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Some people think that
one of the fundamental institutions of the 19th century should be restored;
we single out Great Britain as the great leader embracing this institution.
This institution was the free minting of gold
practiced by Great Britain in its heyday of growth, world economic and
financial power. Under this system, any owner of gold bullion could take his
bullion to the Royal Mint and have it minted into coins containing exactly
the same amount of gold. This was done at no cost to the owner of bullion as
a government service to the economy.
Thus, the owner of gold bullion converted his
bullion directly into money which could be saved, invested or spent at will.
The new gold was turned into money and increased the money supply because gold
was money.
Another idea has been floated, regarding doing
the same with silver: "Opening the Mint to Silver" is the same idea
as free coinage of gold, outlined above, but applied to silver.
Some people suppose that re-instituting this
practice of centuries prior to the 1800's, which was indeed
entirely wholesome and beneficial in its time, would produce the same
wonderful results today; supposedly, the restoration of this institution would
restore stability, growth savings and true and lasting prosperity.
Free coinage of silver considered
First we must think of what sort of "free
coinage" of silver we are thinking of. Would we propose the free coinage
of a coin with a face value, or with no face value?
If we propose the free coinage of a coin with
a face value, then the face value must be superior or equal to the intrinsic
value of silver. No one is going to take silver bullion to the U.S. Mint, for
instance, and have it turned into silver coins with a face value that is less
than the bullion value of the silver in the coins!
If the face value is equal to the intrinsic
value of the silver, then within a week's time the silver coinage would
probably be on its way back to the refinery, the price of silver having gone
up in the meantime and made the melted coins worth more than the coins
themselves.
If the face value is superior to the bullion
value of the silver in the coins, then the miners who are taking their silver
to the Mint are obtaining a State subsidy of their mining operations, which
is politically objectionable.
Alternatively, if we are proposing the free
coinage of a coin with no face value, then the situation is different. There
is no subsidy at all involved; if there is a cost for minting, it could
reasonably be attributed to social and economic policy for the benefit of the
community in general. It would be an acceptable State expenditure, indeed, a
quite legitimate function of the Treasury.
However, the miner having turned his silver
bullion into coins with no face value - or with a face value far below the
intrinsic value, which negates the coin's monetary function - is now faced
with the problem of what to do with them. The coins are valuable,
indeed, but - what is their value? They can be designated as "legal
tender", they are a product of the Treasury, but the problem does not go
away - what is the value of these coins?
Each individual would have a different idea
regarding the value of these coins with no face value! And the ideas of each
individual would change hourly, according to the quoted price of silver on
the international exchanges. Each transaction with these coins would
necessitate a process of haggling about the correct value of the coins.
Some people, but most definitely not all
people, would wish to save these coins, and under present conditions, they
would most likely be doing something wise and prudent; however, they would be
speculating on a rise in the price of silver, either long-term or short-term,
according to the views of each individual saver. Speculators are a small
portion of the total population, especially among the less-affluent savers
who are the most interested in silver as a means of saving.
The fact is that silver coins with no face
value, or with a face value so low as to be meaningless, as in the case of
the American Silver Eagle 1 oz. coin, are generally available in quantities
sufficient to cover the needs of American speculators on the price of silver,
who wish to speculate by purchasing Silver Eagles.
For this reason, if under present conditions
the US Mint or any other Mint were open to "free coinage of
silver", there would probably not be a great increase in the amount of
such silver being minted. Such miners who turned in large amounts of silver
to be minted, would be well and truly stuck with them and have a great deal
of trouble in placing them among the public, which in the U.S. for instance,
is already largely satisfied with the production of Silver Eagles by the U.S.
Mint.
The dilemma
If free coinage refers to minting as legal
tender a coin with a face value superior the value of its silver content,
then this implies a subsidy to the mining interests. This is unacceptable,
politically.
If free coinage refers to a coin with no face
value, even if by Law classified as legal tender, this means that any
important amount of additional minting is going to lead to piles of coins
stuck in the hands of the miners who delivered the bullion to the Mint for
minting into coins. This is unworkable economically, as there is insufficient
market for silver coins with no face value.
Why did free coinage work at one time,
and why would it not work again today?
The reason is not hard to find: in the past,
in earlier centuries, silver was money in itself. There was no "price of
silver"! The price of silver was expressed in the amount of things that
a given amount of silver could purchase. The closest thing to a price of
silver was the amount of gold one ounce of silver could buy.
