by Kevin Dowd, 1993.
Chapter 2
Automatic stabilizing mechanisms under free banking
THE EVOLUTION OF A FREE BANKING SYSTEM
The development of coins
In a relatively primitive society in which individuals are just beginning to trade with each other, ‘coincidence of wants’ problems would arise frequently if market participants were restricted to barter. Some goods would be more in demand than others, however, and at some stage individuals would realize that they had a better chance of getting the goods they wanted if they first accepted some popular intermediate good and then swapped it for the good they wanted to consume. This resort to ‘indirect exchange’, which employs a certain class (or classes) of intermediate goods, would allow individuals to avoid the ‘coincidence of wants’ problem, but their transaction costs would remain high. In particular, they would still need to measure the quantity of the goods they were offered and assess their quality. They would therefore prefer intermediate goods whose quantity was easily measured and whose quality was relatively uniform. To minimize transport and storage costs, market participants would also want goods that were sufficiently scarce for small amounts to have a high exchange value. Historically, people have tended to converge on the precious metals as desirable intermediate goods and to abandon alternatives as the advantages of precious metals become more apparent.
The use of precious metals as intermediate goods would still leave individuals with the inconvenience of weighing lumps of metal and assessing their purity. This would create an opportunity for some individuals to act as intermediaries and make their living assessing the purity of the metal brought to them and recasting it into pieces of more convenient size. As such practices spread, the fineness and sizes of metal pieces would gradually become standardized, and the private intermediaries would mark the pieces to show their weight and quality. The profits made by the earliest of these intermediaries would attract others, and they would compete with each other for business. It would not take long for them to realize that they could attract more business by using distinctive marks on the metal pieces they issued. The intermediaries would thus become private mints and their metal pieces privately issued coins.
Each of these private mints would exist primarily to maximize its own profits, which could be generated in several ways. One would be by offering competitive minting fees. Another would be by developing a reputation for probity to reassure prospective customers that they would not be cheated. A third would be by innovation: mints would experiment with coins of new denominations, alternative metals, and so on. Any successful innovations would be imitated by other mints and would become widely adopted. It bears stressing that these mints would have no incentive to cheat by overstating the weight of their coins, because such deception would be easy to detect, and this would harm the mint’s reputation and hence its business. Furthermore, the law would classify such activity as fraud. [2]
As an aside, it is exactly at this stage that the state historically has intervened in the monetary system. Governments realized they could use their coercive powers to create a legal monopoly that would make the minting business very profitable. Even if the government’s service was inferior to that of private mints, the public could be forced to accept it, as the state would prohibit its subjects from using the coins of other mints. [3] The government could then impose high minting charges or misrepresent the weight of the coins it issued. Note that it is only the state’s monopoly over the means of legal coercion that enables the state mint to stay in business. A private mint could not provide an inferior service and survive because it would have no way of compelling people to use its services.
