‘Bad money drives out good.’ A maxim of Sir Thomas Gresham (1519–79), the founder of the Royal Exchange, London, who asserted it in 1560 with reference to base silver coin. The contemporary experience of coinage being debased through...

Gresham's law applies specifically when there are two forms of commodity money in circulation which are forced, by the application of legal-tender laws, to be respected as having the same face value in the marketplace. Gresham's law is named after Sir...