Every exchange of goods between the countries is made at a ratio that reflects, or expresses, this abiding difference in comparative costs. The imports into the favored country represent regularly the results of more units of labor of a given grade than do the corresponding exports. The ratio which expresses the disparity of advantage of productive factors is called "the equation of international demand." This does not mean that the money value of the imports exceeds that of the exports, or vice versa. On the contrary, the equation itself embodies a maxim of international trade that "in the long run," or "on the average," imports and exports must be equal in value (i.e., equation of demand). This brings us to the theory of foreign exchanges, which is essential to an understanding of this feature of international trade.
§ II. THEORY OF FOREIGN EXCHANGES OF MONEY
Purpose of foreign exchange
The rate of foreign exchange
1. Foreign exchange of money is the purchase and sale of the right to receive a given kind and weight of metal at a specified time and place. Par of exchange is the number of units of the standard coin of one country that contain the same amount of fine gold (or silver) as the standard coin of the other country. Usually the English pound is taken as the basis in the tables which express the ratio of the gold in the standard coins of different countries. The gold shipping point is par of exchange plus or minus the cost of moving the actual metal; it varies with means of transportation and communication. The par of exchange between England and America being $4.866 and the cost of expressing and insuring a gold pound between New York and London being approximately .03, the shipping point for the export of gold from New York is $4.896. At the upper and lower limits, there is a motive for shipping gold as a commodity. If each transaction were independent of all others, the cost of exchange would be the weight of metal called for, plus grains enough more to pay for loss of interest, cost of freight, risk, and trouble. In such a case it would cost $4.896 to remit one pound; while a debt of one pound payable in London would at the same time be worth $4.836 to the creditor in New York. When, in New York, a number of men having bills to pay in London meet a number of owners of bills receivable in London, a market for London drafts is created and a rate of exchange results somewhere between the shipping points. In this is the explanation of the variation of the rate, and of the facts that the cost of outward exchange sometimes is less than the par of exchange and that the value of foreign drafts sometimes is above par.
Variation about par of exchange
The balancing of foreign exchanges is of essentially the same nature as the domestic cancelation of indebtedness. It is going on constantly between two merchants in the same town, between two banks in the same town who represent groups of merchants, between men in neighboring towns, between distant states like New York and California, and between the trading nations of the world. The price of exchange to the individual is reduced by the specializing of the business in the hands of a few dealers, permitting cancelation of indebtedness or offsetting of exchange, and greatly reducing the amount of bullion to be transported. Exchange varies above and below par as conditions change. When the movement of money is into the country, drafts on London are bought and sold for less than par, for every pound draft thus remitted to London reduces the need of shipping gold to this country, while every London draft collected in New York at such a time increases the need to ship gold.
The cash balance of international trade
2. International shipment of money is always just the amount needed to balance the accounts due. The proposition that in the long run the value of imports must equal the value of exports, while the fundamental truth in the theory of international trade, must be understood in a broad sense. Into the balance between the traders of two nations enter many items: the cash values of the imports and exports of each; freights, insurance premiums, and commissions; the expense of Americans traveling in foreign lands, and the cost of the foreign service of this government (such as the salaries of consuls and of diplomatic representatives) which count as the importation to America of an equivalent amount of food, clothing, and sundry services; subsidies and war indemnities to foreign nations representing, as they do, an expenditure, which at the moment may be paid in coin, but which, as is to be more fully explained, must be offset ultimately in some way by exports.
Various credit items entering into the balance