Miners digging up silver were actually
"digging up money". With free coinage of silver, all the miners had
to do was take their silver to the Mint, and - presto! - their
silver bullion was turned into silver money.
How did we get from there, to where we are today?
It's a very long story but we shall try to
abbreviate it.
The greatest minter of silver in history was
the Spanish Empire.
In 1535 the Spanish Crown established a Mint
in Mexico City, to mint coins which already existed in Spain before the
Conquest of Mexico. These were the "Pieces of Eight", which were
coins that bore in inscription "Ocho Reales" - meaning "Eight Reales".
A "Real" was the name given to a certain weight of pure silver,
about 3 grams. This size of coin probably derives from the Arabian Rial, for Spain was under Moslem domination for about
seven centuries until the Moors were expelled from Spain in 1492. And the Rial itself is perhaps another name for the Koranic "dirham" which is defined in Islamic
Law as a silver coin of about 3 grams in weight.
Eight reales, of 3
grams each, made a coin of 24 grams. And since the U.S. silver dollar was
modeled by Thomas Jefferson upon the Spanish "Pieces of Eight" used
by the American Colonies before Independence, the U.S. Silver Dollar as
defined by the Constitution contains - 24.05 grams of pure silver!
The ratio between the values of gold and
silver, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, was fixed in the U.S. at
16:1. The gold dollar contained 1.505 grams of gold, while the silver dollar
contained 24.05 grams of silver. 24.05 / 1.505 = 15.984, that is, very close
to the ratio of 16:1.
We must pause to understand something with
regard to the peculiar valuation which humans give to gold, a valuation which
is quite different from that accorded to silver.
Gold has, for practical purposes, no declining
marginal utility. What this means is that no one ever has so much gold, that
he begins to attribute a lesser value to any additional gold. Regarding the
world as a whole we can say that world demand for gold is insatiable. At the
end of 1970, there was an above-ground stock of 90,000 tonnes
of gold, and the price of gold was $35 dollars an ounce. At the end of 2008,
the above-ground stock of gold in the world has been calculated as about
162,500 tonnes, and yet the price had gone up to
close to $1,000 dollars. Additional gold is being added to this pile at a
rate of about 2,500 tonnes annually, approximately
1.5% per year, and it all has an immediate market. And yet, as of June 2011,
the price is in the $1,500's.
Silver, on the other hand, does have a
declining marginal utility.
The old ratio of 16:1 between the price of
gold and the price of silver was established before the Industrial
Revolution, when the extraction of silver from the ground was still a
primitive labor-intensive process. This changed radically in the 19th century
and huge quantities of silver began to flood the world and notably, the
United States.
The prevailing view of what happened to silver
in the 19th century is as follows:
The world's appetite for silver began to taper
off as a result of its declining marginal utility under the impact of the
enormous production of silver. There arose a great conflict between those
miners who insisted that the U.S. Government should maintain, to their
benefit, of the old ratio of 16:1, and the market for silver, which began to
reflect the declining marginal utility of silver in lower prices for silver,
while the gold price stood firm, due to its non-declining marginal utility,
even when gold mining was also producing increasing quantities of gold.
In 1873, the Sherman Act by the U.S. Congress
finally demonetized silver. The struggle to maintain the old ratio of 16:1
was ended. Gold had triumphed.
Professor Antal E. Fekete has a different explanation for what happened to
silver in the 19th century. As we understand his explanation, the Sherman Act
of 1873 was not the result of a fall in the price of silver, which would have
meant an enormous subsidy of the Western mining interests had the policy of
the "Open Mint" been continued, but rather the cause of a fall
in the price of silver. Because up until the Sherman Act, all silver
taken to the US Mint was minted into coin for the account of the owner of
the silver - i.e. the miners; whereas the Sherman Act changed this
crucial arrangement and declared that henceforth, the Treasury would mint
silver dollars for its own account, that is to say, only in the
amounts which it, the Treasury, decided should be minted. The miners were
thus left hanging in the air with an excess of production of silver which had
to be offered on the market. The result was that the price of silver began to
decline.
Whatever the cause of the demonetization of
silver - whether the fall in the price of silver gave rise to the Sherman
Act, or whether the Sherman Act was itself the cause of the fall in the price
of silver, the fact is that silver finally ceased to be regarded as money in
itself, except for China, which capitulated in the 1930's and Latin America
which abandoned silver in the early 1900's.
