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CH. 6 CURRENCY STANDARDS 77

of monetary transactions than an object of equal valuewhich passes through many hands and through manystages of production, each of which involves a monetarytransaction, before it reaches the consumer. Thesetwo objects of expenditure would, therefore, beweighted equally for the purposes of the Consump-tion Standard, but unequally for the purposes of aCurrency Standard. Moreover there are many typesof financial business which give rise to a large volumeof transactions but are of little or no importancefor the Consumption Standard; as, for example,Stock Exchange business or three-month TreasuryBills which in each three-monthly period give riseto a large volume of cheque transactions, and maybe the subject of several more by reason of theirchanging hands during the period of their three-month currency.

Nevertheless Currency Standards have been notinfrequently confused with the Purchasing Power ofMoney itself ; and even the very few writers who havegot so far as to distinguish the Currency Standards fromthe Purchasing Power of Money, have often overlookedthe fact that there are two distinct types of thisstandard. In the first type of Currency Standard thedifferent objects of expenditure are weighted in pro-portion to the amount of the cash-transactions (pay-ment by cheque as well as by cash, bemg, of course,included in this expression) to which they give rise.But in the second type the objects of expenditureare weighted by reference to the demand for bank-balances or stock of money which they occasion.The two are distinct because some transactions requirea greater holding of anticipatory money-balances tomeet them than others of equal money-value, accord-ing to their regularity and the certainty with whichtheir date and amount can be anticipated. It fol-lows that a rise or fall in the price of certain articlescauses a greater fluctuation in the amount of the cash-