Money, money circulation and credit - стр. 4

The peculiarity of this form of the cost is that the role of the common equivalent of one good didn’t fix yet.

The fourth stage is the money form of value. The role of the common equivalent played gold (this stage was the most longstanding).

Further the search of the most convenient commodity money began which was accompanied by the refusal of nontransportable, wearing and variegated money. The money arena the ingots of copper, bronze then silver and gold enter. As such metal ingots lost the function of the good itself and became only the exchangeable equivalent it is allowable to argue that in their form the money appear in the sense that we used to understand this word today. Gradually the gold became the basic money stuff and was used for the different denomination coins strikes.

The way of the gold turning into the common equivalent – money was long and difficult. Actually we can suppose that eventually it happened to the middle of the XIX^>th century. Till this moment the money functions along with the gold performed the other precious metals, for example silver. The English monetary unit – pounds sterling – was the weighty pound of silver before.

How can we explain the fact that the gold precisely distinguished from the huge world of goods in the form of specific commodity – money? The gold has the range of unique features:

– homogeneous (the question is about the social value and social labor standard incorporated in the good, i.e. such equivalent should be absolutely homogeneous material);

– chemically inert (it doesn’t rust and remains unchanged almost forever in any environmental conditions);

– portable (there is a plenty large enough cost in relative little volume);

– divisible (any quantity of gold could be easily divided onto the smaller parts).

Strictly speaking theoretically we can distinguish some other materials and metals which also can satisfy the mentioned above conditions: silver, diamonds, platinum, etc.

However the objective process of the economic affairs development distinguished gold precisely. Silver couldn’t compete with gold because of its enough incidence in the earth crust, diamonds are unhomogeneous and couldn’t be divided, platinum found to be scorned by the Spaniards who called it «platina» and simply considered it the waste product of the gold mines.

With the gold usage situation the humanity faced the fact that this metal looses any other distinctive features except quantity. This particular relates this metal with the cost i.e. it looses all the differences between the heterogeneous types of labor. The gold represents itself in the form of «clot» that lacks substance of labor and quantity of socially needed time spent on the concrete good production.