In this edited extract from his new book, Irish Times columnist David McWilliams explains that the story of money is the story of humanity itself
In this edited extract from his new book, The Irish Times columnist explains that the story of money is the story of humanity itself
In the 1920s, he had been arrested in Amsterdam for distributing fake English £50 notes. After serving a short sentence he made it back to Berlin, just in time for a bonanza in the forgery business. After the anti-Semitic violence of Kristallnacht in November 1938, as the monstrosity of the Nazi regime became apparent, Jewish people were desperate to flee Germany and paid Salomon for fake passports and exit visas.
Germany’s bouts of hyperinflation in the early 1920s meant that German currency was printed on whatever paper could be sourced. When billions of worthless marks are being printed, who cares about the quality of the paper? But the Bank of England was a different story. Sterling, the global reserve currency for almost a century, wasn’t printed on any old flimsy paper. Earlier forgers suspected it was printed on material made from a type of reed that only grew in the British colony of Malaya.
The realisation of Hitler’s plan to flood Britain with fake notes, forgeries so brilliant that not even the Bank of England could distinguish them from real ones, was mere months away. The concentration-camp forgers printed a total of £134,610,810, which amounted to four out of every 10 pounds then in circulation or about £7 billion in today’s money.
Money defines the relationship between worker and employer, buyer and seller, merchant and producer. But not only that: it also defines the bond between the governed and the governor, the state and the citizen. Money unlocks pleasure, puts a price on desire, art and creativity. It motivates us to strive, achieve, invent and take risks.
Unlike other technologies, money is ephemeral. It resides in our heads, representing value, but it is intrinsically valueless. For money to work, a leap of mental abstraction is required. Counterintuitively, money is valuable not when it is scarce but when it is abundant. In this sense, money resembles another wondrous human technology: language. Both money and language are crowd phenomena. Like language, the more people who use money, the more valuable it becomes.
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