General Article What is money?

Topic Selected: Money Matters Book Volume: 391
This article is 4 years old. Click here to view the latest articles for this topic.

Have you ever seen a coin that is made of totally blank, unmarked metal? All coins start like this, but at some point most get stamped or marked by a king, an emperor or a nation. Once stamped, these metal disks are suddenly transformed into money.

What’s going on here? The value of metal coins has little to do with the value of the metal in the coin itself – notoriously, it costs around two pennies to make a penny in the United States. But by stamping a number on it, the government can decid...

Would you like to see the rest of this article and all the other benefits that Issues Online can provide with?

Sign up now for a no obligation FREE TRIAL and view the entire collection