Summary
A brief history of money and its uses is presented. A new digital currency, the Smith Unit, to facilitate commercial transactions is proposed. Shortcomings of cryptocurrencies (bitcoin), existing paper currencies (dollars, euros, yen, yuan, etc.), and gold and silver are covered. The Smith Unit is compared to similar products like the ECU (European Currency Unit-the predecessor to the Euro) and the SDRs (Special Drawing Rights) of the International Monetary Fund.
What is money and what are its uses?
(you can skip this section and go directly to "Defining the Smith unit (SMU)" if you are not interested in the economics and theory behind the existence of money and currencies)
Adam Smith in 'The Wealth of Nations'
[1] shows us that the fundamental, true measure of the value of an object is labor-objects which need more labor to make, in general, are worth more than objects which need less labor to make. Allowance must be made for different skills and training involved: an object (or service) of labor of a few hours is sometimes worth more than the object of labor of many days, due to the higher skill and training required in the former.
However, it is inconvenient to talk about objects in terms of their labor content or units of labor they save the buyer; and since most objects are exchanged with one another rather than with labor itself, money becomes a more convenient measure of value. This is the reason goods (and services) are quoted in money prices; but we must not forget that the true value of goods is measured in labor. You exchange the produce of your labor with the produce of others' labor. You get paid for your labor in money, and you exchange that money with the goods produced by other people's labor, is the real exchange going on in the world.
Labor is the true price of all objects; money is their nominal price only.
There are two main uses of money; 1) As a facilitator for buying and selling of goods and services by being a unit to measure their value, e.g. 1 kg of potatoes for 1 Euro, and 2) As a measure of someone's worth, e.g. Maria is worth a million dollars. The use of the same term money to denote these two has caused substantial confusion for humanity, as covered by Adam Smith. However, the primary use of money is the former-a unit of the measure of the value of goods and services.
When considered as a measure of value of goods and services, money may be thought of as similar to the unit of mass, the kilogram (kg) or the unit of length, the meter (m), which from the Système Internationale (SI) units conventions, are standardized units of measuring mass and length.
We must remember that the kilogram and the meter are not absolute measures. When you measure something with a weight scale, it is never a completely accurate reading-because of the calibration errors in the weight scale against the 1 kilogram international prototype in Paris
[2], which is the standard unit of mass in the SI convention (i.e. when you buy 1 kg of something, it is never really 1 kg). This error, the difference between the mass and the actual mass if you had the prototype in your hands, is tolerated depending on your applications-if you are measuring something ultra-sensitive, you need a very accurate and calibrated scale; whereas for most goods, an error of let's say 1% is acceptable (the 1 kg of oranges you weighed are really 990 g if the oranges were weighed by the Paris prototype, but you can live with this error.). Furthermore, the prototype of mass in Paris is itself a variable (recent attempts to put them in terms of physical constants notwithstanding)
[3] and susceptible to drift over time-what it was a hundred years ago is not what it is today, because of corrosion, loss from use and wear and tear, etc. The point is-that even for a physical unit like the kilogram, there is no absolute measure, but we carry on our lives quite well despite the uncertainties and errors.
However imperfect it may be, money (a dollar or a yuan, for example) is a measure of value just like the kilogram for the mass. Different observers will give a different value for mass, length, etc. for an object depending on the accuracy of the tools they have, or how much experience they have with similar objects; the same is true for value, wherein an object can be assigned different values by different observers. You can also think of value being measured in money terms as in imperfect units like
the pennyweight, the cubit or the bag which were used until a few hundred years ago-when you do not need exact units, you get by with these cruder units just fine (e.g. a bag of coal).
Value thus may be considered to be a fundamental property of all objects just like the mass or the length, and we can say:
Object properties: Mass (kg), Length (m), Value (dollars, yuans, etc.), and other properties.
What we needed for mass or length in practice were standardized, easily reproducible international units-and the same is needed for the value of an object.
Before the standardization of mass in kilograms, countries and regions of the world had their own standards of mass (e.g. pound in the Great Britain, seer in India, momme in Japan), and some continue to be used to this day. However, the SI units with their standardized definition of kilogram really simplified things-and the SI unit of mass has gradually replaced all other standards in the last 100 to 200 years.
