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Cute Russian comic. The home of the official English version is here if anyone wants to skip ahead (or support them): https://boosty.to/gabiconomics-en
Agio (from Italian aggio) is - simply put - an exchange rate... with a twist.
Historically, agio referred to a premium paid above nominal value when exchanging depreciated paper money for full-value metallic coins (such as gold or silver) of the same denomination. It reflected the difference in real value between weaker and stronger forms of currency and was especially common during periods of monetary instability or inflation.
In modern usage, agio has become a broader commercial term, referring to exchange rate differences, premiums, or discounts in financial transactions. It is used in contexts such as bond pricing and foreign currency exchange, where it denotes the difference between nominal (or face) value and market value. While the original meaning tied specifically to currency conversion has largely become historical, the term has expanded to describe value differentials more generally and is sometimes even used in place of “exchange rate” in certain contexts.
The author of this is coming off as a bit of a "sound money" crank whenever the subject of specie comes up. We're halfway to goldbuggery
I agree with you and find myself feeling a patronising tolerance of it. I hope it's going somewhere interesting though. Creative people can have little a crank object of interest if it doesn't get in the way of otherwise seeing the world clearly. I feel like, while it could go either way, I can't see it totally derailing the story or overshadowing the other more useful stuff.
I suppose exploring how currency works and how arbitrary and/or deceptive it can be might be valuable overall in interrogating the status quo economic system.
Have earlier issues had a focus on exploring something that is tangential to marxism? I feel like I've seen a few pages with the little explanatory text going into something either regionally specific or exploring something the author just thinks is neat.
I poked a bit at the Assignats/early paper money that came up in #54 and while this certainly seems like a continuation of what that comic foreshadowed, it is hard to read it and not think the author is a gold bug.
you think maybe it's just because he's stuck in the ye olde gold standard era of Marx?
I won’t claim to be the best read, so I may be misinterpreting you, the author, Marx, or all three, but it didn’t seem like Marx believed that the commodity value of gold solely was established from the labor value of its extraction.
Actually, that is exactly what Marx believed. And he specifically used the historical example of the rapid inflation of gold coins when the Spanish brought over their hoard from conquering, colonizing and enslaving South America. One of the only times in history where gold has had that tendency.
The labor for creating gold became cheap, so more gold was available, so gold itself became cheap. So instead of being extremely wealthy like the Spanish thought they would be (which they were, just not like modern capitalist wealthy) they were forced to limit their spending. The only way for them to maintain the exchange value is through hoarding, like with diamonds. However, this creates a limit on how much exchange value they can get at any given time. The inflationary tendency is created because there is less labor value being created with any single gold piece.
For Marx, it isn't a goldbug thing, it was a demonstration that even gold currency follows the LTV. Marx would be horrified at fiat currency, as it is an abstraction on top of an abstraction. It is barely tangential to labor value.
And this certainly isn’t something I’ve read about, so I’m sure I’m misunderstanding.
This seems like it misinterprets my understanding of “labor value” in a couple ways:
Again:
So I would like to understand how I’ve misunderstood both from a “modern” interpretation and from Marx’s perspective on this.
Yes, paper money has no real value - it’s purely socially constructed to have it - but it seems the gold standard inflates the value of gold compared to other commodities when paper money is backed by it.