[Sjaax]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Ambiorix

wat zijn eigelijk de belangrijkste nadelen van een goudstandaard?

Een lang citaat volgt, maar het is een excerpt, de meest relevante gedeelten, uit een nog langere tekst.

The actual historical dynamic of exchange rate systems, over four centuries, has therefore been from fixed to increasingly variable rates. A major issue which arises from this historical trend, and is prior to the question of ‘how to establish a common European currency’, is, therefore, why exchange rate systems far more closely approximating to a single European currency than current ones were abandoned? As this progression from fixed to increasingly flexible exchange rates was universal, operating over a long period, and affecting all major countries, it evidently cannot have trivial roots, but must reflect powerful economic processes. Indeed, as will be seen, this trend was not primarily a ‘monetary’ phenomenon at all. It reflects the transformation of the core nature of a 20thcentury economy - compared to any which preceded it, and the revolution in economics which accompanied it.

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The productive economy, however, is radically different in character. The infinitely elastic character of money has its parallel in only one possible structure of a productive economy - that known to economics textbooks as ‘perfect competition. Perfect competition, among other things, assumes that there exists an infinite (in practice extremely large), number of producers; that the Out puts they produce are homogeneous; that production may take place at an infinitely gradable output of units etc.

Perfect competition’s closest physical approximation is a large number of farms producing a standard commodity such as wheat, or a large number of factories producing a relatively uniform product such as wool or cotton thread. Such physical counterparts are unsurprising, as the concept of perfect competition was developed in the context of the 19th century economy - when production on the modem large scale did not exist.

If a very large number of producers is assumed, it immediately follows that none has the ability to influence prices. An attempt by a firm to prevent prices falling, for example due to a decline in costs, will merely lead to the market being fully supplied by other producers. In such an economy, therefore, as each producer has no ability to set the market price, technically they are ‘price takers.’ As producers cannot control prices the latter may move both up and down. In such an economy, that of the 19th century, the infinitely flexible character of money is paralleled by pliable prices in the productive economy.

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If, in ‘perfect competition,’ the features of money and the productive economy, discussed above, parallel each other, in the case of monopoly or imperfect competition, where a small number of firms dominate an industry, this symmetry between money and the productive economy collapses. Flexibility in prices in the productive economy, does not apply. Entry into an industry is restricted by a minimum efficient scale of production limiting the number of possible firms in the industry, by costs of initial investment, by the ability of existing producers to force new entrants out of business by temporary predatory pricing, by technological factors, or other means. Under such conditions, firms are not simply price takers, but price makers. As firms have the ability to influence prices, and therefore the possibility to resist reductions (and can meet a contraction in the market by maintaining prices and decreasing their quantity of production), such prices are ‘sticky’ or ‘administered.’

It is clear that this situation of imperfect competition/monopoly corresponds to the economy of the 20th century, just as ‘perfect competition’ did to that of the 19th (and earlier ones). In particular, in the most advanced, and therefore decisive, economic fields, modem scales of production make it impossible for more than a few producers to exist within an industry - not merely nationally but internationally.

There is, for example, only one fully competitive producer of microprocessors - Intel. Only one major producer of personal computer operating systems, and increasingly, application programmes - Microsoft. There exist only two competitive producers of large civilian aircraft - Boeing and Airbus Industry. The $15 billion production cost of the ‘Eurofighter’ is impossible to finance by any single West European aerospace company. In the 1960s Siemens had to win only half the West German market to finance the cost of development of an electromechanical switch, today it has to capture 20% of the world market to make such an investment worthwhile. Such examples may be multiplied.

Bron: http://www.irishleftreview.org/2011/...pean-currency/