Fineness_of_early_Roman_Imperial_silver_coins

A debasement of coinage is the practice of lowering the intrinsic value of

coin A coin is a small object, usually round and flat, used primarily as a medium of exchange or legal tender. They are standardized in weight, and produced in large quantities at a mint in order to facilitate trade. They are most often issued by ...

s, especially when used in connection with

commodity money Commodity money is money whose value comes from a commodity of which it is made. Commodity money consists of objects having value or use in themselves ( intrinsic value) as well as their value in buying goods. This is in contrast to representa ...

, such as

gold Gold is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol Au (from Latin ) and atomic number 79. In its pure form, it is a brightness, bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile metal. Chemically, gold is a transition metal ...

silver Silver is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol Ag () and atomic number 47. A soft, whitish-gray, lustrous transition metal, it exhibits the highest electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, and reflectivity of any metal. ...

coins, while continuing to circulate it at face value. A coin is said to be debased if the quantity of gold, silver, copper or nickel in the coin is reduced.

Examples

Roman Empire

Roman currency Roman currency for most of Roman history consisted of gold, silver, bronze, orichalcum#Numismatics, orichalcum and copper coinage. From its introduction during the Roman Republic, Republic, in the third century BC, through Roman Empire, Imperial ...

, the value of the

denarius The ''denarius'' (; : ''dēnāriī'', ) was the standard Ancient Rome, Roman silver coin from its introduction in the Second Punic War to the reign of Gordian III (AD 238–244), when it was gradually replaced by the ''antoninianus''. It cont ...

was gradually decreased over time as the Roman government altered both the size and the silver content of the coin. Originally, the

used was nearly pure, weighing about 4.5

gram The gram (originally gramme; SI unit symbol g) is a Physical unit, unit of mass in the International System of Units (SI) equal to one thousandth of a kilogram. Originally defined in 1795 as "the absolute Mass versus weight, weight of a volume ...

s. From time to time, this was reduced. During the

Julio-Claudian dynasty The Julio-Claudian dynasty comprised the first five Roman emperors: Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. This line of emperors ruled the Roman Empire, from its formation (under Augustus, in 27 BC) until the last of the line, Emper ...

, the

contained approximately 4 grams of silver, and then was reduced to 3.8 grams under

Nero Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus ( ; born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus; 15 December AD 37 – 9 June AD 68) was a Roman emperor and the final emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, reigning from AD 54 until his ...

. The denarius continued to shrink in size and purity, until by the second half of the third century, it was only about 2% silver, and was replaced by the Argenteus.

Ottoman Empire

Weight of akçe in grams of silver and index.

Effects

Debasement lowers the intrinsic value of the coinage and so more coins can be made with the same quantity of precious metal. If done too frequently, debasement may lead to a new coin being adopted as a standard currency, as when the Ottoman akçe was replaced by the

kuruş Kuruş ( ; ), also gurush, ersh, gersh, grush, grosha, and grosi, are all names for currency denominations in and around the territories formerly part of the Ottoman Empire. The variation in the name stems from the different languages it is us ...

(1 kuruş = 120 akçe), with the para (1/40 kuruş) as a subunit. The kuruş in turn later became a subdivision of the

lira Lira is the name of several currency units. It is the current Turkish lira, currency of Turkey and also the local name of the Lebanese pound, currencies of Lebanon and of Syrian pound, Syria. It is also the name of several former currencies, ...

Methods

An administrative method to debase currency is for the mint to start issuing coins of a certain face value, but with less metal content than previous issues. There will be an incentive to bring the old coins to the mint for re-minting – see Gresham's law. A revenue, called

seigniorage Seigniorage , also spelled seignorage or seigneurage (), is the increase in the value of money due to money creation minus the cost of producing the additional money. Monetary seigniorage is where government bonds are exchanged for newly create ...

, is made on this minting process. When done by an individual, precious metal was physically removed from the coin, which could then be passed on at the original face value, leaving the debaser with a profit. This physical debasement was affected by several methods, including clipping (shaving metal from the coin's circumference) and sweating (shaking the coins in a bag and collecting the dust worn off). Until the mid-20th century, coins were often made of

or (rarely)

, which were quite soft and prone to wear. This meant coins naturally got lighter (and thus less valuable) as they aged, so coins that had lost a small amount of

bullion Bullion is non-ferrous metal that has been refined to a high standard of elemental purity. The term is ordinarily applied to bulk metal used in the production of coins and especially to precious metals such as gold and silver. It comes from ...

would go unnoticed. Modern coins used as currency are made of hard, cheap metals such as

steel Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon that demonstrates improved mechanical properties compared to the pure form of iron. Due to steel's high Young's modulus, elastic modulus, Yield (engineering), yield strength, Fracture, fracture strength a ...

copper Copper is a chemical element; it has symbol Cu (from Latin ) and atomic number 29. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. A freshly exposed surface of pure copper has a pinkish-orang ...

