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Iracundus wrote:
You appear to be trying to argue nothing makes sense and we shouldn't try to do anything more. We DO know certain things about 40K however and that is when information is given from a 3rd person omniscient point of view. For any fictional universe, that is the only source of fact because there is no independently observable reality. That is why such citations have more validity than an in-character piece like the Uplifting Primer, which exists as propaganda.

Dude, not only did you seem to either miss or ignore my point, you even cited the bit where I specifically pointed out what I was actually saying

Here, let me post it again:

me wrote:I'm not saying 40K runs on bugs Bunny Looney-toons style physics, or that you can't try and make sense of 40K to some extent. But I am saying that you can't be too pedantic about it either, because not only do you irritate other people, but you need some sort of concensus (or at least the willingness of others to believe or humor you) for such conclusions to have any validity because at best all you will have is a theory or be able to make guesses/speculation about how things work. That's just how it is.

What I'm saying, and you do not seem willing or able to grasp - I can't tell - is that we have no certanties when it comes to 40K. We can say what MIGHT be or probably is, but there is very little that can be pointed to as being definite or unchanging, and even then it only remains 'unchanged' so long as someone decides not to change it. We've seen this with 5th edition - the alterations introduced in the Space Marine codexes, the Grey Knights codexes, the Necron codex, etc. THere's a reason people have been complaining about those changes to the fluff after all. This is a far cry from saying 'nothing makes sense and we shouldnt try to make sense of it' - this is saying we make allowances for the less than perfect nature of the evidence. We can't test theories to see if they are true. I can run tests about the theory of gravity to see if it exists or not. I can't do the same as to whether the Warp would behave in a certain way, or if a lasgun actually would work the way depicted in the books. You can only form theories, and theories can always be wrong. Or the evidence can change.

You evidently think everything is clearly laid out and there are no ambiguities. Good for you, but that makes further argument with you pointless because noone will be able to meet the high levels of proof you demand of them. I guess if you feel you're winning some sort of victory by this, more power to you, but it seems pointless to me. (and I say this having already done something similar. I consider that a foolish action on my part.)

Take that as a concession or whatever.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
now back to the economics side:
What I suspect now (again theory) is that the economic situation parallels the setup the Imperium has for other parts of its force - like the Guard - basically you have things organized on a local-system-subsector-sector-segmentum-Empire setup. That is. at each 'level' they have some means of collecting, assessing, and assigning value to the various forms of wealth, resources, and the like they collect and redistribute - both as part of the tithe (tax) as well as the general economic trading within each level of governance. It need not be precise, or even accurate (it probably isnt' knowing the Adminsitratum) but it DOES bring a certain kind of order to the entire process - and the Administratum is all about rules and regulations and collecting and quantifying and all that other data-based insanity.

Now that may or may not be an official currency, or it may only resemble one by accident (and there is no unified currency, or there may not even be a single, defined name for it.) but some sort of coherent process of assigning value exists that enables the Administratum (and various economic factors) to judge (for example) how much things like food or resources (raw ore, promethium etc.) could fetch in terms of material goods or food or water or whatever.

Connor MacLeod wrote:
[What I'm saying, and you do not seem willing or able to grasp - I can't tell - is that we have no certanties when it comes to 40K. We can say what MIGHT be or probably is, but there is very little that can be pointed to as being definite or unchanging, and even then it only remains 'unchanged' so long as someone decides not to change it. We've seen this with 5th edition - the alterations introduced in the Space Marine codexes, the Grey Knights codexes, the Necron codex, etc. THere's a reason people have been complaining about those changes to the fluff after all. This is a far cry from saying 'nothing makes sense and we shouldnt try to make sense of it' - this is saying we make allowances for the less than perfect nature of the evidence. We can't test theories to see if they are true. I can run tests about the theory of gravity to see if it exists or not. I can't do the same as to whether the Warp would behave in a certain way, or if a lasgun actually would work the way depicted in the books. You can only form theories, and theories can always be wrong. Or the evidence can change.

