13. Ответьте на следующие вопросы:

1. What is barter?

2. When may exchange take the form of barter?

3. When is barter inefficient and frustrating?

4. What are the main functions of money?

5. Why has it become unprofitable to hold wealth in the form of money in recent years?

6. Why is money a perfect means of deferred payments?

7. How does a complex trading organization operate in a monetary economy?

V. Ознакомительное чтение

Прочтите текст В и передайте его основное содержание на английском или русском языке.

Text в. Regulation and token money

The Bank Charter Act of 1844 followed a long dispute about the control of the money supply and whether the value of the note issue should be allowed to exceed the stock of gold available to support it. The Act placed a statutory limit on the fiduciary issue (that part of the note issue which was not backed by gold) and restrictions were placed on the issue of notes by joint stock banks other than the Bank of England. In fact, these regulations were framed so that the passage of time would eventually leave the Bank of England as the sole note-issuing authority in England and Wales. The last private bank of issue in England surrendered its rights in 1921.

Apart from relatively short periods of emergency when conversion was suspended, all bank-notes, until 1914, were convertible into gold. Convertibility on a restricted basis was restored in 1925, but finally abandoned in 1931. Since that time Bank of England notes have been wholly inconvertible and we have now reached the stage where our bank-notes, while still carrying a 'promise to pay' printed on their faces, are no more than token money. This is also true of the coinage; the commodity value of the coins is but a tiny fraction of their money value. Nevertheless the notes and coins are universally acceptable, the fact that they have no real commodity value, and are not backed by gold, in no way affects their ability to serve as money.

6. Просмотровое чтение

Прочтите текст С и озаглавьте его.

Text С

Banknotes and coins are not the most important form of money in developed economies. In the UK about 90%, by value, of all transactions are settled by means of cheques. But cheques themselves are not money, they are merely orders to bankers to transfer money from one person to another. The money so transferred consists of bank deposits. If there is no money in the form of a bank deposit then any cheques drawn on that account will be worthless.

Cheques were used as early as the second half of the seventeenth century, but they did not come into general use until the second half of the nineteenth century. The Bank Charter Act of 1844 put strict limitations on the note issue at a time when the output of goods and services was expanding rapidly. The need for an expansion of the money supply to keep pace with increasing output greatly stimulated the use of bank deposits.

This most developed form of money (i.e. bank deposit) consists of entries in the banks' ledgers, or more likely nowadays, of records on computer tapes. The greater part, in value terms, of the payments made each day are carried out by adjustment made to the totals in different bank deposits. A payment from one person to another merely requires that the banker reduces the amount in one deposit and increases it in another. Transferring money, therefore, has become little more than a kind of bookkeeping exercise, the money itself does not consist of some physical tangible commodity.

6. Профессионально-ориентированный перевод

Переведите текст « Money» из Британской энциклопедии.

Money is commodity accepted by general consent as a medium of economic exchange. It is the medium in which prices and values are expressed. It circulates from person to person and country to country, thus facilitating trade. Throughout history various commodities have been used as money, including seashells, beads and cattle, but since the 17^th century the most common forms have been metal coins, paper notes, and bookkeeping entries. In standard economic theory, money is held to have four functions: to serve as a medium of exchange universally accepted in return for goods and services; to act as a measure of value making possible the operation of the price system and the calculation of cost, profit and loss; to serve as a standard of deferred payments, the unit in which loans are made and future transactions are fixed; and to provide a means of storing wealth not immediately required for use. Metals, especially gold and silver, have been used for money for at least 4000 years. Standardized coins have been minted for perhaps 2600 years. In the late 18^th and early 19^th century, banks begin to issue notes redeemable in gold and silver which became the principal money of industrial economies. Temporarily during World War I and permanently from the 1930s, most nations abandoned the gold standard. To most individuals today money consists of coins, notes and bank deposits. In terms of the economy, the total money supply is several times as much as the sum total of individual money holdings so defined, since most of the deposits placed in banks are loaned out, thus multiplying the money supply several times over.