Just think if some of the major copper exporting countries Australia, Chille etc. Were to set a standard copper:silver:gold ratio and only trade metal for metal. Current demand/price increase for silver/gold has priced many of the worlds poor and now middle class out of the market. By setting the standards from a lower price metal like copper a set of ratios could be established that offer all people of the world a currency with defined purchasing power.
This is the biggest problem in a bi (or even tri) metallic standard. You cannot fix prices. Fixing the price of silver or copper or gold relative to each other is no different to setting a price on milk or eggs. As in previous bi-metallic standards, one will always drift from overvalued to undervalued and Gresham law will come into effect. You cannot run a monetary system, and whilst it would be better than what we currently have, I cannot see it, nor would I want it happening.
So the governments have to decide on this and if they did decide on this it means they cannot just print money... for a Gold/anything standard it will take a sensible government :lol:
Exactly... all bi/tri/100 metallic/whatever standards fail as soon as there is even a minute supply/demand imbalance, and given the ease of spreading information these days, the imbalance would be apparent very quickly, and result in a speculative run on one of the metals. An alternative is to have 2 seperate currencies (eg: gold and silver) circulating, and all goods/services could be purchased in either, but swapping between the currencis would be done at a market set rate. In some places there is already an implicit double currency standard.. A lot of the eastern european countries take both euros and their local currency Sellers of goods would re-adjust their prices based on which metal they want more..
You're talking about about the WOW (game) system maybe , 100 copper = 1 silver and 100 silver =1 gold
The pre decimal standard was also tri-metallic. Half Ps and Pennies were copper, 3ps - crowns were silver, 1/2 sovs and up were gold
The American Open Currency Standards. use copper and silver rounds, not sure if they use gold though but a quick google should fix that, ( Nope doesn't look like it http://www.opencurrency.com/directory/currencies/ ). Anyway, I am not in the US so I have not seen if any of these are in use or whether they are just collected by numismatists ( I have about 10 of the copper rounds, I am sure they were made just to be put in a collection but I might be wrong. Some have units of measure stamped on them, some silver ounces have '50' on them and some of the coppers have "2" on them so it looks like 1 copper to 25 silver is the set rate but I do not know enough about the standards to know if this is universal or just in one trade group.
