Value of money

“ The value of money is in proportion to the quantity of the necessaries of life which it will purchase. ”

“ The personal value of money depends on the relation between an individual's money income, and his real income, in terms of goods. The public economic value of money depends on the money income of the community as a whole, and its real income. ”

“ The value of money must depend, not on prices alone, but, as I have said, also on the standard of living, on wages, on hours of work, on the cost of things, on plenty and scarcity, on taxation, and on many other considerations. ”

“ To the writers of this school, it is incredible that anything which has no utility should become money. Money must be either valuable itself, or else a representative of some valuable thing. The value of money comes from the value of the standard of value, and that value may, so far as the logic of the situation is concerned, be as well explained by marginal utility as the value of anything else. ”

“ The variation in the value of money, however great, makes no difference in the rate of profits; ”

“ Thus, then, the real working power or worth of the currency is founded on the entire sum of the relative estimates formed by the population of its possessions; a change in this estimate in any direction (and therefore every change in the national character) , instantly alters the value of money, in its second great function of commanding labour. But we must always carefully and sternly distinguish between this worth of currency, dependent on the conceived or appreciated value of what it represents, and the worth of it, dependent on the existence of what it represents. ”

“ You know I agree with you that money is a more variable commodity than is generally imagined, and therefore I think that many of the variations in the price of commodities may be fairly attributed to an alteration in the value of money. It is difficult to conceive that in a great and civilized country any commodity of importance could be produced with equal advantage without the employment of capital. ”

“ The most important discussions in England of the value of money are to be found in the long polemic between the Currency and the Banking Schools, by writers who would not be listed among the makers of the general theory of value. ”

“ It should however be carefully remembered, that in this whole argument I am supposing money to be of an invariable value; in other words, to be always the produce of the same quantity of unassisted labour. Money, however, is a variable commodity; and the rise of wages as well as of commodities, is frequently occasioned by a fall in the value of money. ”

“ It might well be, therefore, that the rise in the values of goods would offset the rise in the value of money, and that prices of goods would rise at the same time that gold is being withdrawn from the money market to the arts. ”

“ For writers who seek the whole explanation of the value of money in its monetary application, and who see that money, qua money, cannot administer directly to human wants, the view that Professor Fisher expresses, namely, that money has no utility, and is unique among goods in this respect, seems on the surface, to have justification. ”

“ Money is not a mere commodity, it is also the standard or the measure by which to estimate and compare the value of everything else that is bought and sold, and if it be, as it undoubtedly is, the duty of Government to adopt every practicable means for rendering all foot-rules of the same length, and all bushels of the same capacity, it is still more incumbent upon it to omit nothing that may serve to render money, or the measure of value—a measure which is undoubtedly of the greatest importance—uniform or steady in its value. ”

“ Money is of transcendent importance to civilization. It is the physical agency to which society has assigned the function of measuring all equities, and it is the sole agency upon which that incomparable function has been conferred. It is in terms of money that society computes the material value of all human sacrifice, alike the highest effort of genius and the daily toil and sweat of the millions who labor. ”

“ As we saw in the last chapter that it is impossible for anybody to understand the subject of Credit without first comprehending the matter of Value, so we shall see in this chapter that in the order of Nature Value precedes Money, and that the latter can only be learned in the light of the former. The logical reason for this in general is, that Money itself is always a Valuable, and comes to its function as money only through a comparison of itself with other Valuables. ”

“ What sum must be calculated to cover the enormous variation in the value of money that has taken place, and which has really turned all business into a most dangerous gamble? 10. And what sum, under all these conditions, is a man fairly to be allowed for the fact that from his profit he must buy his living from others whose commodities have likewise enormously increased, if not in value, at least in price? ”

“ When a man says he wants money to use, he means only that he wants to part with it,-that he wants either to pay a debt with it, or to give it in exchange for something that he can use or consume.
5. We can have at least a hundred and fifty times as many paper dollars as we can gold and silver dollars. And yet every one of these paper dollars, if it represents a dollar s worth of actual property that can either be itself delivered in redemption of the paper, or can otherwise be made available for the redemption of the piper, will have the same value in the market as the coins. ”

“ Money is so little a mark of value, that if the pieces of money lose a part of their value by friction, from use, or by the knavery of the clippers of money, all goods rise in price in proportion to the alteration which they have experienced ”

