Regulation and token money

The Bank Charter Act of 1844 followed a long dispute about the control of the money supply and whether the value of the note issue should be allowed to exceed the stock of gold available to support it. The Act placed a statu­tory limit on the fiduciary issue (that part of the note issue which was not backed by gold) and restrictions were placed on the issue of notes by joint stock banks other than the Bank of England. In fact, these regulations were framed so that the passage of time would eventually leave the Bank of England as the sole note-issuing authority in England and Wales. The last private bank of issue in England surren­dered its rights in 1921.

Apart from relatively short periods of emergency when conversion was suspended, all bank-notes, until 1914, were convertible into gold. Convertibility on a restricted basis was restored in 1925, but finally abandoned in 1931. Since that time Bank of England notes have been wholly inconvertible and we have now reached the stage where our bank-notes, while still carrying a 'promise to pay' printed on their faces, are no more than token money. This is also true of the coinage; the commodity value of the coins is but a tiny frac­tion of their money value. Nevertheless the notes and coins are universally acceptable, the fact that they have no real commodity value, and are not backed by gold, in no way affects their ability to serve as money.

15. Read and entitle text C

Text С

Bank-notes and coins are not the most important form of money in developed economies. In the UK about 90%, by value, of all transactions are settled by means of cheques. But cheques themselves are not money; they are merely orders to bankers to transfer money from one per­son to another. The money so transferred consists of bank deposits. If there is no money in the form of a bank deposit then any cheques drawn on that account will be worthless.

Cheques were used as early as the second half of the seventeenth century, but they did not come into general use until the second half of the nineteenth century. The Bank Charter Act of 1844 put strict limitations on the note issue at a time when the output of goods and services was expand­ing rapidly. The need for an expansion of the money supply to keep pace with increasing output greatly stimulated the use of bank deposits.

This most developed form of money (i.e. bank deposit) consists of entries in the banks' ledgers, or more likely nowadays, of records on computer tapes. The greater part, in value terms, of the payments made each day are carried out by adjustment made to the totals in different bank deposits. A payment from one person to another merely requires that the banker reduces the amount in one deposit and increases it in another. Transferring money, therefore, has become little more than a kind of bookkeeping exercise; the money itself does not consist of some physical tangible commodity.