David Graeber talks at length about this in his Debt book.
At various times in history "unit of account" and "means of settlement" have been two different things. We are used to having a single currency (INR/USD etc.,) perform both the roles; however that needn't be the case. Going back to the earliest times in Mesapatomia, the debt and payments were denominated in silver coins but the actual payment was done in kind (such as food grains, wood).
Roman currency continued to be a widely used unit of account in the Middle Ages despite there being no Roman Empire producing the currencies/coins. Because a wide swathe of population had gotten used to that unit of account they just continued; though the payment was settled using whatever they had with them.
Brazil used this phenomenon to their advantage to escape from a monetary hole[1]. They created a new currency purely as a unit of account i.e., they didn't print/issue them. Everything was denominated in this new currency so citizens got used to calculating everything in this stable new currency. And then they declared it as their official currency.
I am fascinated by history of money and it's interesting to see a phenomenon play out again and again in different contexts.
It's fascinating how persistent units of account can be.
In Romania, after rampant inflation in the 90s, our currency had stabilized in the 00s at a point where a loaf of bread was something like 5-7000 ROL, while a typical salary was maybe 50M ROL. 1 EUR was maybe 35k ROL.
The government then decided in 2005 to slash these extra zeroes, and replaced ROL with RON, at a fixed price of 1RON = 10k ROL.
The funny thing is, people got used to the new values for small purchases, but for bigger sums, you still hear plenty of people discussing about things in terms of "hundreds of millions" (implying old ROL) instead of the newer values, 17 years later. This is true even though larger sums are also commonly denominated in euros, and it's easy to compute 100k euros = 500k RON. Still, many still go the extra step and say = 5 billion ROL.
Note: both RON and ROL are named "leu/lei" in common usage, but I've used the currency symbols to make it clearer, and because I don't think most would know how to read "lei" (it's read like English "lay" ; for "leu" there's no equivalent, English doesn't have the "eu" diphtong).
It's also funny, in the context of this article, that this is the Romanian word for Lion - so I could say my house is worth five hundred thousand lions!
The actual etymology is based on a medieval Italian coin with a lion on one of its sides that was widely used in this region (don't remember from which Italian city-state).
I think that the coin that originated the name was - for some reasons - Dutch, the Dutch thaler called Leeuwendaalder, and it was later, 16th or 17th century, though possibly the actual coins that were used in Romania were some similar Italian ones, in practice "fakes" made with a lower amount of silver:
That is interesting, because Poland has gone through the exact same thing until the Polish zloty was slashed by like 1PLN = 10k PLN, but in my entire life I have never heard people refering to anything using the old denomination like in your example. I wonder why that is, why did people in Romania stick to the old values so much but people in Poland didn't.
When Canada first adopted a coin for its $1, loads of names were thrown around. I remeber it was about a year, until the name "loonie", named after the bird on it stuck.
When the $2 coin happened, lots of people called it the dubloonie (in most canadian minds, what pirates used). Eventually though, it settled on "twonie".
This sort of cultural change is dynamic, and very influenced by things happening during the transition.
No history book, no movie, etc accurately captures the "word on the street", what the average joe thought at the time.
So, who knows why? Living through the above changes, I simply noticed more and more people settling on one term or another, and eventually.. it just was.
For most people the longest surviving artifact of the denomination was the TV quiz show called "Miliard w rozumie" (A billion in the mind) which had a grand prize of 1 000 000 000 old zł, i.e. 100 000 new zł)
It was a great show, pity it's long gone. Certainly better than shitty entertainment we got now - and at the same time not as pretentious as "Wielka gra".
Ha, you reminded me that it used to be common in the Netherlands (mainly among those over 40) to convert amounts in Euros to Guilders, mainly to express shock.
"It costs how much? 500 Euro?! That's 1000 guilders!!"
I can confirm that the same happened (and sometimes, nowadays rarely, still happen ) in Italy, the conversion rate from Lira to Euro was 1936.27, so everyone used 2,000 for simplicity, i.e.:
"It costs how much? 500 Euro?! That's 1,000,000 Lire!!"
the conversion was 2002, so only little more than 20 years ago, people 40 and over have grown up "in local money".
I'm trying to remember if people like my grandparents did, but nope, maybe I was too young for it. But it's definitely not something that exists to this age.
It's definitely disappearing in Romanian as well, so perhaps Poland simply did this a longer time ago, or moved on faster (or you and I are living in slightly different bubbles within our respective cultures - one of my grandparents is still alive, so maybe I'm actually only hearing it from her and accidentally generalizing).
in france we've had (in 1963!) a re-evaluation where 100 old francs = 1 new francs ; obviously older folks kept talking in old francs but what i found funny is that in some families, children born after 1963 still learned to talk in old francs!
