4 posts tagged “money”

Stuff You Should Know About Money

First of all, money does not have and was never intended to have any intrinsic value. Anyone who values money for its own sake ("The king is in his counting house counting out his money") has a mental illness.

Money was invented (some form of it dates back 5000 years) as a convenient way to equalize exchanges, such as payment for work done or to balance out a barter exchange.

The gathering of people into villages and towns created the first need (after defence of the tribe) for public services, which meant taxes. Egypt and Mesopotamia exacted taxes in the form of goods and labour five millennia ago. By 2500 BCE they had begun to accept silver and gold bars as currency--the pyramids were not built by those who could afford to buy their way out of service to the pharaoh.

Religious temples were the first banks. Currency made theft easier, more convenient. Temples were the biggest and most secure structures in the ancient world, so they became the places to store money and other valuables.

Temple priests were the first bankers, ensuring their personal security by 1750 BCE by making loans to followers who needed cash for a short term. Mortgages, especially of the sub-prime variety, were still a long way in the future.

The world's oldest surviving bank, the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, was founded as a pawn shop in Italy, in 1472.

Paper money goes back much further, at least in China. The emperors issued paper currency in China as early as 910 CE, three centuries before Marco Polo arrived.

Though suitably impressed with the concept of paper currency, Marco was alarmed at how much of it the emperor of the day, Kublai Khan, was printing. The Khan, trying to generate enough wealth to pay for an invasion of Japan (and eventually to conquer all of the eastern world), caused inflation to soar.

Of the tens of thousands of boats he sent to Japan, almost every one sank in a typhoon, never reaching the shores of Japan, because they were built in a cheaper style of a kind suitable for travelling on rivers, not seas. His power and influence in China never recovered.

China ended its first attempt at paper currency in the 15th century as the country exhausted itself through inflation caused by printing too much money. China, the most powerful and innovative country in the world, with explorations to every part of the globe and trading partners in all popular ports, ended its exploratory and trading ventures around the world (crippling the shipping industry) after the Kublai Khan debacle.

The U.S. learned how convenient it was to print money for Civil War costs when it created the "greenback" in July, 1861. After the war, the value of the U.S. dollar had decreased, but the Confederate dollar was worthless.

The U.S. today has about $829 billion in coin and paper money in general circulation. Two-thirds of it is held in other countries.

A study of paper money around the world revealed in 2008 that U.S. cash had more cocaine residue on it than the currency of any other country. Also found on paper money were staphylococcus bacteria and fecal residue. (Don't ask. Don't tell.)

Around 1916, a U.S. citizen could carry his cash to Washington, D.C. and have it washed, ironed and reissued. I wonder why...oh, right.

The old saying that money doesn't grow on trees is correct. U.S. bills are 75 percent cotton, 25 percent linen. Some countries use at least some man-made fibres. Expect some plastic to appear in "paper" money soon.

As counterfeiting has been a booming enterprise since money was invented (some of us are old enough to remember having to bite some coins to ensure they weren't counterfeits loaded with lead), mints have to continually invent new ways to counteract it. The latest U.S. five dollar bill has more than 650,000 tiny glass domes that create an optical illusion the government hopes will be impossible (or at least economically unfeasible) to duplicate.

Poor Frank X. McNamara. Back in 1949 he took friends out to dinner in New York City, then realized to his shock that he had forgotten his cash when it came time to pay up. He promised himself to never find himself in a position like that again. He invented the first credit card, Diner's Club.

The first Diner's Club card wasn't plastic, but cardboard. It listed the 14 restaurants who were prepared to accept the card on the back. It had an annual fee of three dollars.

John Shepherd-Barron, a Scottish inventor, gets the credit for inventing the first true ATM. He created it in 1967 for Barclay's Bank in North London. His concept was based on the same technology as chocolate bar dispensers.

Since plastic cards had still not appeared, Shepherd-Barron's machine accepted only specialized cheques that were dotted with identifying traces of radioactive carbon-14.

Um, radioactive? Yup. Shepherd-Barron claimed that users of the Barclay's cheques "would have to eat 136,000" of them to have any dangerous effects.

Once a specialized Barclay's cheque was entered into his ATM, the user would key in a four digit PIN to confirm identification.