Great Britain might have insisted for national pride reasons that the international unit of mass be the pound, or Japan might have insisted on it being the momme, but the kilogram eventually was accepted in almost all fields of life in all countries.
Not just for mass, but the decimal based SI units have replaced region and country specific units for length, time, etc. as well. The same needs to happen for money-we need to give up the national pride issues falsely associated with a currency, and adopt a worldwide currency.
I propose a unit called the Smith unit. The unit is named in honor of Adam Smith, the founder of Economics.
Defining the Smith unit (SMU)
A Smith unit (SMU, or more simply, just the Smith) is a fixed currency basket derivable from published prices of major world currencies. The unit is 20% each of the
US Dollar, the
Chinese Yuan, the
Euro, and the
Japenese Yen and 5% each of the
Brazilian Real, the
Indian Rupee, the
Swiss Franc, and the
British Pound on 1 January 2011 and its value was set at one USD ( 1 SMU=1 USD) on this date. The methodology is very similar to how major stock market indices are calculated all over the world.
Based on these percentages and published exchange rates of major currencies in USD (data was taken from the Federal Reserve bank of St. Louis
[4]) , the actual currency amounts in one Smith unit are shown in the table below (Column 3):
Table: Currency amounts in 1 Smith unit on 1 Jan. 2011
Currency
|
Currency Weight in Smith unit
|
Currency Amount in one Smith unit
|
US Dollar USD
|
20%
| 0.2 |
Chinese Yuan CNY
|
20%
| 1.32 |
Euro EUR
|
20%
| 0.150727 |
Japenese Yen JPY
|
20%
| 16.334 |
Brazilian Real BRL
|
5%
| 0.083155 |
Indian Rupee INR
|
5%
| 2.24 |
Swiss Franc SZF
|
5%
| 0.046845 |
British Pound GBP
|
5%
| 0.032484 |
Total:
|
100%
| --- |
The weights were chosen to represent the approximate importance of these countries and their currencies in the world, and easily available public quotes for their prices.
Many other currencies could be included in the basket-but as mentioned above-currencies are not to be used to parade national importance, and as long as we have a clear and simple standard for buying and selling goods and services, as the Smith unit is, we can use it to define the value of goods and services in all parts of the world, just like the mass of an object is defined in kilograms everywhere.
With the eight currencies above and the associated percentages, we get a good representative paper currency basket for the entire world. Most of the world trade involves at least one of these eight currencies-and adding more currencies to this basket is therefore not necessary.
The detailed
Smith unit (or the Smith) calculations file can be downloaded here (.xls format).
The file to calculate the
daily value of the Smith quickly can be downloaded here (.xls format).
The currency amounts in the Smith are fixed and not changeable, except when a re-balancing is required, which is covered below. I used data from 1 January 2002 to 31 December 2016 for calculating the Smith unit. Going before and after in time from 1 January 2011, the percentage of currencies in the Smith changes. The maximum weight of any currency was about 26% for the US Dollar, reached on 31 January 2002. The maximum weight of the Chinese Yuan was about 25%, reached on 19 March 2015.
The charts below show how the Smith unit has changed over time vs. the US Dollar since 1 January 2002 until 31 December 2016, a period of 15 years (click on the charts to enlarge them).
There is only one re-balancing rule for the Smith unit:
1. The Smith unit will be re-balanced if one currency becomes 70% of the unit.
I would like the re-balancing (if needed) to be done by the SI, or the International Committee for Weights and Measures in it's General Conference, which is held every four to six years.
The Smith is an open-source currency, and can be thought of as a currency of an imaginary country called the Smith Republic somewhere in the High Seas, whose only goal is to facilitate the buying and selling of goods for the world.
The Smith Republic has no political connections or preferences for any country, and is most like the SI, which is why I propose that the re-balancing of the Smith, if needed, is to be done by the SI. Data from the last 15 years (2002 to 2016, both years inclusive) shows that no re-balancing has been necessary in these years.
