The Hindu Business Line : There're more dollar bills than Coke cans

WE HAVE more than a hundred billion of them in our reserves. Even as the inflow of the dollar continues, this perhaps is the time to sit back in leisure and relish its history.

To help you in such an exercise is Jason Goodwin's Greenback, from Picador (www.picadorusa.com).

For the author, dollar is as an art form, a kind of advertising, and a matter of attitudes; he delves into folklore, investigates counterfeiters, and brings together "an array of quirky detail and often hilarious anecdote."

The intro begins with the story of how Goodwin spent his first dollar, at the counter in Ahmedabad station, trying to get a ticket to Bombay: "I eased a green banknote out of my money belt and put it under a pile of dirty pink rupees. I slid the pile across to the clerk. First-class sleeping berth to Bombay, I said... So that was how my dollar bill went: on bribe." Not something to feel good about, but we may console ourselves that such ghastly things must have happened before the computerisation.

There are more dollar bills in existence than any other branded object, including Coke cans, notes the author. And they are good for hitchhiking because it is not unusual to find substances on the dollar.

For instance, "the US Customs researchers recently analysed dollar bills from suburban Chicago, Houston and Miami. They found that 78 per cent of them were contaminated with cocaine." You can find dollars under mattresses in remote Russian villages, and in many nooks of the world, tainted with liquor and paan, petroleum and just anything. "They never go home."

An angry man should count to ten before speaking. That's a proverb your aunt may have told you, but credit is given to Thomas Jefferson, a lover of the decimal system.

If very angry, count hundred, he used to advise.

He did not like the system that existed then: "Dollars were divided into eights. Twelve pennies made a shilling, and twenty shillings made a pound: an absurd system."

Seven years after America defined the world's first decimal currency, Jefferson, as US minister in Paris, was seeing the French Assembly follow suit — they brought in "kilos, metres, and millimetres." They even tried to dismantle the clock that had the duodecimal system — "they legislated for 24 hour days, 10-day weeks, and years of 10 months." Sadly, however, "nobody could build the clocks".

The difference between money in the Old and New Worlds is explained thus: "Old World money slid from hand to hand by the complex and respected laws of entail and primogeniture; it furnished dowries, allowances, and remittances. In the New World, banks took on projects and used them to create money.

The money would pay for a scheme and then, once the scheme had reached fruition, repay the original investors many times over." Very much like Cinderella's golden coach and horses, states the author, because the money had a sell-by date.

"Most of the forgers were American-born," writes Goodwin in a chapter called "The Spy." What about the others? "English immigrants were too flighty and inexperienced. The Irish preferred horses, and ran the faro and betting industry. Jews didn't do much counterfeiting. The Italians took to it as craftsmen; if they didn't have the right skills themselves, they sent to Italy... They brought a new level of violence to the easygoing rhythms of American criminal life."

Which perhaps explains why many of our leaders are allergic to Italy. In retrospect, those were days when outsourcing did not happen in a big way.

Before signing off, the author wonders if the dollar is all that it seems. Does it have a glimpse of Western vulgarity in the burly type? Or, "A touch of dubious decorum in the mottoes and symbols, like the instant ancestors of the nouveaux riches?" The Internet may be dollar's ultimate destination, he muses. "When the whole country is webbed with electronic money — cash cards, credit cards, smart cards, direct debits, automatic transfers — cash will be for paupers only."

Economics@thehindu.co.in

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