Gold and Silver are often stated as perfect metals for use as money. Would Platinum and Palladium work?

Economics Economics Questions
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1

Both Platinum and Palladium are made into coins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platinum_coin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palladium_coin

Is there any particular reason Gold and Silver are talked about and those two are excluded?

2

  1. I am guessing the reason you hear about gold and silver more is that there is a much broader history of those metals in use.

  2. I suspect that true free markets would use platinum or whatever more rare metals, maybe more between banks than in circulation, or using “$1 bills” worth a speck of palladium.

  3. I think a free market for currency means whatever commodity could be used in exchange, maybe petro-dollars. Vegetable-oil-dollars would be less likely because of the effort required to warehouse significant values (plus it probably goes rancid and gold doesn’t).

3

Very true. In the jewelry trade, platinum never caught on, I suspect partly because it is so expensive, and then because it looks too much like silver to the untrained eye.

4

Thanks guys :smiley:

5

Perhaps platinum will be used as money in a future space-based society. IIRC, platinum group metals are relatively common (compared to gold and silver) on M-type asteroids, and assuming it retains a generally high market price compared to its mass, it wouldn’t take much delta-v to lug large amounts around, compared to the alternatives.

/space cadet rambling [:)]

6

Ooooooh, very interesting, I did not know that…