As I said in my previous post, that is simply not true. We do have certainties in 40K such as for example the existence of an Emperor, and the Heresy. There is 0 chance these things never existed in the first place. You are blurring the issue with that of retcon. Yes, as the IP holder, GW can retcon things, but once retconned those things are true within the 40K universe. If GW should one day decide Horus won the Heresy, then that will have been true and always have been true. Any IP holder has always had such freedom to do such changes, but that doesn't mean the reader doesn't have some certainties within the context of one particular set of changes. If a reader should claim bolters fire lasers, it would be possible to prove that clearly unambiguously wrong through citations of places where bolters are mentioned with ammunition or firing projectiles. There are possible facts that can be determined through observation of the way the universe in 40K is seen to work, if such observatiosn are consistent. Yes, there can be inconsistencies and outliers due to sloppy writing or editing, but it is possible to determine that through comparison to the overall body of work. If a single BL author wrote laser firing bolters, people wouldn't say "Aha, that's a new retcon", peopel would say "He didn't do his research and got it wrong" because all other sources disagree with that.

Connor MacLeod wrote:
What I suspect now (again theory) is that the economic situation parallels the setup the Imperium has for other parts of its force - like the Guard - basically you have things organized on a local-system-subsector-sector-segmentum-Empire setup. That is. at each 'level' they have some means of collecting, assessing, and assigning value to the various forms of wealth, resources, and the like they collect and redistribute - both as part of the tithe (tax) as well as the general economic trading within each level of governance. It need not be precise, or even accurate (it probably isnt' knowing the Adminsitratum) but it DOES bring a certain kind of order to the entire process - and the Administratum is all about rules and regulations and collecting and quantifying and all that other data-based insanity.

Now that may or may not be an official currency, or it may only resemble one by accident (and there is no unified currency, or there may not even be a single, defined name for it.) but some sort of coherent process of assigning value exists that enables the Administratum (and various economic factors) to judge (for example) how much things like food or resources (raw ore, promethium etc.) could fetch in terms of material goods or food or water or whatever.

What you are describing can just as easily be saying they use "tons" to measure how much steel is needed. Having a unit or way of assessing the value of something (food when the sector is starving is obviously more valuable than when it is having a glut), is not the same as having a currency. A currency is a medium of exchange. It is possible to evaluate value of items and commodities and yet still not have a medium of exchange, such as through direct barter. Or in the case of the Imperium, such as what the foregeworlds have: manufactured goods in return for raw materials and food. "1 billion tons of steel for your 10 billion tons of wheat every 10 years" Is there a currency involved in such a transaction? No. If things should change and there is famine, the deal might be changed to "1 billion tons of steel for your 5 billion tons of wheat" but again there isn't a currency involved there either.

Iracundus wrote: As already mentioned, authors in academic citations are expected to provide the information for readers to find the passages or information referenced, when it is not the whole book that is being discussed

And, as already mentioned, nobody has the time or inclination to turn this into an academic discussion.

Given GW's opinion on canon this doesn't qualify as academic anyway.

First off, the government of the Imperium has very little use for actual money.

Resources are the number one thing it needs: People, metals, etc. Next to resources it needs processing. Converting the mined ore of one planet into metal plates. Next it needs manufacturers to take the processed resources and turn it into ships, guns, cities, etc.

All of this are tithed to the Imperium through a very realistic way of taxation. It doesn't pay for them by any stretch. Actually paying for them would just complicate the hell out of things. Instead an auditor looks at what a planet is capable of producing and tells them x% of that goes straight to the Imperium.

The people, on the other hand, need a common way of trading goods and services. That's what money is for: to provide a means of exchanging a good/service for transportable script. If you don't need transportable script, then the barter system is perfectly acceptable and alive in our world today. Of course, a downside to bartering is that it is much much harder to track for taxation purposes. Which is why governments don't normally like this.

Therefore, actual Money has to be in local currencies. It's the only way to account for local variation in supply and demand.

At the same time there needs to be a way for a person to move from one planet to the next. Therefore there is a galactic exchange rate. Obviously this rate would naturally fluctuate and you might be rich on planet X but by the time you got to planet Y you could be in the poor house... or vice versa. Which, again, isn't much different than our world today. A typical American can move to a 3rd world country with $50k USD in the bank and never have to work again while employing "servants" for the rest of their life. However, the reverse, moving from a 3rd world country to America with $50k in your pocket won't get you very far... which, again, is why the Imperium tithes based on what a planet can produce: food, convertible resources, etc. instead of on some etheric currency.

The vast majority of people in the Imperium, however, will never, ever leave the planet of their birth. Ever. Many of them, in fact, have no real idea that they live as citizens of a galaxy-spanning, spacefaring Empire, as their local planet just discovered fire last week.