In spite of having been demonetized, in spite
of no longer being money-in-itself, silver went on being used to manufacture
coins for everyday use all over the world until the 1950's. Since then, all
silver coins in the world gradually went out of circulation, one by one. The
reason for the disappearance of silver money was that the increasing volume
of money in the form of banknotes and bank deposits created by the banking
systems of the world began to exert an upward pressure upon the price of
silver. The silver in coins of various denominations began to be worth more
when melted down into silver bullion, than as monetary coins. Some people
saved their silver coins, perceiving the increase in the value of silver, but
the vast majority of silver coinage in the world was melted down and sold as
silver bullion.
The rise of technology in the world since 1950
created the principal market for silver bullion. Silver's continued use in
the minting of coins became a minor part of the market. Industrial use
created by technology became the major support for the price of silver.
Silver is no longer used to mint coins for
monetary use. The fall in the price of silver, initiated in the 1800's, has
now ceased and silver is gaining value, partly as an effect of the increase
in money in circulation and the perceived probability of huge future
increases in money in circulation due to current monetary policy around the
world.
People around the world are now concerned
about the safety of their savings and are buying silver and gold as a refuge
for those savings.
The silver coins that people are buying are
not monetary silver coins; they cannot easily and immediately be used in
daily transactions to pay for purchases of goods or services. Purchasing
those coins is a form of speculation on the future increase in the price of
silver and the value of the coins. It is a wise speculation, but a
speculation nevertheless. More and more people are now buying silver coins in
spite of the occasional falls in the price of silver, because the fears
caused by these falls are outweighed by the fear of losing all their savings
when invested in other ways.
This is where we are today, with regard to
silver.
The rise of numeric money
At the dawn of the 20th century, gold was the
world's money. A British Pound was 7.32 grams of gold, and the coin which
contained that amount of gold was called the "Sovereign"; it had no
numeric value engraved upon it, which is significant: gold was money
and the Sovereign did not require a numeric value in terms of something else.
A US dollar was the name for a monetary unit that contained 1.505 grams of
gold. A Mexican peso was the name for a monetary unit that contained .75
grams of gold. And so on, around the world.
The 20th century saw the birth and growth of
the power of the State thanks to the idea that the State is to be responsible
for prosperity and the amelioration of the economic condition of the poor -
the Welfare State, in other words. The Welfare State requires expenses far
beyond the resources of the State which can be provided by taxation.
Banking systems all over the world
collaborated in providing their respective States with banking money
(deposits) and bank notes created out of nothing.
Initially, it was possible to redeem this bank
money by claiming gold against the delivery of bank money, but finally in the
30's, paper calims against gold were so excessive
that general bankruptcy took place, and since then, no bank note in the world
has been exchangeable for gold upon demand.
The last tenuous link between money and gold
which existed in the world was expressed by the Bretton
Woods Treaty of 1944. Only foreign Central Banks could claim gold redemption
for dollars which they held. Their own monetary systems were based on the
trust that their dollar claims upon US gold would be honored.
On August 15, 1971 those claims were
dishonored. Nixon "closed the gold window" and the dollar, and with
it the whole world, was freed from any constraint upon the increase of debt -
debt could be "paid" with more debt, forever and ever, or so it was
thought.
The international bankers were delighted. At
last, they were free from that pesky limiting factor, gold! Free to expand
credit, free to create more money ad libitum.
The ensuing decades were a banker's dream!
By and large, the change to irredeemable bank
money was enormously successful, if the creation of a world gone mad can be
considered a success.
As the decades went by, people eventually
forgot about the gold into which their bank notes (paper money) had once been
redeemable. They began to think about their bank notes as money itself,
when they are not so by any means; they are only a formerly redeemable
representation of actual gold money.
The bank notes bear numbers which originally
referred to the weight of metal they represented. The world has forgotten
this entirely and now people everywhere regard the bank note as money itself
and the quantity of money as equivalent to the number on the note.
The population of the globe today thinks of
money in terms of numbers which refer to no quantity of anything. The
more numbers you can add up, the wealthier you are! The world's money is
simply numeric.
Problems of free coinage of gold without a gold
monetary system
Within a world monetary system that is
exclusively numeric, the free coinage of gold would mean the minting of coins
either bearing a face value, or not bearing a face value.