In Italian “euro” is masculine while “lira” is feminine, but some people still occasionally use the feminine when referring to euros.
Since we're talking about the language of euros, what is the correct plural of "euro?"
My native English-speaking sister-in-law lives in the E.U. and uses "euro" for both singular and plural. But when I watch European television, I hear both "euro" and "euros" used as the plural form.
Sometimes within the same program, so it doesn't appear to be based on the country.
I don't live in Europe, but it seems to me that "euros" is correct however since I've heard so many non-native English speakers say "euro" as the plural, it doesn't sound that odd to me anymore. For abstract sums ("that will cost many euros") I think "euro" sounds outright wrong though.
In Serbian, they are pluralised like a normal noun ("jedan euro" "pet evra").
Indonesian Rupiah (IDR) is in a similar place at the moment. It was an interesting mental shift for me whenever I visited Jakarta from India. I also noticed quite a lot of restaurants dropped 00s in their menu card. And changes at-below 5000 IDR is written off as round off error. It's in fact rare to come across 5000 IDR notes. So maybe they too will drop 00s in near future.
And it only gets more fascinating the more you read about it. I remember Graeber also brought up the example of criminal fees somewhere in western Europe being measured in actual human women even until fairly recently. Maybe at some point did people actually settle damages by transacting in women, but the measurement lived for far longer than the practise. It was just well known how many pigs corresponded to a human woman, and how many grains corresponded to a pig. (This was something scholars studied and found agreement on.)
Graeber speculates that this whole idea of precisely measuring what one person owes to another started with criminal codes, fueled by a deeply human sense of tit-for-tat. Only quickly people realised an actual, literal, eye-for-an-eye is impractical, and it's better to conduct the transaction in something other than the specified fee.
>Brazil used this phenomenon to their advantage to escape from a monetary hole[1]. ... And then they declared it as their official currency.
You know, looking at their inflation rate (which is in the double digits), they should have kept that dual "currency" system and let people withdraw the inflationary currency as cash and keep the non inflationary currency in bank accounts with negative interest rates.
Why? Because inflation is a lie, you think your money is safe because you don't see it wither away (you do feel it wither away, but by how much? nobody really knows), a negative interest rate is the raw honest and ugly truth.
See also: The relationship between Guineas and Pound Sterling in British auctions.
Your bid is in Pound - but you pay in Guineas (which are worth 5% more) - the difference in worth is the auctioneer's fee.
Of course, noone's paying in actual Guineas - those are too rare, and noone's carrying gold coins around. The Guinea value is being converted to Pound value - but the Pound value is the amount the former owner of the object to be sold will receive.
5% is an insanely low auctioneer's fee. Is that for really high-ticket items only? The place I usually buy from in the US, it's 22%, and while that's on the high end, I don't think I've ever seen less than 15%. These are largely items in the $500-$5000 range, with a few in the $5-20k range and occasional big-ticket items going for a bit over $100k.
Now we need a Zimbabwean, down to earth, algorithmic stable cow. We’ll call it TerraZIMC, and it will be backed by our free floating crypto currency TerraMoona. If someone milks the system too much & udderly destroys currency, you can take your beef to the chief bullshitter.
On a serious note, that TerraZIMC already exists. It is the Brahman. The value of everything (other cows, cars, wives, houses, insurance policies etc) can be measured in Brahman cows. It is inflation proof as well as it is effectively barter.
People love talking about hyperinflation in Zimbabwe and stuff, most people just defaulted to their normal trade. How many Brahman cows is your stuff worth? Oh the price is too small to measure in cows? No problem. A Brahman cow is about 200 chickens on average. So for smaller transactions, how many chickens is your stuff worth?
The people who struggled the most during Zimbabwe's hyperinflation were the city people who did not own any animals. For the people in the rural areas, not much changed, besides city people coming and talking crazy numbers.
The majority of people live outside the cities and trade as they always do. That chicken can also be divided into heads of corn if need be. The dollar only becomes a concern when you trade with the city kids who have no assets to their name and can only use money.
I lived in Zim through the hyperinflation and early USD years and knew lots of people working in private schools there. I heard one of them say that school fees were also set to be roughly constant in units of cattle (I forget the exact numbers, it might have been 3 heifers (~2000 USD) per term).
Maybe the same idea now with bay area house prices in units of FAANG shares. Everything is constant for those holding (cows, FAANG) and not great for those with (ZD, USD).
