Why a Zimbabwean firm offers pensions denominated in cows
economist.com
economist.com
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-...
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.
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).
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.
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.
"It costs how much? 500 Euro?! That's 1000 guilders!!"
"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".
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".
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.
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.
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.
Printing money is a crime there nowadays (and similar creative financial operations). A head of state lost its office once for disrespecting it.
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.
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).
That being said I haven't actually verified any numbers so maybe the market is right.
Yet nobody I know has actually quit. I suspect they might be addicts claiming they can quit anytime...
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.
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.
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.
But to your actual question: Not according to Wikipedia at least.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_trend
It seems “Bear Market” came first, and bull market was a play on it.
> 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.I am not going to follow your portfolio!
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.
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.
The thought that someone works at one company their whole life abd gets their pension from there also seems archaic that
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.
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).
" 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.