The U.S. Mint does produce gold coins with a
face value, but the face value is so low as to be meaningless - the face
value is ignored; it is as if it were not there at all.
If the Mint were open to free coinage, the
miner supplying the gold bullion would be in the same position as the miner
supplying silver bullion in exchange for silver coins with no face value:
"Now, what do I do with the coins? Who wants them?" The market for
gold coins is satisfactorily served by current minting. There is no scarcity
of gold coins. They are readily available. The miner does not want this hassle.
He disposes of his gold by other means.
Since they bear no numeric face value
which is related to reality, gold coins are not easily useable in commerce.
Purchasing them is pure speculation - even if the best and most solid
speculation. Using them as money directly will require negotiation between
buyer and seller. This is cumbersome and inefficient.
Gold is money, but it cannot at present be
used as money directly in day to day affairs, because using it requires what is actually barter activity. Today it
is not possible to make a deposit in a bank anywhere in the world, using a
gold coin. Some banks in Europe buy and sell gold coins. If you want to make
a deposit, you must first sell your gold coin at one window, and with the
numeric money you can then make a deposit at another window.
My friend James Turk has invented an ingenious
system which he calls "Goldmoney"
and it does perform a useful service for gold owners; "Goldmoney" can accept numeric money from the owner
of an account, and convert that numeric money into gold held for his account;
conversely, "Goldmoney" will convert the
gold holdings of the owners of an account into numeric money and effect a
transfer of this numeric money according to the account holder's
instructions. Alternatively, "Goldmoney"
can effect transfers of gold between gold holder's
accounts.
Let us now suppose that the U.S. Mint is going
to produce gold coins with a true face value. Just what is that value going
to be?
A moment's consideration will suffice to
conclude that such a project is not feasible, because the true price is
fluctuating every day in terms of numbers and today, numbers rule in
this world.
Gold is not directly useable as money in
today's world, but it remains a mighty metal.
Let us suppose that the U.S. Mint produced a
gold ounce coin and that it was given a value of $2,000 dollars, when the
market price of gold is $1,600 dollars per ounce. What would be the result?
The result would not be a gold coin overvalued
in terms of present numeric dollars. The result would a devaluation of the
numeric dollar in terms of gold! Up to 1934, the U.S. dollar represented
1.505 grams of pure gold. This worked out to a price of gold in dollars of
$20.67 per Troy ounce.
Suppose gold has reached a price of $1,600
dollars an ounce. If a gold coin is minted that says "$2,000
Dollars", then that means that the dollar is now worth less, it has been
devalued to one two-thousandth of an ounce of gold; otherwise, people would
take four of these coins, paying $8,000 dollars for them, and buy five
ounces of gold bullion. What people want with gold is to have more gold,
no matter how it looks!
So, it is not possible to overvalue a gold
coin.
Winding up this discussion it is clear that as
things are, "opening the Mint to the free coinage of gold" cannot
be a useful measure, because it can only be considered as an institution
that complements a monetary system wholly based on gold as money in itself. Whenever we talk of "the price of gold"
it is evident that we are living in a monetary system that is not a gold
system. Under a gold monetary system, there is really no "price" of
gold, for everything is priced in terms of gold, and "the price of
gold" is revealed by the things which gold can purchase - its purchasing
power.
Free coinage of gold is not viable except as a
support to a monetary system that consists exclusively of gold, or of gold
and silver, where the silver floats in relation to gold. To put it simply,
think of the monetary system as a duck, and of free coinage as the feathers
on the duck. The two must exist together!
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Considerations regarding silver
If silver is currently $36 dollars an ounce, a
one-ounce silver coin can be successfully placed in circulation with a
monetary, numeric face value of $60 dollars, which overvalues the silver
contained in the coin.
These coins would be very useful to the
population and would be eagerly snapped up in vast quantities. The population
would save these coins and use paper money for transactions - Gresham's Law;
individuals would dispose of their silver money only in situations of great
need. Theoretically, it would be possible to gather important quantities of
these coins and use them to purchase a greater weight of silver bullion than
that contained in the coins. However, it would be difficult to gather such
quantities of silver, as the people would be jealously hanging on to their
silver coins. Those individuals who might wish to carry out such an operation
would be turning in silver money in exchange for bullion, and bullion, unlike
the coins, would carry the risk of a fall in the price of silver. The
speculators would have abandoned cash for a speculative position in bullion.