And so began the age of having to remember passwords.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to address the developmental needs of their children at the right time, not too late as often happens.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

[Primary source: Discover, April 2009]

The more developed we become, the more technologically connected we get, the more we regret the loss of our privacy. The media and internet blogs and chat groups wail that we can't keep anything private any more.

What I wonder is: Why?

Granted, there are personal matter such as finances that are none of anyone's business except the owner of those finances. Yet many of those same people do their banking over the internet, which is anything but secure.

A recent study in Canada showed that the major Canadian banks pay their customers who lose savings as a result of their identity being stolen from internet banking transactions about $250 million per year. The banks deem it much cheaper than improving their security, which would cost about two billion dollars (a one-time cost).

Those same banks have their staff assure customers that internet banking is safe--indeed, even urge them to open internet banking accounts. Meanwhile, even the scammers are onto this, sending out "account confirmation" notices by email and notices of "upgrades" that require confirmation of banking details (name and password, at least) that look dangerously similar to emails from the real banks. The fraudulent emails even include bank logos and fake bank email domain addresses that look identical to the real thing.

Meanwhile, the same banks offer little encouragement to customers to do their banking over the telephone, which is far safer. True, it is possible to break into a telephone line and steal banking information. However, this is wiretapping, which is deeply frowned upon by the police. And it's fairly easy to track the sources of the illegal taps. Criminal charges follow.

What we hear about bank fraud and identity theft is enough to make anyone think that their whole life could be in the toilet by the end of the day if their identity were stolen.

I remember "the old days" where people in cities didn't have to lock their doors. In many rural areas, it's still like that today. People know everyone, so they know everyone else's business. It's almost impossible to keep secrets from rural neighbours. Isn't that loss of privacy in the extreme?

At the same time as city dwellers are losing their privacy against their will, they are losing the concept of real friendship. Real friends help real friends in trouble, no matter what. Friendships in cities today resemble more business relationships where each party must contribute an equal share to the relationship and each party must benefit from the other's efforts or the friendship is dropped. "What have you done for me lately?" is the key to many relationships.

Meanwhile, our loss of trust has caused us to want to keep our children indoors instead of out playing sports or investigating life away from the security of home. The kids stay home, eat junk food and play video games (both readily and willingly provided by parents). The kids get fat. But the parents don't notice because they are putting on the pounds as well due to lack of physical activity and overindulgence of prepared foods.

Many people fear going outside their homes after dark. That's not just a caution for them, but a real and substantial fear.

Now I wonder whether we are not teaching ourselves to be afraid of everything. We don't even look at strangers in an elevator, presumably because we fear they might rob or rape us. We don't count our change in convenience store because we want to be out of there before it's robbed the next time.

Parents watch and monitor the activity of their kids, in some form, all day, every day. The children, not used to much freedom of choice or independence from their parents, want to get away from the parents when they become teens. At that age, when the kids have learned very little except fear and dependence from their parents, they go out into the world and get themselves into trouble.

Of course that only accounts for a small percentage of adolescents. But how small a percentage is small enough to ignore?

When my wife and I had young children, we routinely taught them how to cope with the situations they would face when they went out alone. We taught them what to expect, what to do if unexpected things happened and how to react in as many possible situations as we could think of.

How many parents do that today? Ninety percent? That's a pretty high figure. But it leave ten percent of children unprepared to face the world they live in. It's no coincidence that ten percent is about the amount that get into trouble, either with the law or by indulging in illegal activities, including drugs and alcohol.

Where everyone knows everyone else's business, a child can walk down a street and every neighbour who sees that child will know what he is doing and where he is going. In most cities of fear, the same child would be a stranger to the neighbours. In which situation do you think the child would be safer?

Loss of privacy only matters when private information becomes known to the wrong people. Lack of privacy can be a great benefit when the right people know what they should.

We need to stop fearing the good guys and learn to trust them more. They will not trust us or our kids so long as we don't trust them.

The bad guys aren't that hard to identify. They don't wear black hats, as they did in the old western movies. But they follow patterns. We can learn those patterns and teach them to our children.

Long ago it was said that it takes a village to raise a child. Most kids don't live in villages these days. Some kids in cities are treated as enemies by neighbours who don't know them well.

