Commodity money【DOC精选】.doc

Commodity money From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia An?okpoho?or?manilla, the traditional commodity money in?West Africa?until the 1940s. Commodity money?is?money?whose?value?comes from a?commodity?of which it is made. Commodity money consists of objects that have value in themselves as well as value in their use as money.[1] Examples of commodities that have been used as?mediums of exchange?include?gold,?silver,?copper,?salt,?peppercorns, large stones (such as?Rai stones), decorated?belts,?shells,?alcohol,?cigarettes,?cannabis,?candy,?cocoa beans?and?barley. These items were sometimes used in a metric of perceived?value?in conjunction to one another, in various commodity valuation orprice system?economies. Aspects[edit] Commodity money is to be distinguished from?representative money?which is a certificate or token which can be exchanged for the underlying commodity, but only as the trade is good for that source and the product. A key feature of commodity money is that the value is directly perceived by the users of this money, who recognize the utility or beauty of the tokens as they would recognize the goods themselves. That is, the effect of holding a token for a barrel of oil must be the same economically as actually having the barrel at hand. This thinking guides the modern?commodity markets, although they use a sophisticated range offinancial instruments?that are more than one-to-one representations of units of a given type of commodity. Since payment by commodity generally provides a useful good, commodity money is similar to?barter, but is distinguishable from it in having a single recognized unit of exchange. (Radford 1945) described the establishment of commodity money in?P.O.W camps. People left their surplus clothing, toilet requisites and food there until they were sold at a fixed price in cigarettes. Only sales in cigarettes were accepted – there was no barter [...] Of food, the shop carried small stocks for convenience; the capital was provided by