Gerard de Malynes, fl.1586-1641.

Early British Mercantilist, whose misfortunes as a merchant possibly encouraged him to denounce the trading policies of charter companies (notably, the East India Company), advocating a return to the staple system (where teams of merchants were involved in the trade). 

Born to a Flemish family in Antwerp ('De Mechelen', although possibly of Lancashire origin), Gerard de Malynes emigrated to London in the 1580s.  Probably on the strength of his father's connections, Gerard de Malynes was appointed assay master of the Royal Mint and served on several government commissions advising advising on economic problems during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. 

In 1592,  Malynes became involved in a shabby deal involving a bid for the  cargo of a captured Spanish ship, on behalf of a group of Amsterdam merchants.  When the numbers didn't add up, the Dutch traders accused Malynes of embezzlement and a lengthy and painful series of lawsuits ensued, crawling through the English courts, that ended only in 1610 with Malynes in debtor's prison for three years.  This experience may have embittered  him towards the merchants and usurers against whom he would soon turn his pen.

Shortly after serving on a royal commission on exchanges in 1600,  Gerard de Malynes exploded into print in 1601, with two vituperative treatises lamenting the state of the English economy (and society), placing the blame firmly on the machinations of merchants, usurers and currency dealers. The disease, the canker, of England, was the "Marchandising Exchange", i.e. the international money market.  Malynes believed that English coin was undervalued in foreign currency markets, with the result England regularly received less cash for its exports and paid more for imports, and that this had led to an outflow of cash from the kingdom. (He did not imagine undervaluation might affect the volume of exports and imports - he assumed these were demanded and supplied inelastically).   The drain of coin, Malynes alleged, had led to a fall in the domestic price level that had been disruptive of trade and employment.  Malynes attacked the very notion of allowing currency to be valued on the market, noting that it was issued by the King, to whose value he has pledged his good name with his stamp, and that private persons speculating and altering the value of the coin constitute an attack on royal authority, and thus treasonable as any other offense. 

But Malynes recognizes that the king's own debasements and unrealistic mint ratios have played a role in feeding the speculative money markets abroad.  As a result, he recommends setting the face value of the coin exactly equal to its metallic content - par pro pari - and the strict regulation of foreign exchange transactions.  To this end, Malynes advocates the resurrection of the ancient office of 'Royal Exchanger' centralizing foreign exchange transactions in royal hands.  This office had been abolished a half-century earlier (on the advice of Sir Thomas Gresham), but would indeed by resurrected by Charles I in 1627. In this manner, Malynes argued, the value of money would become immune from the vagaries of the market and the money that currently sloshed around in wasteful and disruptive speculation on the money market would find its way back to its original role, a public convenience, provided by the King's grace, to circulate national commodities.

But he did not end there.  Drawing much from Aristotle, the Scholastics and a myriad of disparate sources, Malynes launches an all-out attack on other 'immoral' and 'amoral' pillars of nascent capitalism - the merchants with their speculative greed, the usurers with their crushing interest, disruptors of the natural social order and domestic harmony, corrupters of Christian virtue and the moral fabric of the country.

"Plentie or scarcietie of Commodities doth also alter the price of the things wanting or abounding to the use thereof, which is grounded upon estimation by consent after the pleasure and sensualtie of man" (Malynes)

"plentie of money maketh generally things dear, and scarcitie of money maketh likewise generally things good cheape....According to the plentie or scarcitie of the monie, then, generally things become dearer or good cheape, whereunto the great store or abundance of monie and bullion, which of late years is come from the west Indies into Christendom hath made euery thing dearer according to the increase of monie" (Malynes)
 

Like the "bullionist" Thomas Milles, Malynes was a promoter of detailed restrictions on trade and supervision of the export of bullion. Malynes, outlined, following Bodin, how the influx of American gold had risen prices abroad and thus deteriorated the terms of trade for England. Argued that as exchange rates are determined by the machinations of wily financiers allied with the charter companies, damaging bullion exports will always ensue. Thus, the only way to avoid this would be to fix exchange rates to parity and control the export of bullion.

Malynes's later tracts (1622, 1623) were direct responses against two works of Edward Misselden, who had argued that the individual export-import transactions did not matter, but only the nation's total balance of trade.

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