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Claus wrote:
I would add that capitalism had an explicit commodity money until 1971, and
I think no one can deny that the banking system and finance production
already existed up to that time, so how can you say that the need to
finance production requires money not to be a commodity, since money was a
commodity and finance production was there? In Marx's theory there is no
inconsistency between the commodity nature of money and the credit system.
On the contrary, Marx derives the latter from the former in a consistent
way.
__________________________
Claus, I think Duncan mentioned this long ago: couldn't it be argued
that the US Fed for example has adopted a modern version of the gold
standard, in that it attempts to define the currency's value in
the form of a tradeable basket of goods and services? That is, isn't
Greenspan following sensitive commodity prices, such as gold and oil,
in the determination of US monetary policy. So that even when the Fed
deviated from this policy in 1998, by letting the price of the 'basket'
of senstive commodity prices fall, inlcuding gold in dollar terms, it was
forced to play catch up.
Yours, Rakesh
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