I think it is probably like the Galactic Empire of Star Wars. There IS a universal currency but once you get so far from Terra or other major Imperial systems local currency is higher valued because of the sheer distance. The local lords might as well be the Emperor constantly shipping supplies (if they are an agricultural world or forge world OR a recruitment system.) Every once in a while some one from the Empire comes and checks on things and isn't seen for one hundred years. It seems to be a very loose patch work of systems. I think it would be similar in ways to the USSR. Industry is key to supply the Empire with what it needs to survive. It in the books that countless systems are lost either by error or war and on the whole no one could careless. It seems to be an ever changing confederation of systems being won and lost.

If the guard get paid then whatever the munitorium pays them is pretty much the galactic standard.

Well according to the story of Necromunda the Imperium uses Imperial Credits.

SMC wrote:I think it is probably like the Galactic Empire of Star Wars. There IS a universal currency but once you get so far from Terra or other major Imperial systems local currency is higher valued because of the sheer distance. The local lords might as well be the Emperor constantly shipping supplies (if they are an agricultural world or forge world OR a recruitment system.) Every once in a while some one from the Empire comes and checks on things and isn't seen for one hundred years. It seems to be a very loose patch work of systems. I think it would be similar in ways to the USSR. Industry is key to supply the Empire with what it needs to survive. It in the books that countless systems are lost either by error or war and on the whole no one could careless. It seems to be an ever changing confederation of systems being won and lost.

Again thus far there has been no evidence provided of any unified currency, only planetary, sector, and at best Segmentum level as per the previous citations in this thread. The rest of your post is in itself acknowledgement of the loose nature of the Imperium, which is as you say a confederation of systems rather than a monolithic modern nation state. Units of accounting do not equate to currency.

KamikazeCanuck wrote:If the guard get paid then whatever the munitorium pays them is pretty much the galactic standard.

Not necessarily. It is possible for military scrip to be issued for a local area, yet that doesn't mean it is accepted in the rest of civilian society elsewhere. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip#Military_scrip and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_invasion_money

The military scrip in these examples were not easily converted into normal currency (if at all), and they were never the standard currency of their issuing nation.

Mortarius Arcanum wrote:Well according to the story of Necromunda the Imperium uses Imperial Credits.

Read the Necromunda rulebook:

Guilders provide Underhivers with the only secureway of storing large quantities of money. This they do by keeping money secure as Guild credit, a form of deposit account that all Guilders will honour. If a Guilder should die, his debts, accounts and other business arrangements pass to his successor.

Guilders also supply Underhivers with their physical currency in the form of Guild bonds and Guild tokens. Bonds are large denominations, oblong chipsof ceramite bearing an indelible imprint of value. Smaller token chips are carried as loose change and are used within the settlements as everyday currency.These Guild tokens are often referred to simply as credits - p.66 Necromunda rulebook

They are Guild credits (i.e. a local currency), not an Imperium wide currency.

ahh thank you for the correction!

Iracundus wrote:
Again thus far there has been no evidence provided of any unified currency, only planetary, sector, and at best Segmentum level as per the previous citations in this thread. The rest of your post is in itself acknowledgement of the loose nature of the Imperium, which is as you say a confederation of systems rather than a monolithic modern nation state. Units of accounting do not equate to currency.

This isn't quite accurate.

First off; you don't need a modern nation-state in order to have widespread or even universal use of a certain currency. Precious metals, for instance, have historically been EXTREMELY widespread if not actually universal, without any such state. The only requirement is that the currency be trusted (if credit-based) or valued on its own merits (if commodity-based). Different nations/city-states/feudal holdings have certainly had different names for their silver coins, for example, but they were all defined as weights of silver; the 'currency' was the silver, not pounds or dollars or francs or whatever name had been attached to them by any particular locality.

Secondly, in order for double-entry bookkeeping to be possible, you require a unit of account; and that unit of account is a money, a medium of exchange. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be useful. Setting an arbitrary value and then accounting in terms of that value does not actually accomplish anything unless other parties also use that valuation; and if they use it, it's automatically a money.

Thirdly, money is valued because it makes barter more efficient, and it works better the more widespread it is. The natural tendency is for any given money to expand as far as possible, because the wider an area it covers the better it does the job it exists to do.

