HISTORY

St Helena’s forgotten currency board

by Steve Hanke and Matt Sekerke
Johns Hopkins UniversityCENTRAL BANKING PUBLICATIONS LTD
A reprint from Central Banking Journal

The tiny isle of St Helena was discovered in 1502 and settled permanently by the East India Company in 1659. It was only after the British dispatched Napoleon to its shores in 1815 that St Helena became a real “place,” however.

In the monetary sphere, St Helena wasn’t on the map until 1976. Until then, the British dependency did not have its own unit of account and primarily used currencies issued elsewhere. That changed, however, when the passage of the Currency Fund Ordinance of 1975 and the Currency Regulations of 1976 established a currency board and the new St Helena pound became legal tender. Surprisingly – given the burgeoning currency board literature – St Helena’s currency board remains unreported. In what follows, we correct that oversight.

Life before the Currency Board

From the beginning of the East India Company’s administration, sterling was the official unit of account in St Helena. Nevertheless, the predominant circulation was Spanish dollars, not pounds. In 1684 an Order in Council introduced St Helena’s first unique coinage, a series of copper bars stamped with their weight and valued at one penny per ounce. This awkward money was refused by ships calling at the island and shunned by St Helenians. Consequently, the unwieldy copper bars had more or less disappeared by the early eighteenth century. Such too would be the fate of St Helena’s later forays into the coinage business (Vice 1983). As an active port of call – owing to its strategic placement in the middle of trans-Atlantic trade routes – St Helena hosted traders from around the world, merchants laden with the international currencies of the day. St Helena became a sort of exchange house on the high seas in which currencies traded at rates fixed by the council.

When the council’s fixed rates of exchange departed from those prevailing in the world markets, visiting traders spotted arbitrage opportunities and exploited them ruthlessly. In some cases, the island was virtually depleted of currency in the process. For example, legislation devaluing Spanish pieces of eight from 6s to 5s in March 1708 allowed traders to buy Spanish dollars cheap in St Helena and sell them dear in Madras at the 6s rate. Soon the East India Company needed to order new coins struck to provide the cash-strapped island with circulation. The company’s quick action was key to reviving St Helena’s economy in the early 18th century. In time, however, gold pagodas and Venetian florins, undervalued in India, returned to fill St Helena’s vaults and further lubricate the island’s commercial activity.

St Helena's high point

This situation prevailed into the early 1800s, when St Helena reached its zenith. With the arrival of Napoleon and his extensive entourage in 1815, the island’s population doubled and trading activity and the demand for money trebled. The council’s catalogue of official exchange rates, see Sampson (1973), reveals the staggering array of currencies circulating on
the island in 1823, two years after Napoleon’s death.

After the post-Napoleon slump, St Helena (and many other British possessions) faced a new challenge as a result of fluctuations in the gold price of silver. The old parities for silver standard currencies vis-a-vis gold standard currencies became obsolete when the price of silver fell. Arbitrageurs sold silver currencies in St Helena and other locales where the old exchange rates prevailed, at high cost to those territories. Gresham’s Law struck with a vengeance.

Such exchange-rate difficulties arose not long after St Helena was handed over to the Crown in 1834. Orders in Council adjusting parities to market levels solved the problem, albeit at a cost. St Helena took the first such action on July 15 1843, when most foreign coins were exchanged for silver and sent away to be melted into bullion. Spanish doubloons and dollars remained in circulation alongside sterling at the rate of 4/2d. A subsequent decline of the Spanish dollar from 4/2d. to 3/8d. in 1879 prompted the St Helena Council to demonetise the Spanish coins, leaving sterling as the sole official medium.

