Money

What is money

Money is a man made unit of measurement to use as a payment for goods, for services or a debt. If you like a very complicated and detailed explanation about money check wikipedia.

Wonder how long ago we started to dance with this devil. Oi some people love the devil. According to A History of Money from Ancient Times to the Present Day by Glyn Davies, rev. ed. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996. 716p. ISBN 0 7083 1351 5; chronologically it kind of happened in Mesapotamia in c. 3000 - c. 2000 BC, when they started a banking system which was used by the temples and palaces for the accounting and storage of initially grain but later other goods including cattle, agricultural implements, and precious metals.

Then in the Bronze age 3000 BC - 1500 BC there was a land called Cappadocia, which is present day Central Anatolia in Turkey. Yeah we are talking about a very old civilisation which branched out into lots of other civilisations. These are the Hatti's. But even before that, in 3000 BC, the writing was developed to aid the accounting system of the palaces and the temples of Mesapotamia. Then in 2500 to 1550 BC the rulers of Cappadocia made ingots of silver and gurenteed their weight. These were used in transaction of goods. Call them money I would but read on.

Now you must be thinking why the hell is this guy started on this boring subject. yes it is boring. But it is what keeps most of us going at a rat race. I am stuck in a very mundane place called benefit dependency. And the world financial system is going into a very nasty turn. I been listening to the boffins talking about it for about 5 years about this impending 'disaster'. But I could not understand the whole thing. Why because it is not exactly a straight forword thingy. OK. Do you know that the Chinese Government and other governments have been buying the national debt of US. Now who wants to buy some one else's debt?

Do you know? Please let me know if you know.

Now back to the scene of money and grit.

This is a bit more complicated than I thought. The boffins cannot agree on the subject of "History of Money"; so they devised another way of explaining the history called, "Numismatics (Latin: numisma, nomisma, "coin"; from the Greek: νομίζειν nomízein, "to use according to law"), is the scientific study of currency and its history in all its varied forms."

But it is to make it more complicated. If we remember there were lots of things used money in our past. So some of them were metal wooden coins or medals and things like credit cards then there are the paper money, and last the stocks and bonds. That is all it is about. No hassle, or when hassle crops up we will sort it out.

"Ochre was one of the first pigments to be used by human beings. Pieces of haematite, worn down as though they had been used as crayons, have been found at 300,000 year old Homo heidelbergensis sites in France and Czechoslovakia. Neandertal burial sites sometimes include ochre as a grave good. The oldest evidence of mining activity, at the "Lion Cave" in Swaziland, is a 43,000 year old ochre mine. In Germanic rune lore, red ochre was often used in place of blood to redden, or tint, the runes and thereby instilling the spirit of life into the rune, enabling it to be used for magical purposes."

Red Ochre has been used as money in the good old days. In Australia the Abosrigines used it as money. So people who lived near these places with good Red Ochre must have been like the Oil Man today init. Then some cultures were using seashels, strong beads, and ivory were used for money. As these cannot be counterfeited, easily storable and transportable, lots of similar pieces of equal size available, they were used for bridal money, implements etc. But all else was of barter system. But by then people started thinking about coincidence of various needs like rics and salt for mutual satisfaction. Other wise whats the use of all of us having rice to sell and none has salt. And they needed something, in place of salt or rice, to carry it around and which is equal to the rice at home to sell. Now we get the ugly head of real science of money coming out.

They came out with Commodity Money. So if I have rice and my neighbour has fruit and the two harvests different times we have a problem, unless we have something like copper, gold, coconuts - things which can be stored for years without going moldy - transacted according to a certain measurement.

The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp by R.A. Radford is a bloody good read about how cigarettes become a commodity money in the WW3 POW camps. I think I will have to go back to the article one day to go through it with intent.

Out of all the commodities used by man the best is gold which has lasted many years upto date.

"The U.S. dollar was originally specified by the Coinage Act of 1792 to be a unit of weight (471.25 grains of troy silver (about 30.54 g of silver)) and not one of money as it is thought of today. The value of gold or silver contained in the dollar was then converted into relative value in the economy for the buying and selling of goods. This allowed the value of things to remain fairly constant over time, except for the influx and outflux of gold and silver in the nation's economy. According to an evaluation of data from the U.S. Department of Treasury, the cost of goods and services remained relatively consistent between 1635 and 1913, around a level of roughly 25 times the buying power of the U.S. dollar in 2006"

Says the Wikipedia.

