Loose change
Pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters. No more Canadian pennies out there with the little maple leaf, though – they quit making them long ago. Same with our fifty-cent piece. The coins that remain in our financial system are a pain in the neck. At the grocery store: “That’ll be four dollars and seven cents, sir.” Dang. Forgot to stuff any change in my jeans. Now I have three more quarters, a dime, a nickel and three pennies to add to my swelling collection of bits of metal.
Paper money stopped having any intrinsic value back in 1971 when then-president Richard M. Nixon unilaterally and via executive order abruptly ended the direct convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold. Since then, it’s been pretty much just scrip. So, as long as we don’t run out of trees, Ms. Yellen at the Federal Reserve Bank can print as much of it as she needs, or so she would lead us to believe.
One warm evening untold millennia ago, during the time when humans were only just beginning to assert their presence on this planet earth, the tribal elders of a tiny village in the land that would come to be known as Peru became terrified. They noticed for the first time that the rising moon was rapidly turning from its familiar brilliant gray-white appearance to the color of death – a deep dark red. It was the consensus of the elders that the gods must be severely unhappy with them and their small village. In an act of penance, they summoned a young virgin, who was quickly adorned in the finest of clothes, crowned with a wreath of blossoms and then flung to her death from the highest cliff. And by morning, the moon had returned to its normal hue. Phew.
Surely you have heard of this acronym, which stands for “keep it simple, stupid.” Which reminds me of an old joke: A guy has a flat tire on the street next to the insane asylum. He removes the lug nuts from the wheel, pulls it off and replaces it with the spare from the trunk. But as he reaches for the lug nuts, they all fall down the drain gutter. Dismayed, he says to himself “Dang. How am I to get home?” Then he hears a voice coming from a window high up on the building behind him. “Hey, you down there – just take one lug nut off of each of the other three wheels and use them on your spare.”