Those people who might wish to own more silver
bullion would want to purchase their bullion with numeric money and not with
overvalued silver money - this is predicated by Gresham's Law: you spend the
money that appears less desirable, and retain the money that you think is
more desirable; a silver coin which overvalues the silver in the coin, is
certainly more valuable, in the eyes of its owner, than a paper note or a
bank deposit.
However, these temporarily overvalued silver
coins would eventually exist in a situation where silver bullion is valued at
more than $60 dollars an ounce, because since numeric or fiat money is
continually increasing in volume, prices are rising and silver bullion will
eventually be worth more than $60 dollars an ounce.
These coins would then be undervalued and
their destination would be the refinery, where they would be turned into
bullion with a higher numeric value. Thus, silver coinage with an overvalued
face value is possible, but destined to a short life in circulation.
We have covered all the alternatives regarding
free coinage of silver and of gold. The free coinage of both precious metals
poses similar yet different problems which make it impossible to implement
free coinage.
Free coinage is only possible and indeed,
highly useful and desirable where people think in terms of quantities of
precious metals when they are doing their economic calculation, not in
terms of numeric money, and this can only happen where the monetary
system is based on gold or silver, or on both.
The way back
How can we return to such a sound and
realistic economy, where precious metals become once again money itself,
because people think in terms of quantities of precious metal, either silver
or gold?
First, we do not believe any change can be
effected by a decree of any sort. The change must come in a roundabout way,
insensibly. The problem of an overnight change, from the whole world's way of
economic calculation by simple numbers, to calculation by quantity of
precious metal is simply overwhelming.
Just as the change from using quantities of
precious metal to effect economic calculation was gradual - a gradual decline
in quality of money, we may remark - so a change back to using precious
metals in economic calculation will have to be gradual.
We believe that the insertion of silver into
circulation must come first, because silver is the metal that is accessible
to the majority of the world's population.
This can be done by a kind of collaboration
with the present system of numeric calculation in terms of money which is
only numbers.
Gresham's Law is popularly expressed as
"bad money drives out good", meaning that money of higher quality
is driven out of circulation and into savings!
The plan is to infiltrate good silver money
into potential circulation, in parallel with numeric - paper - money;
"potential circulation" means that though the silver money will be
usable in any transaction, in practice it will not circulate, because as
higher-quality money it will be driven into savings. And savings, immediate
and massive increase in savings, is what is vitally necessary in today's
over-indebted world. Good silver money could and would provide the necessary
incentive and means to accommodate massive savings.
Silver can be turned into money that will
never vanish en route to the refinery, as in the past, but remain permanently
in savings as potentially circulating money.
There is only one way to achieve this
A silver coin with no engraved face
value can be granted a numeric value by means of an official quote on the
part of a State Authority, either by the Central Bank, or preferably by the
Treasury itself.
The numeric value will overvalue the silver in
the coin, ideally by a small percentage. This numeric value, granted by the
Central Bank or Treasury, will increase as the price of silver rises; the rise
in the price of silver will be inevitable, due to the constant increase in
the volume of numeric paper money and bank deposits.
The overvaluation of the silver coin by the
Treasury or other Authority creates a profit for the Treasury or other
Authority that mints and grants a virtual monetary value to the coin. This is
can be called either a subsidy or a tax paid by the population to the
issuing institution. This is a one-time-only cost of furnishing real,
tangible silver money for the population, and it will willingly be paid by
the population. The cost will not be paid by the Monetary Authority, but paid
by the population to the Monetary Authority.
Temporary falls in the price of silver will
not be allowed to affect the official numeric value, only rises, just as the
value of a dollar bill does not depend upon the value of the paper it's
printed on. (Though rises in the price of paper and costs of printing are
making the printing of paper dollars uneconomical already, as shown by the
attempts to introduce metallic dollars into circulation in the U.S.) A fall
in the price of silver would mean greater profit for the Monetary Authority,
and a larger over-valuation of the silver in the coin, regarding which the
public will be totally indifferent. Absolutely no one will wish to turn in
his over-valued silver coins for paper bills.
This coin will never disappear from
circulation, as it bears no engraved value which cannot be modified when the
intrinsic value of the silver in the coin begins to approach its engraved
value.
This coin, due to its superior quality as
incorporating a quantity of silver, will immediately be snapped up by
the population and retained as savings. Daily expenses will be met with
numeric money but silver will be kept back as savings, useable in emergencies
directly as money in daily transactions.
