"The State Bank is obliged to pay equivalent gold in exchange for paper money," and other myths.
Money is far richer in history than we might think. The.
Unfortunately, numerous economic fallacies and misconceptions seem to never die; they just return in slightly different forms at later dates.
One hundred years ago, the countries of Europe were trying to recover from the consequences of the First World War. It was not only the cost in human life (estimated to be more than 20 million people) and the military expenditures of nearly $5 trillion in today’s dollars. It was the political and ideological legacies of the war, as well.
The relatively classical liberal institutions that had generally prevailed in many of the Western nations before the war had been weakened by the wave of wartime controls and central planning introduced by the belligerent governments. Socialists were calling for the end to capitalism and its permanent replacement with government peacetime central planning. Others called for a new “social liberalism” of extensive and intrusive government interventions and welfare state redistributions.