Sterling holds sway

Sterling remained the exclusive legal tender until the passage of the St Helena Coinage Order of 1925. This order made legal tender in St Helena “all coins which are legal tender coins in the United Kingdom under the Coinage Acts of 1870 and 1891 and all silver coins which are legal tender in the Union of South Africa under the Coinage Act, 1922” (Colonial Office 1949, 18). By legalising South Africa’s currency, the council hoped to lay the groundwork for a more formidable trading relationship with South
Africa. Unfortunately, that relationship failed to develop (Vice 1983, 125). The government ultimately replaced the 1925 measure with the Currency, Coinage and Legal Tender Ordinance, No. 5 of 1948, as amended by Ordinance No. 12 of 1949, “which provided, inter alia, that [St Helena’s] currency should be Bank of England notes and United Kingdom coins which are legal tender in the United Kingdom from time to time” (Colonial Office 1950, 15).

The only branch of a foreign commercial bank to operate in St Helena was the Standard Bank of British South Africa, a corporate ancestor of today’s Standard Charter Bank (Henry and Siepman 1963). It operated briefly from 1864 to 1865 and was closed for commercial reasons. At that time, St Helena was rapidly declining as a port of call because steamships began to replace sailing ships and could bypass the island without obtaining provisions. Today, banking on the island is carried out by the Government Savings Bank.

The Currency Board solution

It was in this context that St Helena passed the Currency Fund Ordinance of 1975 and the Currency Regulations of 1976 in the interest of generating seigniorage revenue. These measures established a currency board, giving the island its first unique legal tender currency. The currency fund issues the St Helena pound, which is at parity with the pound sterling, in denominations from 1p coins to £20 notes. As of March 31 2001, there was £3,480,256 in circulation, or roughly £480 per capita. The currency fund’s
story, like that of any currency board, is told by its financial statements.

A good deal all round

The currency fund is managed on behalf of St Helena’s Commissioners by Crown Agents Asset Management, Ltd. Formerly a British public corporation, Crown Agents is now a private firm owned by the Crown Agents Foundation, whose members include other firms, NGOs, the British government, and various international agencies. Crown Agents Asset Management charges a fee of 0.5% of the market value of the funds under management (a “safe custody” charge of 0.02% was added in fiscal year 2001). Orthodox currency boards are characterised by small staffs and low expense, with expenses typically amounting to 0.5-1% of total assets. The currency fund is no exception.

The fund’s foreign assets are UK gilts and bank deposits, both denominated in sterling, and the bullion value of commemorative coins in circulation is likewise included. Ten-year gilts have been the investment of choice. The currency fund’s bank deposits are kept in overseas banks and have been moved around of late between several banks.

The currency fund holds deposits in the St Helena Treasury, and the latter provides the Fund with cash overdraft facilities. The currency board has also provided the Treasury with a tidy source of revenue, averaging £300,000 in operating profit each year, or about 5%of the Treasury’s self-generated revenue. The Fund’s balance sheet makes it clear that the currency board operates very close to orthodox currency board rules. It does not hold any domestic assets, does not regulate banks, and therefore has no scope for engaging in sterilisation or introducing a domestic monetary policy. Its only deviation from orthodoxy is the relatively large foreign exchange cover for its monetary liabilities, which has ranged from 117% to 138%. Orthodox currency boards of the British colonies typically operated with 110-115% cover.

Insulated from Government

This small departure from orthodoxy is no cause for alarm, however, because the board remains insulated from the kind of government and banking sector shenanigans which recently engulfed Argentina’s unorthodox currency board. Argentina’s unorthodox board suffered from wild fluctuations in its foreign exchange cover of its monetary liabilities and in its net domestic assets, as it engaged in aggressive sterilisation. Although the unorthodox currency boards in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Bulgaria, Estonia, Hong Kong and Lithuania have avoided the problems encountered in Argentina, they, too, have scope for sterilisation and have used it. By contrast, the currency fund has no scope for sterilisation.

Lessons from St Helena

Since the currency board was introduced, the St Helena pound has been trouble free. With the currency board, the Treasury has also gained a source of revenue which reduces, in part, the island’s dependence on the United Kingdom5. Judging by this example, currency board orthodoxy pays, and other currency boards should draw lessons from St Helena’s experience. Clearly, other small territories (not to mention the 61 larger countries identified in Hanke (2002)) would benefit from following St Helena’s
example. Each has a central bank that issues a domestic currency. In all cases, a currency board would be more suitable than a central bank.