Given these factors, I would be VERY surprised if there did not exist a universal or near-universal currency across the Imperium, along with a massive variety of national, planetary, sub-sector, sector, and possibly Segmentum currencies.

And like I said before a Guardsmen uses IG backpay to buy cupcakes from a civilian in Gaunts Ghosts without any trouble.

BeRzErKeR wrote:
This isn't quite accurate.

First off; you don't need a modern nation-state in order to have widespread or even universal use of a certain currency. Precious metals, for instance, have historically been EXTREMELY widespread if not actually universal, without any such state. The only requirement is that the currency be trusted (if credit-based) or valued on its own merits (if commodity-based). Different nations/city-states/feudal holdings have certainly had different names for their silver coins, for example, but they were all defined as weights of silver; the 'currency' was the silver, not pounds or dollars or francs or whatever name had been attached to them by any particular locality.

Secondly, in order for double-entry bookkeeping to be possible, you require a unit of account; and that unit of account is a money, a medium of exchange. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be useful. Setting an arbitrary value and then accounting in terms of that value does not actually accomplish anything unless other parties also use that valuation; and if they use it, it's automatically a money.

Thirdly, money is valued because it makes barter more efficient, and it works better the more widespread it is. The natural tendency is for any given money to expand as far as possible, because the wider an area it covers the better it does the job it exists to do.

Given these factors, I would be VERY surprised if there did not exist a universal or near-universal currency across the Imperium, along with a massive variety of national, planetary, sub-sector, sector, and possibly Segmentum currencies.

The Imperium cannot even keep a unified religious doctrine, language, or military across all its worlds, and has trouble even just keeping track of the existence of some of their worlds, let alone be able to manage a coherent monetary policy.

What you describe of the use of precious metals is the use of a commodity as a form of currency, but even then it has never been universal. All sorts of commodities have been used in the historical past as forms of currency, from grain to cowrie shells to metals, yet they never reached universality, not even gold. The Incans valued gold for its aesthetic and religious qualities but it was never used as a medium of transaction. In the Imperium, there isn't a universally valued good. Bullets have value in one hive in the Calixis Sector but would be worthless on a feral world that has no guns and maybe even no metallurgy at all. Not even precious metals necessarily have value given the possibility of some worlds having high concentrations of such metals.

The use of the precious metal content as money was because there was no political unification in Europe, and therefore no entity able to establish any one currency unit (whether it be franc, ducat, whatever) as a universal standard on which to measure, so people did the one thing that could be universal: gold or silver content since the laws of physics and chemistry were the same everywhere. Precious metals were also easily transportable unlike grain, and did not decay unlike grain or other organic forms of money.

Where there was political unification, such as in Imperial China, there was the ability to enforce recognition of the same currency throughout the territory, which is why among other reasons paper money was first used in China. Compare this to the Imperium, where the existence of the Imperium or Terra can be mythological to some worlds, and where the Imperial institutions exist as a veneer on top of local rule. The Imperium is a confederation of worlds, bound together by the threads of a few common institutions that extract resources from individual worlds, and which doesn't even try to intervene in the politics let alone economy of individual worlds. Combine this with the time effects of warp travel and astropathic communication unreliability, then you have chaos.

You neglected the advantage of barter in the paradigm of the Imperium: certainty. If they demand 1 ton of steel of a certain grade, they know what they are getting. There is no need to consider issues of inflation, deflation, or exchange rate. If planet A produces 1 million tons of steel, and planet B consumes 1 million to make Leman Russ tanks, having taxes extracted as direct commodities and then channeled to production centers allows for the certainty of continued production.

The Imperium does have a unified religion and language. Sure, there's a lot of variation but the Emperor is God and they speak gothic.

KamikazeCanuck wrote:The Imperium does have a unified religion and language. Sure, there's a lot of variation but the Emperor is God and they speak gothic.

The variation shows it is not unified. The Emperor may be a sun god on one world and a rain god on another. He may be worshipped in lieu of older gods, or be the only one ever known by the people of a world. Simply have 1 god doesn't mean it is the same religion. It just means they are monotheists but as we see on Earth, there are multiple monotheistic religions. The religious practices are widely different. You have the official Ecclesiarchy cathedrals, but on a feral world he may be worshipped with blood sacrifice. The Imperium's missionaries are explicitly described to try to fit the Emperor into local religions as a way to try and sway the locals, but that doesn't mean there is actually a unified religion.