> Maybe the same idea now with bay area house prices in units of FAANG shares.
It's interesting how this holds up so well across time.
The Byzantine historian Michael Attaleiates [1] was writing in the 11th century how the increase in the price of grains (which, in that particular case, was caused by the nationalisation and centralisation of grain delivery by the Byzantine State) was also causing an increase in the base salary demanded by the Byzantine demos and, most importantly, by its soldiers. Presumably grains were a fundamental "economic unit" (for lack of a better term) for Byzantium, as cows are for Zimbabwe and as real estate is for SV.
My reading of that event is to buy some Netflix stock at some point. They started a chain reaction with bad news but as far as I'm aware they might have been able to raise their prices in exchange for a relatively small amount of their customers.
That being said I haven't actually verified any numbers so maybe the market is right.
I haven't looked into it myself, but I'd do more research than just looking at diffs before buying FAANG stocks now. It's easy to forget that a lot of especially tech stocks were extremely handsomely valued by traditional metrics before the Fed started raising rates.
I really liked their content when they first launched here in AU.
I have two family members on limited incomes who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford it - so I got the top-end plan, specifically because it said something about multiple devices in your family.
Then the prices were raised, it became harder to find anything that I wanted to watch (new content I wasn't interested in, and lots of missing older content). I basically stopped using it.
Then prices were put up again (twice, I think), at the same time that they started bitching about password sharing/whatever. Then one family member died, and the other stopped using it, so... yeah, I'll keep the $23/month.
There's a decent change I'll drop it when they actually block me from account sharing. Until that point, I don't mind the higher prices. When that point does come, I'll certainly re-evaluate if Netflix is worth it for me.
My take is that Netflix is doomed. They had a good run, because they were first streaming platform, but at the end of day it is all about the content that you have, and big competitors, such as HBO and especially Disney+ are much better at producing quality content (and they have huge catalogs of existing, top-shelf movies and shows already). I expect people gradually switching to those services, and Netflix becoming irrelevant.
I keep almost killing off my Netflix in favor of the others, but then I remember its actually where most of what my kid watches is right now. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth a consistent subscription.
What I really need is a better way to manage it all: Content aggregator which you can add everything to a single watchlist. And when you want to watch something on a service you don't have subscribe and then cancel it immediately so you just have it for the month. I am sure all the services would squash something like that though.
I think eventually people will do something like this: keep Disney+ subscription active all the time, as the default (because it will be the best), and occasionally buy one month of the other services (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime) just to see what's new there.
The Disney+ and Hulu bundle is probably going to end up my default. But Prime just kind of exists. Never watch much on it, probably need to re-evaluate the value there.
They were priced at a level that could only be justified if they had the same exponential growth they've been having for many years into the future. I think the dump is mostly a reckoning that this isn't realistic. They might still grow from current levels, but it's not going to be at the same rate as they have for the past decade.
I never quite thought that I would see a fellow Zimbo on HN - although I suspect the few of us that are have left the country for good (and did so decades ago at that).
"Whites" in the sense the people that Zimbabwe government deemed were whites. If you have some issue with the word, ask a former member of the Mugabe regime, whom implemented the policy because their definition is the one you're looking for.
And since when was it racist to point out a racist eviction policy helped lead to hyperinflation? It's racist now to be against evicting someone based on their perceived ethnicity?
As a side note, our word `pecuniary', referring to money, comes from the Latin word `pecu', meaning `bovine animal'. Reckoning one's wealth in cattle has a long history.
There's also a say: "pecunia non olet" that literally translates to "money does not stink" but in latin is kind of funny, because pecunia comes from pecu, which does indeed stink :)
> Etymologists point to a proverb warning that it is not wise "to sell the bear's skin before one has caught the bear." By the eighteenth century, the term bearskin was being used in the phrase "to sell (or buy) the bearskin" and in the name "bearskin jobber," referring to one selling the "bearskin." Bearskin was quickly shortened to bear, which was applied to stock that was being sold by a speculator and the speculator selling stock.
> At about the same time, another animal symbol made its appearance in the marketplace. The term bull originally meant a speculative purchase in the expectation that stock prices would rise; the term was later applied to the person making such purchases. The animal seems to have been chosen as a fitting alter ego to the bear. Thus poet Alexander Pope wrote in 1720:
Come fill the South Sea goblet full;
The gods shall of our stock take care:
Europa pleased accepts the Bull,
And Jove with joy puts off the Bear.
You can read large chunks of Leviticus as a code of fines, fees and taxes (to be paid to the priest-civil-servant caste for their ritual sacrifice and consumption) for a variety of offenses, predominantly denominated in livestock.
