Les Jones

Three tales of inflation

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 | Economics |

Mises.org - Inflation and the Fall of the Roman Empire:

Caracalla had also debased the gold coinage. Under Augustus this circulated at 45 coins to a pound of gold. Caracalla made it 50 to a pound of gold. Within 20 years after him it was circulating at 72 to a pound of gold, reduced to 60 at the end of the century by Diocletian, only to be raised again to 72 by Constantine. So even the gold coinage was in fact inflated — debased.

But the real crisis came after Caracalla, between 258 and 275, in a period of intense civil war and foreign invasions. The emperors simply abandoned, for all practical purposes, a silver coinage. By 268 there was only 0.5 percent silver in the denarius.

Prices in this period rose in most parts of the empire by nearly 1,000 percent. The only people who were getting paid in gold were the barbarian troops hired by the emperors. The barbarians were so barbarous that they would only accept gold in payment for their services.

FOFOA - Gresham’s Ghost:

Henry VIII and Edward VI, during their reigns, drastically debased the silver coinage of the kingdom through both weight and purity. In 1544, young King Edward VI issued a coin containing just one third silver and two thirds copper — equating to .333 silver, or 33.3% pure. The result was a coin copper in appearance, but relatively pale in color. A shocking debasement considering England’s first silver coins were .999 pure, followed by .925 which later came to be known as sterling silver.

Then, in 1552, a penny’s weight was cut to only 8 grains (0.52 g). The penny began at 22.5 troy grains of fine silver and was reduced to 15 grains around 1420, then to 12 grains in 1464, and 8 grains in 1552.

Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal - Inflation’s Moral Hazard:

In a naive way, I assumed that since most people’s income tended to rise with inflation, there was nothing to worry about. I did not suffer personally because of it, nor did most of the people I knew. If a product once cost y and now cost 10y, what did it matter, so long as your income had gone up by ten times, too? Since people seemed better off, at least measured by what they could consume, one could even assume that incomes had risen faster than inflation.

Yet this was a crude way of looking at things, as my father’s fate should have instructed me. He sold his business in the sixties, at the end of the period of price stability that had reigned throughout his life, for what then seemed a large amount of money. He was a man who, for both temperamental and ideological reasons, held a deep contempt for financial speculation and wheeling and dealing, with the result that he did nothing as inflation inexorably eroded his savings. He grew poorer and poorer through the remaining 30 years of his life, and might have sunk into poverty had he not moved into a house that I owned. And this after reaching a level of wealth that, relatively speaking, was greater than I shall probably ever know.

For a while, I was angry about what seemed my father’s improvidence and lack of foresight. As the current financial crisis has conclusively demonstrated, however, not everyone is blessed with foresight, not even those whose livelihood depends primarily on the claim of possessing it. My father was born of a generation that saw money as a store of value, a far from dishonorable notion—and one that, when it reflected reality, helped give a lot of people peace of mind. And as I reach the age when inflation might cause me some embarrassment, even hardship, my sympathy with my father’s plight has grown. I am no longer young enough to fight another day, economically speaking: the destruction of my wealth by inflation would be final. In an aging population, more and more people are in my position, which helps explain why an age of prosperity can be an age of anxiety, even without a financial crisis.

Previously

• Word of the Day: John Exter’s Inverted Pyramid of Assets
• Word of the Day: Gresham’s Law
• Lots of good reading on gold and currency
• Word of the Day: German Silver, Britannia Silver, Sterling Silver, Sheffield Plate

Tags: gold, inflation, theodore dalrymple

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