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Writing: A Remedy for the Country

A Remedy for the Country, § 20

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§ 20

The second thing that I have undertaken to prove is that such a reduction of the conversion rate or of the paper daler to 36 mark is unfair, first, because it is well known that only a small percentage of the notes have been issued by the Bank at a rate of 36 mark but most of them at 72 and 108 mark. Fairness, after all, requires that those who issue promissory notes and debentures should not be obliged to redeem them at a higher rate than that which they have actually been worth. That is, the possessor of a debenture is not entitled to demand from the issuing party a greater quantity of silver or copper than that for which it was made payable and which he could originally demand for it. Now, it is easy to calculate the quantity of silver at which a banknote issued at a rate of 72 mark was made payable, namely two 9-daler banknotes for one riksdaler specie and, at a rate of 108 mark, three 9-daler notes. If these banknotes are then redeemed by the Bank a few years later at the rate of one riksdaler specie, or its equivalent value, for each 9-daler note, then it is clear that the Bank will redeem its promissory notes with a quantity of silver two or three times larger than that for which they were actually made payable.

With regard to those banknotes that were issued at a lower or par rate,1 however, fairness would require that they should likewise be redeemed in current coin. However, as they would now have passed from hand to hand over a long period of time, been mingled with the rest of the same daler denomination, and along with them declined in value, and as it likewise cannot be known in whose possession they now are, and if those who first drew them from the Bank had actually lost something on them or if they had lost a little of their value everywhere during their circulation among several hundred people, thus distributing the suffering almost evenly among the subjects, then the question is whether it is not far more equitable and more prudent for the survival of the Bank to redeem all banknotes on the basis on which the majority of them were issued than to establish another basis, whereby holders of banknote capital would be able to command two or three times the amount in silver capital that the banknotes had been worth when they came into their possession.


  1. par rate: at the face value.

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