I've watched my parents pensions get wiped out twice. IIRC the first time my dad withdrew a few decades worth of pension and bought a pair of boots.
It's been interesting to see alternatives like the one described in the article pop up. Another popular one is property - employees might club together and purchase a small flat every N months and each own some shares in it. Then there is the ever-favoured cash/gold under the mattress approach...
Not amusing it all, but deeply concerning. The obvious choice would be Quarter Pounders. They are vastly superior b/c cooked fresh and don’t cost much more.
Over the years, how the McDonalds stock moves has been a good indicator of how both the Food/Beverage market and the Commercial real estate market move.
My only qualm would be the menu choice. I would suggest the French Fries. They are more indicative of both demand and Mickey D's cost of production.
People buying more "meals" or "combos" at Mickey D's has been positively correlated to average household income and blah blah economic indicators over the years.
> People buying more "meals" or "combos" at Mickey D's has been positively correlated to average household income and blah blah economic indicators over the years.
You are saying it as if it was some sort of a profound piece of information. Of course it's positively correlated with the average household income, this is a typical "eat out experience". There's a bunch of other indicators which are even better correlated with the average household income, for example the "average household income" itself.
The better question here would be "does it give me any way of assessing the future of the household income" and I bet it doesn't.
It is weird to rrad that pensions or benefits are paid by companies, not independent pension funds or the state. I have read enough news titles about companies in the US that have gone bankrupt and people have lost their pensions.
The thought that someone works at one company their whole life abd gets their pension from there also seems archaic that
In effect it's a giant work camp/prison. You look like you're free and you can leave if you manage to get the money and some kind of visa but otherwise your money inflates away to nothing and somehow this doesn't affect the elite who seem to have all the US$. Diamond wealth simply vanishes - $15 billion or something like that? You're basically working for them for nothing.
There are many to blame, not least us Zimbabweans, but special thanks to Henry Kissenger for pushing us into the hands of the Russian and Chinese backed "liberation" movements just 9 years before the Berlin wall came down.
Ahh, fond memories. When the communism was giving its last breath in Poland in 1989, inflation got pretty high - around 40 percent a year. I had a private English language lessons with a student and we were adjusting lesson price to the price of eggs.
This guy had friends in London so he spent a lot of time there working (those were happy times when Policeman was not allowed to ask you if you have a work permit and having a government issues ID was considered as a disgrace to human dignity), so he was a very fluent speaker plus he was bringing to Poland luxuries like Melody Maker magazine that I was laboriously reading, fascinated (I was and I am big music fun).
"In the late 1990s, the government instituted land reforms intended to evict white landowners and place their holdings in the hands of black farmers. However, many of these "farmers" had no experience or training in farming. Many farms simply fell into disrepair or were given to Mugabe loyalists."
" From 1999 to 2009, the country experienced a sharp drop in food production and in all other sectors. The banking sector also collapsed"
Looking past the racial issues, what this was is a socialist redistribution of wealth away from a productive educated class to an unproductive, uneducated and corrupt class. It's economic suicide, if only the corrupt government had been educated enough to recognize it. The results were predictable. South Africa is flirting around the edges of doing something like this. I hope the example of their northern neighbor is enough to stay their hands.
So. When you retire, and stop working at your current job, you get cows and you now have a new job… I do hope cows are liquid assets in Zimbabwe in the future.
Cows are always liquid assets in Zimbabwe and Africa. They are the currency for dowry (bride price). There is never a day when you cannot liquidate a cow.
I guess assumptions we have don't hold in Zimbabwe. Retirement age is probably earlier and Retirees are healthier. People have way more children and grand-children (so more family for mutual support and taking advantage of the cattle). Retirement is shorter. Just guessing here.
At various times in history "unit of account" and "means of settlement" have been two different things. We are used to having a single currency (INR/USD etc.,) perform both the roles; however that needn't be the case. Going back to the earliest times in Mesapatomia, the debt and payments were denominated in silver coins but the actual payment was done in kind (such as food grains, wood).
Roman currency continued to be a widely used unit of account in the Middle Ages despite there being no Roman Empire producing the currencies/coins. Because a wide swathe of population had gotten used to that unit of account they just continued; though the payment was settled using whatever they had with them.
Brazil used this phenomenon to their advantage to escape from a monetary hole[1]. They created a new currency purely as a unit of account i.e., they didn't print/issue them. Everything was denominated in this new currency so citizens got used to calculating everything in this stable new currency. And then they declared it as their official currency.
I am fascinated by history of money and it's interesting to see a phenomenon play out again and again in different contexts.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-...