Low Gothic is the lingua franca. That is not a unified language. Sure the local languages may be offshoots of High or Low Gothic but so are Romance languages offshoots of Latin, and no one claims French and Spanish are unified languages. A speaker of one might be able to fudge their way through a similar language and make out bits of writing but that doesn't mean they are the same. Similarity does not equate to being unified. The fact that there can be two natives from different worlds can have potentially mutually unintelligible languages despite both being based off Gothic shows there isn't unification:

Warriors from one planet speak different, sometimes unintelligible, dialects or practice strange customs which are baffling to soldiers from other worlds. - p. 9, 2nd ed. Imperial Guard Codex

Joey wrote:What currency does the Imperium use?
Do they have a central bank?
If yes, how can it possibly regulate money supply on such a vast scale?
If no, what's to stop the collapse of industry caused by an unregulated money supply?
What is wealth relative to? Xenos currency? Surely not. Mineral wealth? It would make Ron Paul happy, but it doesn't work.
Or do different planets have their own currencies? In which case how are tithes settled without the planet simply printing money to pay the Imperium?

Gold standard system acts as central Imperial currency.
I don't think there's such thing like 'Euro' in the Imperial days.

< Taken by the void dragon. >

There's nothing, at all, universal to the Imperium, save a handful of rules.

1) Honor the Emperor.
2) Meet your tithe.
3) Turn your psykers over to the Black Ships.

500 planets all within 2 light-years of one another (a fairly small area of space, considering) might never know that any of the other 499 planets is occupied, and may see an Administratum tithe-ship once a century, and may possess absolutely no capability of their own to leave their world, because they're Feudal or Feral Worlds.

The King of the planet Zillman's Domain in the Calixis Sector, for example, owns a lasgun. This makes him king. Visitors to this world are often burned at the stake as witches, for the sin of possessing vox-links.

For the love of the God-Emperor, is this a nationally-approved educational exam board with a required standard of referencing set out in the curriculum and enforced by invigilators and examiners, or is it a forum for people to discuss their favourite bits of some books based on a game where people push little plastic models around a table and pretend that they're fighting a war?

Iracundus wrote:

KamikazeCanuck wrote:The Imperium does have a unified religion and language. Sure, there's a lot of variation but the Emperor is God and they speak gothic.

The variation shows it is not unified. The Emperor may be a sun god on one world and a rain god on another. He may be worshipped in lieu of older gods, or be the only one ever known by the people of a world. Simply have 1 god doesn't mean it is the same religion. It just means they are monotheists but as we see on Earth, there are multiple monotheistic religions. The religious practices are widely different. You have the official Ecclesiarchy cathedrals, but on a feral world he may be worshipped with blood sacrifice. The Imperium's missionaries are explicitly described to try to fit the Emperor into local religions as a way to try and sway the locals, but that doesn't mean there is actually a unified religion.

Low Gothic is the lingua franca. That is not a unified language. Sure the local languages may be offshoots of High or Low Gothic but so are Romance languages offshoots of Latin, and no one claims French and Spanish are unified languages. A speaker of one might be able to fudge their way through a similar language and make out bits of writing but that doesn't mean they are the same. Similarity does not equate to being unified. The fact that there can be two natives from different worlds can have potentially mutually unintelligible languages despite both being based off Gothic shows there isn't unification:

Warriors from one planet speak different, sometimes unintelligible, dialects or practice strange customs which are baffling to soldiers from other worlds. - p. 9, 2nd ed. Imperial Guard Codex

Well, I should imagine that regional accents would be quite diffferent between planets, just like between counties and countries at the moment, but bigger due to them being in different planets. As for the official language, English is the official language of the Uk, but some places speak Welsh, Irish Gaelic or Scottish Gaelic as well. The fact that there are local languages (which is unsurprising given that the planets were isolated from each other for thousands of years before the Great Crusade) does not mean that Gothic isn't a unified language.

OT, I personally think that there must be an Imperial standard value for a Credit or a piece of gold or whatever and that local currencies probably have their own established exchange rates. I would also think that the exchange rates in the Imperium probably vary very little due to the size of the Imperium, there are probably very few things that can cause massive damage to an economy of that scale.

