Falling currency means that we all end up dirt-poor
By Nury Vittachi
I’ve just come back from the bank, where I had to change money from one currency to another. This really annoys me. In the queue, I worked out that if you change your money 13 times, you end up flat broke without actually having bought anything. Worse still, I’ve just realized I change money 14 times a year. That means I can save time and energy by just staying at home and burning my life savings.
In ancient times, when the world was young (and Keith Richards had already began to rot), the practice of changing one form of money to another every time you crossed a national border began.
This was particularly bad news for people from South Asia. Their currency, the rupee, was set at a very low exchange rate: one rupee was equal to one speck of dirt.
I recall my father’s long face every time we used an airport money-changer. We got a handful of dirt. And those were the good days. Other times we just got a laugh.
Today, everything has changed. The various brands of rupee are still worthless, but thanks to financial terminology, the situation is expressed far more elegantly. We now say 0.9897 rupees equals 0.9897 specks of dirt or 1.075 seconds of laughter, which I think you’ll agree sounds better.
In the old days, the most confusing currency was the Pound, a British banknote which (rather suspiciously, I thought) weighed only a fraction of a pound.
The British currency was famously complex. The pound was divided into shillings, pence, florins and penny-farthings, coins which were so large they were used in Britain as bicycle wheels. The British also had a huge variety of coins, such as guineas, half-crowns, tuppences, quids, grands, optics, drams and snifters.
The first transaction I ever had on a visit to London went something like this:
Me: How much is that?
Airport shopkeeper: Two grand, a guinea-half-crown, three shillings, half a snifter and tuppeny-ha’pence-farthing.
Me: Oh. Do you accept rupees?
Airport shopkeeper: Yes sir. That’ll be forty googillion rupees, but I will have to give you the change in dirt and sneers.
Only after I got a job as a financial journalist did I learn how the system worked. The main world currency was the US dollar, colloquially known as Greenspans. The Greenspan was divided into bucks, dimes, nickels, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, semi-colons, jots and iotas.
And after many years of earning a monthly handful of dirt in Asia, I eventually got a job where I was paid in a currency fixed to US dollars. I pictured myself swanning back to my home town, pockets overflowing with Greenspans.
But what happened? From the day I started that job, the US dollar started falling in value. Down and down it went, into a hole which makes the Marianas Trench look like a scratch in a piece of marble or Kim Jong-Il’s head, whichever is denser.
The last time I visited Sri Lanka, I took a wad of US dollars and a wad of rupees. This was the way to get a good deal, I said to myself. No such luck. At the airport in Colombo, I checked out the rates for both my currencies at the moneychangers. I got two handfuls of dirt and a double-portion of sniggers.
