of the economic situation in the American colonies prior to 1764. The currency used in the American colonies has always revolved around, specie or the two types of paper currency, legislatively issued legal tender or land bank notes (Finkelstein 39). Foreign specie was far more common than British specie, due to an export prohibition of British specie and an unfavorable balance of trade between the American colonies and Britain that drained whatever British specie
The penny, also known simply as the one-cent coin, was first made about 230 years ago in 1787. The first penny ever made was 100% copper and it was heavier and larger than the usual penny today. The design itself was suggested by the famous Benjamin Franklin ("A Brief History of the U.S. Cent”). Lately, people have talked about the idea of abolishing the penny, but others disagree. The penny should not be abolished.
Another problem plaguing the economy of Britain was that the Americans continued to issue a large amount of paper bills. The British felt the effective way to halt the issuing of the bills was to put in place a Currency Act. They saw the paper money as "greatly depreciating
Ever since the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944, the U.S dollar became the world’s currency. Bretton Woods agreement was basically an agreement on which every country currency would be back up by the dollar, due to the fact that after WWII United States was the only one with the biggest gold reserve in the world. Although it was proposed as a good idea it had its flaws for one even though it help the U.S and other countries there was simply not enough gold to continue backing up the dollar value. Which lead to President Richard Nixon to abolish the gold standard economy. His abolish of a gold standard economy lead to a new proposal on which the dollar would be back by.
Nixon raised the price of gold during his presidency. This angered nations all who had signed the Bretton Woods Agreement (see Definition page) after World War II. As the world’s reserve currency, the US dollar had an additional problem. As global trade grew, so too did the demand for U.S. dollar reserves. For a time, the demand for US dollars was satisfied by an increasing
There was pushback from the Federal Government, President Grover Cleveland included, wanted to keep the money supply fixed in gold, held in the hand of the government (Doc D). Monopolization of the wealth supply was pandemic in the United States in the late
This view is in contrast to Kindleberger’s stance that after WWI it was important to get the exchange rates fixed at equilibrium levels and it was the collapse of interwar gold standard that brought about the world depression.
The U.S. dollar peaked in value in 2000-2001 and has been in a significant decline ever since. There was a relatively brief period in 2008 when the dollar rebounded quite sharply due to the worldwide financial crisis and economic meltdown, when there was a global rush to the safety of U.S. treasury securities. But since then, the dollar has resumed its long-term downtrend. In the recent years the dollar has been improving relative to other currencies, becausee of the decline in those other currencies.
The first main cause was the Great War for Empire of 1754-1796. It is often referred to as the Seven Years War though it really lasted nine years. This was a war between the British and French. This war caused King George III to lose an enormous amount of money. Parliament quickly replace salutary neglect with imperial administration (A. 133). The enactment the Currency Act of 1764 barred colonies from using paper money as legal tender. The Currency Act ensured that merchants would be paid in good money, boosting their profits and British wealth. (A. 135)
In 1764 The Currency Act was passed. The act banned the use of paper money in all colonies. In passing this, the British government was attempting to stop inflation and create uniform currency. This Act made paper money worthless. The British government didn't give the colonies enough time to exchange their money and it’s lack of process created chaos and inconsistency. Britain should have given the colonies more time to trade their money since it was Britain's idea to make such a tremendous adjustment to their system (Martin, The Events That Led to the American Revolution).