Castiel wrote:

Warriors from one planet speak different, sometimes unintelligible, dialects or practice strange customs which are baffling to soldiers from other worlds. - p. 9, 2nd ed. Imperial Guard Codex

Well, I should imagine that regional accents would be quite diffferent between planets, just like between counties and countries at the moment, but bigger due to them being in different planets. As for the official language, English is the official language of the Uk, but some places speak Welsh, Irish Gaelic or Scottish Gaelic as well. The fact that there are local languages (which is unsurprising given that the planets were isolated from each other for thousands of years before the Great Crusade) does not mean that Gothic isn't a unified language.

Probably already stated... they have main banks on each planet..... and the munitorum/ admin offices on terra would probably take care of all of it in the grand scheme of things.... they deal in credits, generally

Iracundus, stop asking for referenced proof for the background story for a tabletop wargame. I said "I think" that means that I personally think that there must be some kind of universal standard, that is my opinion, not a statement of fact.

Also, fix your quotes.

Iracundus wrote:

The Imperium cannot even keep a unified religious doctrine, language, or military across all its worlds, and has trouble even just keeping track of the existence of some of their worlds, let alone be able to manage a coherent monetary policy.

See, that's irrelevant; my entire point was that you don't NEED a coherent monetary policy, or indeed ANY formal monetary policy, in order to have widespread use of a single currency. The natural tendency is for cultures to move towards a universal medium of exchange.

Iracundus wrote:
What you describe of the use of precious metals is the use of a commodity as a form of currency, but even then it has never been universal. All sorts of commodities have been used in the historical past as forms of currency, from grain to cowrie shells to metals, yet they never reached universality, not even gold. The Incans valued gold for its aesthetic and religious qualities but it was never used as a medium of transaction. In the Imperium, there isn't a universally valued good. Bullets have value in one hive in the Calixis Sector but would be worthless on a feral world that has no guns and maybe even no metallurgy at all. Not even precious metals necessarily have value given the possibility of some worlds having high concentrations of such metals.

Your point about precious metals is certainly true, but there are a few other problems here.

First: you cannot assert that there is no such thing as a universally valuable good in the Imperium, because you don't know that. It's unlikely, but certainly possible.

Second; a currency does not depend on the good it is backed in being universally valued; even if someone thinks gold is the ugliest, most worthless metal in existence, it can still be used in trade for what the bearer actually DOES want, because a lot of people want gold. That is, if a good is valuable to SOMEONE, then that good has exchange-value even to people who do not value it in its own right. This, by the way, is a self-reinforcing cycle; some people value a good and are willing to trade for it. Some other people, then, will trade for it because they know they can trade it away to people who want to use it, in exchange for what they REALLY want; this increases the number of people who want the good, which means more people are willing to trade for it, which means more people want it. . . demand spirals up until it becomes universal or near-universal, at least among those cultures which are in contact with each other. There have been several studies done on this phenomena, of which probably the most famous is "The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp", viewable here:http://www.simon-davies.org.uk/Radford_1945_POWCamp.pdf

Iracundus wrote:
The use of the precious metal content as money was because there was no political unification in Europe, and therefore no entity able to establish any one currency unit (whether it be franc, ducat, whatever) as a universal standard on which to measure, so people did the one thing that could be universal: gold or silver content since the laws of physics and chemistry were the same everywhere. Precious metals were also easily transportable unlike grain, and did not decay unlike grain or other organic forms of money.

Where there was political unification, such as in Imperial China, there was the ability to enforce recognition of the same currency throughout the territory, which is why among other reasons paper money was first used in China. Compare this to the Imperium, where the existence of the Imperium or Terra can be mythological to some worlds, and where the Imperial institutions exist as a veneer on top of local rule. The Imperium is a confederation of worlds, bound together by the threads of a few common institutions that extract resources from individual worlds, and which doesn't even try to intervene in the politics let alone economy of individual worlds. Combine this with the time effects of warp travel and astropathic communication unreliability, then you have chaos.

You've still got that a bit wrong. Gold and silver, precious metals, WERE the currency unit; all of the various currencies of Europe and early America were simply names for different weights of gold and silver. The pound sterling, for example, was literally one pound of sterling silver. That same amount of silver was called a dollar in America, but it was exactly the same, and both coins spent just as well. The French franc began as a silver coin as well; once again, interchangeable with an equal weight of silver from any other nation. The names didn't matter. You didn't buy things with francs, pounds, or dollars, really; you bought them with silver. What you called your silver was more or less irrelevant. It wasn't until legal tender laws began to come into force that which coin you used became relevant.

