[lbo-talk] Why no world currency?

[Shane Mage]

>Sean:
>
>In my class last night we started talking about currency speculation
>and capital controls and a student asked why all countries couldn't
>just use the same currency....
>[WS:] I think you already mentioned the main reasons - local control of the
>supply of money is not a trivial thing.  The ability to print money and
>control its supply is one of the most important prerogative of national
>governments, the other two being its monopoly for institutional violence and
>its sovereignty vis a vis other national governments.
>
>The reason that you did not mention is cognitive-psychological.  Currency is
>a common yard stick used in everyday life.  People are used to it and do not
>want to trade it for anything else.  Just like Brits or Americans do not
>want to abandoning their cumbersome inches, pints, Fahrenheit 
>degrees and what not for the far superior metric system - most 
>people would be reluctant to abandon their national currencies for a 
>standard one.

Wojtek's first point is quite true, but his second point is equally false. For
millenia, and until much less than a century ago, people of virtually 
all countries contendedly and unquestioningly used a common 
currency--gold.
Any other currency was treated as essentially worthless and to be
disposed of as quickly as possible.  Even after world capital  abandoned
gold, a global-bank-based credit currency was entirely possible.  Keynes
worked it all out, but at Bretton Woods he was unceremoniously cast
aside--the dirty deal being done by the Stalino-Rooseveltian apparatchik
Harry Dexter White.

Incidentally, Trotsky once suggested that, in the latter stages of the
transition to communism, the socialist world economy would allow
gold a final efflorescence as global currency!

Shane Mage

"Thunderbolt steers all things...It consents and does not
consent to be called 
Zeus."                                                         

Herakleitos of Ephesos