When the world transitioned from gold and silver pegged currencies to floating paper currencies (Bretton Woods abolition in 1971), alarmists published all kinds of warnings-but the transition went about quite smoothly and no country ties it's currency to gold reserves anymore. There's nothing magical about a currency; it's only use is the ease with which it can help in buying and selling of goods by ascertaining their value.
As the proliferation of bitcoin in the last few years has shown, there is no need to involve the banking and financial systems of the world in choosing or controlling currencies-as long as people quote their products in bitcoin and someone (an exchange) converts existing currencies to bitcoins, the new currency can be used to buy and sell goods without issues.
We must agree that there is a real need for a standardized world currency to eliminate the massive transaction costs in conversions from one currency to another-especially in world trade. World travelers also will benefit considerably from a world currency-they lose every time they convert currencies. We will also get rid of the constant babble of countries trying to "manipulate" currencies, keeping currencies low for increasing exports, etc. (all these so called manipulations have no effect on the value of objects; much like changing the unit of mass from kilogram to pound has no effect on the actual mass of the objects).
Problems with the bitcoin
The bitcoin has some very serious shortcomings, which make it a risky currency for transactions: 1) Bitcoin can be mined, i.e. more bitcoin can be created by computers, etc. and if mining costs collapse, the currency will fall very considerably in price, or even go to zero and 2) it is liable to fraud-because it can be hacked or stolen (the biggest exchange of bitcoins, Mt. Gox, lost USD 500 million of its clients' money in 2014 and was shut down, Bitfinex lost USD 65 million of bitcoin in 2016 due to hacking). There are no such problems with using the Smith as a currency unit in transactions, assuming it is accepted as a true currency of a disinterested party. and 3) Governments of countries normally guarantee bank deposits (in the country's currency) upto a certain amount. The FDIC in the US guarantees deposits upto $250,000 per bank. No such guarantee exists for bitcoin deposits with banks, brokers, etc. This is a major risk for all holders of bitcoins, 4) bitcoin is very unstable against existing currencies, the volatility making it a poor choice as a global currency.
Moreover, the bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies), because of its association with solving complex computing problems etc. is unnecessarily complicated. If science and progress is about simplifying complex things and not making simple things complicated, the Smith with its easy to implement calculations is a much nicer solution for a global currency than the bitcoin.
The massive appreciation in the value of the bitcoin against all currencies since its creation shows that it is being used as a store of wealth (the second use of money, pointed above) and speculation, rather than as a currency to help exchange in the buying and selling of goods (a new currency should be stable in value against existing currencies). The large number of cryptocurrencies launched after the invention of the bitcoin show that it is not that hard to come up with cryptocurrencies-and the creators and promoters of these currencies stand to make a lot of money as long as the bubble keeps going up. It reminds me of Internet stocks of the late 1990's who went up fast, only to collapse later on (I believe that the bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies will stop being used as currencies, but may continue to be used as a store of wealth and investing like baseball cards, collectible cars, or art and jewelry). A new global currency solution should be relatively stable vs. other major currencies and provide a smooth and continuous transition from them. The Smith meets that criterion well, by its very design.
One must note that a block chain/distributed ledger system is different from bitcoin the currency (Nakamoto's amazing contribution is the design of the block chain/distributed ledger system, and not the bitcoin), and can work well with existing currencies and the Smith.
Problems with existing paper currencies (dollars, yuans, etc.)
The main problem of using a dollar or a yuan as a world currency is that the currency is thought of as a matter of national pride, because of incorrectly thinking of money and currency as being a national asset, and not an instrument to facilitate trade of goods and services (the same confusion mentioned above, in the two uses of money), and countries for this reason like to have their own currency and full control over them. If a country X doesn't have a good relationship with the US, it is hard to convince the businesses in the country X to accept the US dollar. In some cases, e.g. Ecuador and Panama, countries have accepted foreign currencies to be used in every day lives, and do not see any problems, with most goods in these countries being quoted in US dollars. However, there is always the risk that Ecuador goes back to using the Sucre, because a currency being a matter of national pride is well entrenched in society. Italians still debate about going back to the Lira and the Greeks blame their problems on joining the Euro, and want to bring back the Drachma. Worse still, many countries do not want their currency circulating outside their borders (e.g. China and India). Adopting the apolitical Smith, which is a simple mathematical derivative of some of the world's major currencies, solves this problem.
