スタンプ貨幣
●Jerome Blanc（1998）, “Free Money for Social Progress: Theory and Practice of Gesell's Accelerated Money”（American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol.57(4), pp. 469-483）
Hoarding then becomes the cause of economic crisis, and the natural advantages of money cause hoarding. How then to stimulate the circulation of money and discourage hoarding?
The solution was to be found in the depreciation of money. That is the only way to pass beyond the mechanism of the tribute. Money, as we have seen, has two advantages over goods: no carrying costs and general liquidity. The first one is linked to the store of value function of money, the second to its payment function. The solution is to give money an artificial carrying cost in order to suppress the first advantage and privilege the second one. Thus Gesell proposed his famous stamped money system. Every month or every week notes lose a fixed percentage of their nominal value, for example, a weekly rate of 0.1 percent of the nominal value of the notes, i.e., a yearly depreciation of 5.2 percent.(9) Then, in order to maintain the value of their notes, people would have to purchase stamps every week at the Post Office.(10) Stamped money means that the authorities impose on money, not prices, a stable, fixed, and announced inflation.
Yet, the storage of wealth is safe in Gesell's system. While every deposit in the savings bank creates a need to buy stamps, it is always the holder of the notes who needs to buy them. In the case of deposits in savings banks, the banks have this responsibility. The saver withdraws his deposit at the same value he deposited it. Hence, the savings bank is stimulated to loan its funds in order to avoid this costly need. When funds are loaned, the stamps are bought not by the depositor or the savings bank, but by the borrower who holds the money. In this system, the disadvantage lies not in borrowing money, but in holding money idle.
Since it is in the interest of no one to hold notes idle, this system stimulates deposits, discourages hoarding, stimulates loans, and, finally, stimulates monetary circulation in general.
Such a system is likely to succeed so long as the following conditions are fulfilled:
1. The system has to have strict regulations forbidding the use of substitutes to the depreciating means of payment. The lack of control over such substitutes would lead to the destruction of the accelerated money system by the behavior of agents looking for stable means of payment. However, Keynes stated that, in contradiction to Gesell's assumption, there is a continuum of variously liquid assets able to serve as money substitutes(31). From a theoretical point of view, this is enough to destroy any attempt to set up an accelerated money system. It seems that this difficulty prevents this sort of project from being set up on a large scale.
2. Actually, trust is the key to the system. Trust is enough to let it succeed, and the lack of trust severely endangers its success.
On a large scale, an accelerated money system is likely to last only if a complete shift in thinking occurs. Such a revolution would allow a transformation of the economic system. This necessity of a revolution in thought is another way to say that trust is necessary to the system, but that trust in such a system is quite unlikely to appear in a normal context on a large scale.
●Bruce Champ, “Stamp Scrip: Money People Paid to Use（pdf）”（Economic Commentary, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, April 2008）
ゲゼルのスタンプ貨幣やね。デフレ脱却のための提案の一つとして深尾（光洋）先生の以下の本でも言及されてましたね（「ゲゼル」という名前が明示的に言及されていたかどうかは覚えてないけれども、アイデアは同じ）。
- 作者: 深尾光洋
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- 発売日: 2001/12
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今更ながらなぜにスタンプ貨幣？ ということだけれども、VOX のとある記事を読んでたらナチス党と深い関係にあった経済学者Gottfried Federもスタンプ貨幣と似たようなことを語っていたらしい*1ということで、ちょちょいとググッてみたわけです。残念ながらこの件についてGoogleさんからは（英語または日本語での）詳しい情報を聞き出すことはできなかったわけですが、「代わりといってはなんですが」ということで冒頭にリンク貼った2つの論文をお教えいただいたという次第であります。・・・以上。
（追記）以上じゃなかった。もう一つ情報を頂戴しておりました。
●Irving Fisher, 『Stamp Scrip』（New York; Adelphi Company, 1933）
