The Emergence Of Foreign Exchange

The current currency rate mechanism has evolved over thousands of years of the world community trying with various mechanism of facilitating the trade of goods and services. Initially, the trading of goods and services was by barter system where in goods were exchanged for each other. For example, a farmer would exchange wheat grown on his farmland with cotton with another farmer. Such system had its difficulties primarily because of non‐divisibility of certain goods, cost in transporting such goods for trading and difficulty in valuing of services. For example, how does a dairy farmer exchange his cattle for few liters of edible oil or one kilogram of salt? The farmer has no way to divide the cattle! Similarly, suppose wheat is grown in one part of a country and sugar is grown in another part of the country, the farmer has to travel long distances every time he has to exchange wheat for sugar. Therefore the need to have a common medium of exchange resulted in the innovation of money.

People tried various commodities as the medium of exchange ranging from food items to metals. Gradually metals became more prominent medium of exchange because of their ease of transportation, divisibility, certainty of quality and universal acceptance. People started using metal coins as medium of exchange. Amongst metals, gold and silver coins were most prominent and finally gold coins became the standard means of exchange.

The process of evolution of medium of exchange further progressed into development of paper currency. People would deposit gold/ silver coins with bank and get a paper promising that value of that paper at any point of time would be equal to certain number of gold coins. This system of book entry of coins against paper was the start of paper currency. With time, countries started trading across borders as they realized that everything cannot be produced in each country or cost of production of certain goods is cheaper in certain countries than others.

The growth in international trade resulted in evolution of foreign exchange (FX) i.e., value of one currency of one country versus value of currency of other country. Each country has its own “brand” alongside its flag. When money is branded it is called “currency”. Whenever there is a cross‐border trade, there is need to exchange one brand of money for another, and this exchange of two currencies is called “foreign exchange” or simply “forex” (FX).