(yes, I know there's more content and "this week's currency summary" sounds less fun and I should chill out)
They are salable assets with a price that people are willing to pay to acquire them. It is no more abstract than a hypothetical report on how a house in New York City is now worth less than a house in Wichita. Numerology implies some kind of mystical force. This is simply observation of measured human behaviour.
It's more like saying "a building in New York is now worth less than a business headquartered in Wichita".
Sure. There's no difference. A salable asset is a salable asset is a salable asset. They are all freely traded amongst each other. You can trade that business in Wichita to acquire the building in New York (along with some extras to reach parity in the transaction), just as you can trade your USD to acquire EUR (with some extras to reach parity in the transaction). If two assets have value parity, the trade can take place without any extras.
Comparisons of similar assets (currencies in different countries, houses in different cities) tends to be more interesting for reporting, though. If you are vacationing in a different country you're probably not going to trade your house for the foreign currency. You're typically going to trade your own locale's currency. Likewise, if you're moving to another city, you're probably going to trade your house in your origin city for one in the destination city, not your collection of comic books.
You could trade your house for foreign currency needed while on vacation and your comic book collection for a house when you move to New York City, but it is not nearly as common as trading similar assets when moving about the world. The media needs to attract a wide audience, so common behaviour is significant. Unfortunately, the beloved Comic Book Collector's Homebuying Guide Weekly didn't find the readership necessary to remain in business.
Each transition saw a 1:1 conversion with fluctuation - usually to benefit the EUA/ECU/Euro - along the way.
https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/EURUSD%3DX#eyJpbnRlcnZhbCI6I...
No, not AFAICS. Because if that were so, then "this historic event" could only mean one single event, the most historic event ever. That's obviously nonsense; there are / have been many historic events. And if there can be many of those, there can also be at least several historic lows.
Parity in this context just mean a ratio of 1-to-1, doesn't it? I guess it could be synonymously replaced with ‶numeric equality″.
The key takeaway given that is that the market is either losing confidence in the eurozone, gaining confidence in the US, or most likely; both.
> The key takeaway...
Yes, and that's the useful information.
Exchange rate was 1 EUR for 1,95583 DM
I don't think so, the same happened for the old Lira in Italy, 1,936.27=1 €, that everyone rounded to 2,000=1 €, or for the Portuguese Escudo, around 200=1 €, it should be just a coincidence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_euro#Currency_t...
The conversion was based on exchange rates on 31 December 1998 for the initial Euro members.
EUA was exchanged 1:1 for ECU, then 1:1 for EUR, so that's a nice continuation.
> EUA was exchanged 1:1 for ECU, then 1:1 for EUR, so that's a nice continuation.
Interesting, I didn't know that. We did something similar here in Brazil to get rid of the hyperinflation: the Real (which started at 1:1 with the USD) was preceded by the URV, an accounting measure which was used to denominate all prices; during that time, the prices continued to inflate in the former currency, but were mostly fixed in URV, so when the currency changed from Cruzeiro Real to Real (at 1:1 with the URV), the prices stopped inflating so much. Of course, that was not the only thing the Plano Real did to get rid of the hyperinflation, but it got rid of an important "inertial" component of the inflation, in which prices inflated daily because they had always inflated daily.