money to serve as a means of payment for the settlement of international balances.
Like home circulation, international circulation requires a constantly changing quantity of gold and silver. A part of the accumulated hoards serves therefore, in each country as a reserve fund of world money, which now declines, now rises, according to the fluctuations of the exchange of commodities.110 Besides the special movements which take place between national spheres of circulation, world-money possesses a universal movement, whose starting points are at the sources of production from which gold and silver streams spread out in different directions all over the world market. Here gold and silver enter the world circulation as commodities and are exchanged for commodity equivalents in proportion to the labor-time contained in them, before they penetrate national spheres of circulation. In the latter, they appear now with a given magnitude of value. Every fall or rise in the cost of their production equally affects, therefore, their relative value throughout the world market; on the other hand, that value is entirely independent of the extent to which the different national spheres of circulation absorb gold or silver. The