“ It has been taken for an axiom in all our reasonings on the subject of finance, that supposing the quantity and demand of things vendible in a country to remain the same, their price will vary according to the variation in the quantity of the circulating medinm; in other words, that the value of money will be regulated by its quantity. ”

“ In the only proper sense of the term the value of money means its power of purchasing services in general, and the value of money is high when a given sum of it will purchase much of general services, and low in the contrary case ”

“ The relations of commodities to one another remain unaltered by money: the only new relation introduced, is their relation to money itself; how much or how little money they will exchange for; in other words, how the Exchange Value of money itself is determined. ”

“ The supreme consideration is that the money of a country shall be so regulated as that prices may not fall from any cause inhering in the money system. The value of money—in other words, the sacrifice necessary to obtain it—should be no greater at one time than at another. ”

“ I am glad to observe that there appears to be a tendency toward agreement with regard to the fact that the value of money depends upon the demand for it and supply of it. Professor Laughlin likes the word standard better than I do. It suggests something permanent and fixed, whereas money is a very changeable thing. ”

“ Since the value of the money in use in any society is insignificant as compared with its total wealth valued in terms of money, it has been argued that the function of money as a measure of value is far more important than its function as a medium of exchange. ”

“ But though the value of money is not settled in an exceptional way, there is nevertheless a peculiarity about it, as there is about many articles. It is a commodity subject to great fluctuations of value, and those fluctuations are easily produced by a slight excess or a slight deficiency of quantity. ”

“ When we consider the transcendantly important character of the service which money performs—when we reflect that, without it, the achievement of an advanced civilization would be impossible, we can not escape the conclusion that, compared with the value of that service, the commodity value of any material on which the money function may be stamped is too trifling to merit serious attention. ”

“ Seasonal calls on an inelastic money supply for actual cash to move crops and pay agricultural wages may make a real difference in the value of money; scarcity of money of the right denominations for retail trade may give an agio to such money, [550] but the money and credit used by specula [Pg 523] tors, bill brokers, dealers in foreign exchange, investment bankers, etc., increases, rather than decreases, the funds available for ordinary industry and commerce. ”

“ But this is not to assert the doctrine of the commodity school, that its value must arise from the metal of which it is made, or in which it is expected to be redeemed. Nor is it to deny that the money function may add to the original value. On the contrary, the services which money performs are valuable services, and add directly, under conditions which we shall analyze more fully in a later chapter on the functions of money, to the value derived from non-pecuniary sources. Value is not physical, but psychical. And value is not bound up inseparably with labor-pain or marginal utility. ”

“ It seems that wealth had existence before money was thought of. Wealth is substance, of which money is the principle or representative, but which, in itself, has no intrinsic value.
Money is an invention made to represent wealth, or value, in order that its various kinds may be exchanged with facility, or that they may be exchanged without the absolute and direct and immediate receipt and delivery of one product of labor for another product of labor. ”

“ Money represents value; but value is not a thing, nor does it reside in things. Value is demand, desire, esteem, want, wish—it is a power existing in persons—the motive-power of the population — a power that may be represented immediately, if necessary. Then, the representative of the unit of population, and thus of value will be the true money unit. But it may also be represented through the medium of the dollar, at a fixed rate per capita. When this is done, by proper authority, true money will exist. ”

“ By MONEY, I understand any commodity, which purely in itself is of no material use to man for the purposes above-mentioned, but which acquires such an estimation from his opinion of it, as to become the universal measure of what is called value, and an adequate equivalent for any thing alienable. ”

“ If men anticipate that the value of the income, which is a fixed sum of dollars, is to grow less in the future, then the present worth of the bearer of that income will shrink to an extent greater than the "pure rate" of interest would call for. ”

“ Money may be defined as a generally accepted material means of payment and medium of exchange. This, its primary and essential function, may appear to be less important as new modes of balancing accounts of wealth are devised. But its functions as a common denominator of values and as a standard of deferred payment are increasingly important in an advancing society. It is this expression of the value of all other things in terms of money which may well be deemed the essential characteristic of the capitalistic age. ”

“ In whatever degree, therefore, the quantity of money is increased or diminished, other things remaining the same, in that same proportion the value of the whole and of every part is reciprocally diminished or increased. ”

“ The material of money must not only be valuable, but the value must be so related to the weight and bulk of the material, that the money shall not be inconveniently heavy on the one hand, nor inconveniently minute on the other. ”