Another problem is best illustrated with an example. If country Y want to use the US dollar as its currency, as long as as there are paper US dollar bills in circulation, the country Y needs to depend on the US Treasury Department (who prints the bills) in some way. The US Treasury has a monopoly over printing US dollar bills, and that makes it very inconvenient for country Y to adopt the US dollar. The US dollar can be adopted for digital transactions in country Y, but it cannot be adopted for bills if country Y does not want to depend on a foreign entity for the circulation of bills within the country. If the US Treasury allowed printing of US dollars outside of the US, just as the one kilogram prototype of mass in SI has many copies all over the world to replicate the kilogram, it would not be an issue, and US dollar bills could become a world currency to replace all paper currencies.
It is unlikely that the US Treasury will give up this exclusive right to print dollar bills-and it is therefore best to start afresh, with a new currency like the Smith, which if needed can have bills in the future, emitted by the SI, with the same methodology used today for replicating the one kilogram prototype.
In this example I took the US dollar and the US Treasury as starting points-but you can imagine the difficulty of adopting the Japanese Yen or the Chinese Yuan as international currencies-because they are even less popular than the US dollar. Coming up with a basket of currencies seems to be good way to solve this problem.
Countries generally guarantee deposits in their banks. They however do this only for deposits in the country's currency; and foreign currency deposits are not guaranteed by the country (this is completely irrational and very awful for the savers; the Argentinians found this out the hard way in the Argentine crisis in 2001-2003, when their US dollar deposits were converted to Argentine Pesos forcibly). Chilean banks will accept deposits in Pesos and US Dollars, but the State entity for guaranteeing the deposits only guarantees the Chilean Peso deposits. All international governments will be more amenable to guarantee deposits in a neutral, worldwide currency like the Smith and not limit the guarantee to the home country currency.
Countries like Ecuador and Panama have adopted the US dollar as their official currency, and loans and interest rates are also quoted in US dollars. Clearly if currency and money was such an important thing as people are told by nationalistic rhetoric, this would not be possible.
If Norway were to adopt the Euro, it would not change the real price of anything in the country, but would be a considerable benefit for Norway's citizens and visitors to Norway, who would not have to lose money while converting from kroner to other currencies, or the reverse. The risks to Norway of adopting the Euro are largely imaginary-as is clearly seen by how efficiently the Euro was adopted in various Euro zone countries. Norway can stay a separate country and still adopt the Euro as its official currency, to the tremendous benefit of its citizens. If the United States decided to adopt the Euro as its official currency, nothing would change inside it, and business would carry on as usual, with everything quoted in Euro. Instead of pushing for the Dollar or the Euro or the Krone as a world currency, adopting a neutral, basket-based currency solution like the Smith would be an amicable solution for all countries.
Comparison to the European Currency Unit (ECU) and the Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) of the International Monetary Fund
The ECU was the predecessor to the Euro. It was a basket of currencies just like what is proposed for the Smith here, and the Euro zone did transition successfully to the Euro from the ECU
[5]. The major problems with the ECU were 1) That of other paper currencies emitted by countries-a vehicle of national and regional pride. The ECU was used as a political instrument to suppress smaller countries-wherein bigger countries were given larger weights in the basket and apparently because they were more important to Europe. Outside the Euro zone, it was promoted as a tool to further Europe's interest, etc. which made it a bad choice for adoption by other countries and 2) Too much re-balancing, apparently to reflect the share of European trade, making it an arbitrary rule. The meddling finance types would calculate the share of European trade every five years and adjust the weights of currencies in the ECU. They forgot that trade data itself is approximate and quite volatile, just as most other economic data is.
This is the reason that the Smith has just one re-balancing rule, of a currency becoming 70% of the basket, because wide variations in it's composition are completely okay, as long as the market knows how to convert the various world currencies to the Smith in a transparent manner.