When I say 'money' or 'currency', I am not limiting that to paper bills. Letters of credit, weights of precious metals, packets of spices, smooth stones, all of those things can be and historically have been money. The defining characteristic of a monetary economy, as opposed to a barter economy, is that there exists a medium of exchange; something which is bought and sold BECAUSE it can be traded widely, as opposed to because people want to actually use it for themselves. And, inevitably, everything in the system ends up being valued in terms of that money, because everyone ends up dealing in it at some point and it's much, much simpler to have one price for each good rather than each having a barter price in terms of every single other good.

Iracundus wrote:You neglected the advantage of barter in the paradigm of the Imperium: certainty. If they demand 1 ton of steel of a certain grade, they know what they are getting. There is no need to consider issues of inflation, deflation, or exchange rate. If planet A produces 1 million tons of steel, and planet B consumes 1 million to make Leman Russ tanks, having taxes extracted as direct commodities and then channeled to production centers allows for the certainty of continued production.

Here's the thing; tithes are not an economic action. Economics regards exchange, giving something to get something. The tithes the Imperium demands are simply taken; there's no exchange or accounting, so of course you don't need a medium of exchange for that.

In that case, yes, it's more direct and simple to simply demand what you want. But that doesn't have anything to do with the ECONOMY of the Imperium, and it doesn't affect the efficiency of a universal currency at all. Rogue Traders and interstellar merchants still have to keep accounts to know whether they are making a profit; you can't keep books without a unit of account, and there's no reason that unit of account can't be used as a medium of exchange and credit, as long as it's attached to something people will accept. The Imperial Guard gets paid; the Departmento Munitorum has to keep track of that, which ALSO requires a unit of account and exchange; paying off your soldiers in unbacked 'military scrip' only works in a very limited way, for a very limited time. At the very least, unbacked emission of currency will steadily impoverish whatever planet the Guardsmen spend their pay on, and in the long run that's not sustainable.

The point is that a universal currency is a simple and efficient way of making trade easy and generating prosperity. Furthermore, it doesn't even require active intervention to come about; historical evidence seems to show that it requires active intervention to STOP it from happening. Do note that literally every modern nation has legal tender laws on the books; there's a reason for that. I figure that, as presented in the background, the Imperial government flat doesn't care what the civilian economy does except insofar as it impacts the war effort; and, that being so, a universal currency has very likely developed as an efficient and practical way to move value around and facilitate trade. There are doubtless exceptions, of course, in the form of worlds or regions which are totally or near-totally isolated from the Imperial economy and so have not joined the system, but there is no reason that there shouldn't be an Imperium-wide currency of some sort.

Lone Cat wrote:Gold standard system acts as central Imperial currency.

No it doesn't. The Imperial economy is FAR too stable to be a gold standard system.

Melissia wrote:No it doesn't. The Imperial economy is FAR too stable to be a gold standard system.

That's. . . exactly backwards. Fiat currencies are far, far less stable than commodity-based currencies; the organization which controls the currency can put off corrections for a time, but in doing so they only make the ensuing crash worse, while fully-backed currencies fluctuate almost constantly but to a much smaller degree. Commodity currencies are also not subject to continuous inflation like fiat currencies are.

That said, there's absolutely no way of knowing if the Imperium is on a fiat or commodity system, or which commodity might be backing it. I don't think there's anything anywhere which indicates a gold standard.

In that case, yes, it's more direct and simple to simply demand what you want. But that doesn't have anything to do with the ECONOMY of the Imperium, and it doesn't affect the efficiency of a universal currency at all. Rogue Traders and interstellar merchants still have to keep accounts to know whether they are making a profit; you can't keep books without a unit of account, and there's no reason that unit of account can't be used as a medium of exchange and credit, as long as it's attached to something people will accept. The Imperial Guard gets paid; the Departmento Munitorum has to keep track of that, which ALSO requires a unit of account and exchange; paying off your soldiers in unbacked 'military scrip' only works in a very limited way, for a very limited time. At the very least, unbacked emission of currency will steadily impoverish whatever planet the Guardsmen spend their pay on, and in the long run that's not sustainable.

The Imperium at large doesn't give a feth about the local economy of this backwater planet. It pays its soldiers in a script of some sort that local merchants damn well better accept, or the million-strong army of Guardsmen currently stationed there might just decide a bit of regime change is in order.