The creation of this silver coin, now become
money with a virtual numeric value, makes its use possible in numeric
economic calculation and in daily needs in case of pressing circumstances. It
can co-exist with numeric money. Whoever pays with the coin, the recipient of
the coin will probably retain it in savings. It can be deposited for credit
in a bank at its numeric value, in which case the bank manager will probably
keep it for himself, by substituting an equivalent amount of paper money out
of his own pocket for the silver coin.
This plan for monetizing silver is not a plan
for "free coinage of silver". The Mint will coin such quantities of
silver coins as demanded by the public. If the coin is scarce, a premium will
be paid by savers anxious to own this coin. The Monetary Authority will be
charged with the task of minting quantities of this coin sufficient to
satisfy popular demand. If the coin is so abundant that its quantity exceeds
the capacity for savings of the population, the excess will return, via the
banking system, to the Central Bank, until the desire for saving on the part
of the population once more manifests itself in further demand for the coin.
Thus, silver will come once again into use as
money, with the help of a virtual numeric value granted by a Monetary
Authority.
It is foreseeable that masses of this silver
money, put away in savings, will be in the hands of the people as numeric
money destroys itself, as it appears to be doing through its issuance in
astronomic quantities. When the pernicious numeric money destroys itself,
silver will remain in the field! When the Central Banks collapse through
their own actions, silver will once again take its rightful and reasonable
place in the lives of people, by default.
World demand for this coin, ideal for savings,
will be so great as to drive industrial use of silver into second place in
the determination of the price of silver. As silver is sought as a monetary
refuge, minting of coins will become so great that demand for silver as money
will determine limits to its industrial use and drive the price so high that
the old ratio of 16:1 might become a reality once again. But, that would be
far in the future.
The fixed ratios between silver and gold which
existed in the past were actually mistakes of policy and theoretically, it is
unsound to look for such a fixed ration, because of the difference between
gold and silver. Gold does not have a diminishing marginal utility, while
silver does have such a diminishing marginal utility. This indicates that the
ratio between silver and gold must be a fluctuating ratio, where it is the
value of silver with relation to gold that fluctuates.
It is important to place monetized silver in
the hands of people once again so that the idea of silver as money does not
totally disappear from the memory of mankind.
Our very civilization depends upon the use of
real, physical money. We cannot have an industrial civilization along with
the use of numeric money which is now either paper, or in bank accounts
nothing more than imaginary money.
Man cannot deal with reality with what is the
stuff of numbers of no substance.
Silver must be first in circulation, before
gold, because silver is for use by the masses and gold is much more special.
The way back to gold, which is so vitally important, is through silver as
money in the hands of the people.
All of this does not mean that people will be
saddled with the need to handle heavy quantities of silver to make payments.
The ownership of a quantity of silver money can be transferred by electronic
means from one owner to another; "Goldmoney"
can also be "Silvermoney". Only 50 years
ago, the U.S. Treasury issued Silver Certificates representing silver in the
vaults of the Treasury. Silver Certificates representing monetized silver
coins in Treasury vaults would be acceptable, as there would be no leveraging
involved.
All great transformations in social and
economic life must involve masses of people. In other words, change must come
from the grass roots.
The mobilization of silver as money once
again, to circulate in parallel with numeric money, is the way forward.
Silver money is the thread that will allow humanity to escape from the
Labyrinth of numeric money.
We have no idea to propose, regarding the
reform of the international monetary system to restore gold as money. This is
something that has to take place, because the world has truly turned into a
madhouse of disorder since gold was banished in 1971. We have no idea how the
restoration of gold as money in the world will take place.
The restoration of gold money is gigantic
counter-revolution in monetary affairs. While we wait for this event, the
monetization of the silver ounce, or some fraction of it, to allow it to
circulate permanently in parallel with numeric money is something that favors
humanity and that can be carried out without upsetting the world's numeric
monetary system.
We conclude with a phrase borrowed from Franz
Lehar's "Merry Widow" operetta: "Man tut vas man kann!" - one does what one can
Hugo Salinas Price
President, Mexican Civic Association Pro Silver
www.plata.com.mx/plata/
Hugo Salinas Price is President of the Mexican Civic Association Pro
Silver; its website, with some articles in English, is www.plata.com.mx
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