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Writing: A Remedy for the Country

A Remedy for the Country, § 10

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§ 10

Such is the difference between the daler of each separate kind of metal, but it may, with regard to what was previously said about the comparison between different metals, become considerably greater and be as high as 80 or 100 per cent, and no one is then likely to be surprised if the productive occupations become insecure and are devastated, and that not by accident but as an inevitable consequence of the regulations, whether or not bank loans had ever been permitted.

Let us now proceed and see how all of this has affected paper money. In order to understand the matter more clearly, we must make a distinction here between the bank transfer notes that have been issued by the Bank against ready money in order to ease circulation and long before bank loans were permitted,1 and those that have been issued more recently as loans against property, real estate, etc.

Before the loans were made, no deposit-receipts were in circulation for which the holder of the receipt had not deposited an equal amount of ready money in the Bank. All receipts were made out in daler kmt. If the monetary regulations of the realm were to be respected by the Bank, the depositor should receive a deposit-receipt for 900 daler whether he deposited the sum in slantar or plåtar, that is to say, whether he deposited 1 or 1 4/9ths of a skeppund of copper or in whatever sort of current silver coin, without the Bank’s promissory note indicating what kind of currency had been paid into the Bank or containing any assurance that the receipt-holder would be able to withdraw his capital against that receipt in the same kind of coin that had been deposited when it was issued.

When such receipts were being cashed in, it was thus in the power of the Bank to honour its receipt either in caroliner, pjäsar, plåtar or slantar, that is, whether it wished to pay for one and the same sum 60 to 70 or up to 100 per cent more or less, without the receipt-holder being aware of having lost any of his daler.

Thus, the daler number on the receipt did not denote a specific quantity of silver or copper but only what the Bank was willing to pay for it; but the more inferior the coin with which the receipts were honoured, the less the quantity of silver or copper the daler number on the receipt represented and the less value did the receipt have; that is, commodities must be paid for with many more daler in receipts than in caroliner and riksdaler, so that if the Bank had exchanged the receipts for nothing but slantar, the value of the daler on the receipt would of course already have fallen against the former by 60 or 70 per cent and more, and all of this as a result of the monetary regulations.

When these different daler are compared to the riksdaler specie, which represents a certain quantity of silver, it is clear that it requires a different amount of the more valuable than of the less valuable daler to purchase riksdaler, which is precisely what has now come to be called a high exchange rate2 and is nothing other than an agio between the better and inferior sorts of coin according to their intrinsic worth, and which neither can nor ought to be rejected, for anyone would certainly be a fool who would want to exchange 2 lod of silver for 1¾ lod of equal fineness and he an even greater one who would want to sell 2 lod of fine silver for 100 lod of copper, when he could otherwise get 200 lod for it.


  1. . . . long before bank loans were permitted: at the beginning of the Age of Liberty, Ständernas bank in practice was forbidden to give out loans to private persons. This ban was lifted in 1731 by the decision made by the Diet to allow the loaning out of what the bank had gained in interest. In 1734 it also became possible for the bank to provide loans with iron as security. This right was in 1738–9 – with the inauguration of the Hat government – turned into a more general right to loan out money on the private market. In 1760 this right was abolished as a consequence of inflation, the fall of the Swedish exchange rate and the overwhelming economic problems.
  2. high exchange rate: During the eighteenth century the concepts of falling and rising exchange rates were reversed compared to how we see matters today. The modern expression would be “low exchange rate”.

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