The Guard script requires no external value, because the vast majority of its soldiers will never, ever retire from the Guard, except to be a name on a wall somewhere, buried in a mass grave, or utterly annihilated on the field of battle.

Locally speaking, though, if a unit of Guard Script is viewed as worth X amount of the local currency, the Perfect Pink Shell, then the Guard Script has local value, and will always maintain this value, either being worth more or less Perfect Pink Shells, depending on how many Guard soldiers are there, how often they buy things, and what, exactly, they buy. The Guard, however, is going to offer only economic incentive to a certain aspect of the economy, as there's only certain things a Guardsman is going to buy. Food and drink, prostitutes, tobacco-equivalents, smoking paraphernalia, maybe books, pornography, various devices and goods for uniform maintenance (bootblack, starch, brass polish, etc) and so forth. He's not buying property, he's not buying cars, he's not buying high-class fashion, he's not buying *anything* that he cannot carry on his back when the order comes down for his unit to move off-world.

Even Rogue Traders only deal with people where currency is important on a fairly local level, but their local level is much wider-ranging than the common citizens. Still, a given sector of space is still just one sector of space, and the currency is valueless in space itself (except amongst members of the crew who, like the Guardsman above, aren't buying anything significant) and in the wild reaches of Wilderness Space where one is more likely to encounter some tentacle-faced horror than another human being. A Rogue Trader's wealth is measured in what he discovers and what he sells to other, powerful factions who are capable of paying him in a local currency that has value in the region of Imperial Space the Rogue Trader spends the majority of his "off" time. He discovers, say, a ring of asteroids rich in an electro-conducive element. He drops a signal beacon that marks the spot, and then high-tails it back to Forge World Beta-Kappa-Palooza and talks to the Master of the Forge. He provides the tech-priest with some auspex data about the find, and then offers to sell the location to the guy. He does this with four other Forge Worlds as well, and sells the location of the mine to whichever Tech-Priest offers what he feels is the most profitable deal. He might even, if he's an especially roguish sort, sell it to all five of the Forge Worlds, and then let them fight over it, pocketing the money and disappearing back into space.

There's no galactic currency involved here, because the RT isn't going to go from the Calixis Sector to the Segmentum Ultima to the Sol Sector to Fenris to the Ixaniad Sector and then out to the Jericho Reach and then home to Glavia. While RTs are the *most* mobile of Imperial citizens, they still stick to one general area of space, simply because it takes so very, very long to fly from one end of the Imperium to another.

EDIT: Further, there's nothing in the galaxy one can base a currency on, on a galactic level, that would hold any meaning. Gold might be valuable in one area, but it's next to worthless in another, because this other area mines entire planetoid-sized asteroids made of solid gold for the Mechanicus. This would hold true for any other possible commodity or good.

clively wrote:First off, the government of the Imperium has very little use for actual money.

To quote Homer Simpson.
"Money can be exchanged for goods and services".
You have $7bn of steel that I want. I have $7bn. Success!

That's not how the Imperium works.

Imperium: "You have 7 billion tons of steel that we want"
Planet: "What will you give us for it?"
Imperium: "We have 7 trillion men with laser guns who will come and take it from you, if you don't hand it over."
Planet: "..."
Imperium: "Your call."


In the reality of it, however, it's much more nefarious. This iron-rich planet is going to have an established Imperial presence from the get-go, with the Administratum and the Ecclesiarchy overseeing the governance and social order of the populace, respectively, which makes the tithing of its steel an act of religious devotion (for the workers) and a political necessity (for the Planetary Governor and his cabinet). The currency here will be established based on something local, whether that's feathers from a bird, a shiny bit of metal that's industrially useless but decorative, an issued script from the various Mining Concerns that employ workers, or some other, basic thing that is established locally.

When the tithe ships come, the tithe is handed over to them, checked against requirements, measured, weighed, and then loaded aboard the vessels and shipped off to wherever the Imperium needs that steel to go. The Planetary Governor gets to keep his job, the workers aren't executed, and life goes on. Steel produced in excess of the tithe requirement can be used locally, sold to other organizations (such as RTs, smaller Mechanicus operations, private production Combines or Trade Guilds, and so forth), which will then be traded for things like food, water, tech the planet needs but can't produce locally, and so forth and so on.