, or a copper-nickel alloy, reducing wear and making it difficult and unprofitable to debase them.

Coin clipping

Clipping is the act of shaving off a small portion of a precious metal coin for profit. Over time, the precious metal clippings could be saved up and melted into bullion or used to make new coins. Coin clipping was usually considered by the law to be of a similar magnitude to

counterfeit A counterfeit is a fake or unauthorized replica of a genuine product, such as money, documents, designer items, or other valuable goods. Counterfeiting generally involves creating an imitation of a genuine item that closely resembles the original ...

ing, and was occasionally punished by

death Death is the end of life; the irreversible cessation of all biological functions that sustain a living organism. Death eventually and inevitably occurs in all organisms. The remains of a former organism normally begin to decompose sh ...

, a fate which befell English counterfeiters Thomas Rogers and Anne Rogers in 1690. Even among pirates, clipping coins was considered a serious breach of trust. Henry Avery's pirate fleet attacked the treasure ship '' Gunsway'' in 1695 and netted one of the largest pirate captures in history. When fellow pirate William May's crew were found to have traded clipped coins to Avery's crew, Avery took back nearly all the treasure he had shared with May and his men and sent them away. Coin clipping is why many coins have the rim of the coin marked with stripes (''milling'' or ''reeding''), text (''

engraving Engraving is the practice of incising a design on a hard, usually flat surface by cutting grooves into it with a Burin (engraving), burin. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or Glass engraving, glass ar ...

'') or some other pattern that would be destroyed if the coin were clipped. This practice is attributed to

Isaac Newton Sir Isaac Newton () was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author. Newton was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment that followed ...

, who was appointed Master of the

Royal Mint The Royal Mint is the United Kingdom's official maker of British coins. It is currently located in Llantrisant, Wales, where it moved in 1968. Operating under the legal name The Royal Mint Limited, it is a limited company that is wholly ow ...

1699. Although most modern fiat coins are unprofitable to clip, modern milling can be a deterrent to counterfeiting, an aid to the blind to distinguish different denominations, or purely decorative.

Sweating

20 cent Napoleon 3 superposition de 2 pieces 15 et 16 mm face

In the process of sweating, coins were placed in a bag and shaken. The bits of metal that had worn off the coins were recovered from the bottom of the bag. Sweating tended to wear the coin in a more natural way than clipping, and so was harder to detect.

Plugging

If the coin was large, a hole could be punched out of the middle, and the face of the coin hammered to close up the hole. Or the coin could be sawn in half, and a plug of metal extracted from the interior. After filling the hole with a cheaper metal, the two halves would be welded back together again. Verbal references to plugged quarters and plugged dimes eventually yielded the common phrase "not worth a plugged nickel" (or 'plug nickel', or even a plugged cent), emphasizing the worthlessness of such a tampered coin.

Related uses

*"Debasement" is also sometimes used to refer to the tendency of silver or gold coins to be " shaved", that is, to have small amounts shaved off the edges of the coins by unscrupulous users, thereby reducing the actual precious metal content of the coin. In order to prevent this, silver and gold coins began to be produced with milled edges, as many coins still do by tradition, although they no longer contain valuable metals. For example, the

U.S. The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous ...

quarter and dime have milled edges. Coins that have traditionally been made purely of base metals, such as the U.S.

nickel Nickel is a chemical element; it has symbol Ni and atomic number 28. It is a silvery-white lustrous metal with a slight golden tinge. Nickel is a hard and ductile transition metal. Pure nickel is chemically reactive, but large pieces are slo ...

or the

penny A penny is a coin (: pennies) or a unit of currency (: pence) in various countries. Borrowed from the Carolingian denarius (hence its former abbreviation d.), it is usually the smallest denomination within a currency system. At present, it is ...

, are more likely to have unmilled edges. *By analogy, "debased currency" is sometimes used for anything whose value has been reduced, such as " Stardom is an utterly debased currency"

References

External links

Debasement of Coinage
at dictionary.cambridge.org * {{cite web , url=http://www.usmint.gov/learn/kids/coins/fun-facts/page/10 , title=Fun Facts , url-status=live , website=U.S. Mint , archive-date=2022-05-19 , access-date=2022-12-03 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220519013552/https://www.usmint.gov/learn/kids/coins/fun-facts/page/10 Coins Currency Inflation Monetary economics Monetary policy sv:Devalvering