If the Euro did not have these shortcomings, it would serve as a good worldwide currency.
Despite all these problems, the Euro's overall success in replacing all the member states' currencies does show that a currency basket can be used as a currency of many countries, and therefore ensures that if the Smith is adopted by the world, it will become successful as a global currency.
The SDRs of the International Monetary fund
[6] have the same problems as the Euro 1) Political unit 2) Arbitrary re-balancing. There is an additional problem with the SDRs-they are too heavy on the US Dollar and the Euro already and are very unlikely to be adopted by a country which doesn't not consider the US or the Euro zone to be their ally.
Using a major stock market index as a world currency
Anything whose value is clear and easily accessible to the general public, and which cannot be manipulated easily, can serve as a currency. The US S&P 500 Index is such an index. One can base a currency off it, and use that for transactions worldwide. Divisions of SPY (SPY is the most popular ETF connected to the S&P 500 Index) can be used to buy and sell things on eBay for example-you are just debited the amount in SPY instead of dollars or euros or yuans. That's easy to implement, and does not need too much regulatory oversight-after all the S&P 500 is guaranteed by the faith of the US capital market system and therefore indirectly the US government. You could make coins of fractions of SPY as well.
The problem with using a stock market index as a currency is that there is high volatility with respect to currencies in certain periods e.g. in 2008. Combining many stock market indices of the world to come up with a new currency doesn't help because stock markets worldwide are massively correlated (when they go down, they all go down together).
Implementation guidelines
Having covered how the Smith can be used as a currency, here are some implementation guidelines:
1. Businesses and retailers need to set up a new currency, the Smith, and if needed, tie it to a new country, the imaginary Smith Republic, in their accounting systems. They need to quote the price of their products in Smiths in addition to other currencies.
2. Exchanges need to convert existing currencies to the Smith (much like what they do for bitcoin), so that consumers can use the Smith to buy goods from retailers who accept the Smith. The Smith needs to be quoted in several currencies for this-and exchanges can use the formulas mentioned above to calculate the current price of the Smith.
Exchanges need to offer an easy mechanism to convert the Smith back into other currencies (a two-way market). The indicative value of the Smith will also be published on this website periodically.
3. The Smith is proposed as a unit to facilitate commercial transactions. It is not designed as an investment or a speculation vehicle, or that it will appreciate in time, etc. against other currencies. Clearing and security of Smith accounts and transfers from them should be the same as for currency deposits today. The Smith needs the active involvement of banks and financial institutions and governments worldwide to be successful. It is not a currency to hide wealth, taxes, etc.
4. There is no paper currency for the Smith, it is purely digital. There are no Smith coins either. The decision to emit paper currency or coins of Smith can be made in an SI General Conference.
5. Much like the slow and gradual adoption of the ECU in the Euro zone before the complete phasing out of individual country currencies like the German Mark and the French Franc and the launch of the Euro, a switch to Smith as a world currency should be a slow process, with the businesses and consumers always having the choice to deal in whatever currency they are comfortable with-it is important to launch the Smith as a parallel currency, and not a replacement for other currencies. If businesses and consumers see the advantages in buying and selling their goods using the Smith, they will automatically start shifting to it, as happened in the Euro zone with the ECU.
Some people have disagreed with me on thinking of money as a unit of measure of value, like the kilogram for the mass, or the meter for the length. They say that value is not a physical property like the kilogram or the meter. I may remind them of the notion of time, measured in seconds, or temperature, measured in Kelvin, as both being man-made intangible, non-physical properties as well, just like the value. If we have universal units for time and temperature, we certainly can have a universal unit for value. The value of objects may be different at different places and times (the same bottle of water costs a lot different in downtown Paris vs. a small town in Portugal), we all know this and are fine with it; a standardized unit of value worldwide would be like extending the Euro over the whole planet, instead of limiting it to just the Euro zone.
We have moved from gold and silver coins to paper currencies successfully in a period of a few hundred years. However, we now have hundreds of paper currencies-and we need to move forward and standardize everything on one global currency. The Smith is proposed with that final goal in mind.
Originally published on the Smith Money site in March 2017
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
