Gresham's Law (redirected from Copernicus' Law)

Gresham's law: see under Gresham, Sir Thomas.

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Gresham's law

Observation that “bad money drives out good.” It is named for Sir Thomas Gresham (1519–1579), financial agent of Queen Elizabeth I, who was one of the first to elucidate it (he had been preceded by Copernicus). The meaning expressed is that, if two coins have the same face value but are made from metals of unequal value, the cheaper will tend to drive the other out of circulation; the more valuable coin will be hoarded or used for foreign exchange instead of for domestic transactions.

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Gresham’s Law 

an economic law, formulated by the 16th-century English statesman and financier T. Gresham, that states: “Bad money drives out good.” Actually this principle was known before him, as it had been noted that, upon circulation of coins of the same nominal denomination but different value, the lower-value coin assumes the function of circulating currency while the higher-value coin is hoarded, melted down into ingots, or taken abroad. For metal currency, this law had already been formulated by N. Copernicus in 1526. A full scientific analysis of the phenomena stated in Gresham’s law is given by the Marxist theory of money (see K. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, as well as Das Kapital, vol. 1, ch. 3).

The action of Gresham’s law is typical for bimetallism when, upon the legal establishment of a value ratio for gold and silver (for instance, 1:15), both gold and silver coins of appropriate weight and with the same nominal exchange value are freely minted from private metal reserves. When the market price of silver falls, say to a ratio of 1:20, it becomes profitable to exchange only silver coins. Gresham’s law also acts in the case of inflation: with the devaluation of paper money resulting from overissue, the population hoards gold and silver coins while the paper money usually remains in circulation.