"The origins of sterling lie in the reign of King Offa of Mercia, who introduced the silver penny. It copied the denarius of the new currency system of Charlemagne's Frankish Empire. As in the Carolingian system, 240 pennies weighed 1 pound (corresponding to Charlemagne's libra), with the shilling corresponding to Charlemagne's solidus and equal to 12 pence. At the time of the penny's introduction, it weighed 22.5 troy grains of fine silver (30 tower grains)(c. 1.5 g), indicating that the Mercian pound weighed 5400 troy grains (the Mercian pound became the basis of the Tower Pound, which weighed 5,400 Troy grains, equivalent to 7200 tower grains). At this time, the name sterling had yet to be acquired. The penny swiftly spread throughout the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and became the standard coin of what was to become England."

About The British Pond Sterling.

"The franc was introduced by King John II in 1360. Its name comes from the inscription reading Johannes Dei Gratia Francorum Rex ("Jean by the grace of God King of the Franks") and its value was set as one livre tournois (a money of account). Francs were later minted under Charles V, Henri III and Henri IV.

Louis XIII of France stopped minting the franc in 1641 (replacing it with the Écu and Louis d'Or), but use of the name "franc" continued in accounting as a synonym for the livre tournois."

Lots of french words; it must be the French Franc.

"Before unification, the different German states issued a variety of different currencies, though most were linked to the Vereinsthaler, a silver coin containing 16⅔ grams of pure silver. Although the Mark was based on gold rather than silver, a fixed exchange rate between the Vereinsthaler and the Mark of 3 Mark = 1 Vereinsthaler was used for the conversion. Southern Germany had used the Gulden as the standard unit of account, which was worth 4⁄7 of a Vereinsthaler and, hence, became worth 1.71 (15⁄7) Mark in the new currency. Bremen had used a gold based Thaler which was converted directly to the Mark at a rate of 1 gold Thaler = 3.32 (39⁄28) Mark. Hamburg had used its own Mark prior to 1873. This was replaced by the Goldmark at a rate of 1 Hamburg Mark = 1.2 Goldmark.

From January 1, 1876 onwards, the Mark became the only legal tender. The name Goldmark was created later to distinguish it from the Papiermark (paper mark) which suffered a massive loss of value through hyperinflation following the First World War. The Goldmark was on a gold standard with 2790 Mark equal to 1 kilogram of pure gold."

The Germans have done badly either- I nearly typed Germen?

"After several earlier attempts the Austro-Hungarian Empire adopted the gold standard in 1892 according to the plan of Sándor Wekerle secretary of finance. This plan included the introduction of the new currency, the Krone. It consted of 100 Heller (Austria) or Fillér (Hungary). The value of the Krone was set at 2 Krone = 1 Gulden (Florin, or forint in Hungarian) of the previous silver-based currency. From 1900 onwards, Krone notes were the only legal banknotes of the Empire."

The countries who governed the money market 19th century can be seen by this statement.

"During the 19th and early 20th centuries, many other countries adopted the gold standard. As a consequence, conversion rates between different currencies could be determined simply from the respective gold standards. The pound sterling was equal to 4.886 U.S. dollars, 25.22 French francs (or equivalent currencies in the Latin Monetary Union), 20.43 German Marks or 24.02 Austro-Hungarian Krones. Discussions took place following the 1865 International Monetary Conference in Paris concerning the possibility of the UK joining the Latin Monetary Union and a Royal Commission on International Coinage examined the issues,[5] resulting in a decision against joining monetary union."

And people who live in UK note this:

"Prior to World War I, the United Kingdom had one of the world's strongest economies, holding 40% of the world's overseas investments. However, by the end of the war the country owed £850 million, mostly to the United States, with interest costing the country some 40% of all government spending."

Hai Karamba if you go to war you paay the price. Right now I sm interested about the financial state of the west and who is creating it?


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