It's time we taught kids and adults about living in large, modern urban complexes. We have the technology, but we don't have the updated social practices to go with it.

Teach the children what and who to trust and what and who to not trust. If we don't, they will learn to fear and lack respect for everyone and everything. Does that sound familiar?

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow competent children who know how to cope with their world. The book comes with learning guides.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.
- Denis Waitley, American inspirational speaker and author (b. 1924)

What the hell does that mean?

If that was your reaction to the quote, you might be a bit light on the happiness scale, and may not know it.

Think about things that can be owned, earned, worn or consumed. They all require spending money. Thanks to the rich and powerful West and its persistent propaganda telling us that we can't be happy unless we spend money, an unbelievably large number of people in the world equate happiness and spending.

That requires people to have money to be happy, going along that way of thinking. Everyone who is poor must be unhappy, as a corollary. Or at least lack the ability to be truly happy.

People with lots of money spend, spend, spend. And they are happy. Or they believe they are. They must be, they conclude, because they are living the lifestyle that says they must be happy. They believe they are happy because they have been taught to believe that.

Yet look at the divorce rate among these people. Look at the percentage of their kids who take drugs and alcohol and simply can't manage in school. Look at the number who grow up with a video game as a surrogate mother instead of a real one. By the time they are in their teens, they don't want their natural mother anyway, many of them, because their mothers don't know what to do with them. And they have no idea what to do with their mothers.

So they all spend as much as they can to be happier.

But they don't get happier. What they do get is embroiled in addictions and obsessions, causes to which they devote much of their lives--such as their religion of choice or a political party--in a vain effort to teach the rest of the world how to be happy.

Some cults in other parts of the world understand. They have no source of the money needed to spend the way the addicts do in the West. So, jealous of the West and their own inability to get money to spend on the luxuries they believe they need to be happy, they become suicide bombers or terrorists of other stripes. Some kill their own people out of spite.

Most people in poorer countries don't behave that way, of course. But they have gotten the message. They believe that only fate has prevented them from being happy by not giving them the ability to earn money they can spend to make them happy. "Poor me, fate has dealt me such a cruel blow."

However, others in poorer countries do not succumb to the consumerism propaganda. They believe that happiness is what you make for yourself. And what you make for others around you in the process. They become musicians and dancers, for example, and find happiness in their music. They cherish the "spiritual experience of living every minute" with their music. Others get involved with other forms of artistic endeavour.

They lose themselves in whatever they do. Musicians become one with their music. Painters one with their paintings. Actors one with their particular craft, and so on.

Are the arts, then, the secret to happiness? No, it's the giving of themselves to something beneficial or to someone else that is enjoyed and appreciated by others that brings the happiness.

I can't say whether they live each moment with "love, grace and gratitude." Those are Denis Waitley's words. What words would I use? I stumble over them myself now that I have found happiness I could never have understood until recently.

While I was growing up, I was taught repeatedly, at home, at school, at church, playing sports and doing just about every activity involving others my own age that I must come first in my life. I must be in charge. I must be in control. I must succeed at everything. "Pay yourself first" and buy what you can with it. Borrow to buy what you can't afford so that you can show it off to others so they can see your success. Only when I outgrew that infantile, selfish and consumerish way of thinking and began to share my life freely with others did I find happiness.

With happiness, the more you give to others, the more you get back in return. Business doesn't work that way, which is why business wants us to be selfish. And consumers. Business lives for money. A life built around a business model is pretty shallow.

Business, however, cannot be happy. It's emotionless, even sociopathic if you believe some studies. Shaping our lives on a business model not only doesn't bring much happiness in return, it tends to lose for us many of the opportunities for happiness that we could have enjoyed.

Make someone happy today. You'll be glad you did. Really.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach their children how to be more than consumers, who want them to live lives full of happiness.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

The great secret of getting what you want from life is to know what you want and believe you can have it.
- Norman Vincent Peale

That's pretty easy, right? After all, you have no possibility of getting what you want if you don't believe you can get it.

The problem is that many people--maybe even a majority, but the situation has not been studied sufficiently to say for certain--don't know what they want from life.

Ask most people and their answers will be exactly or somehow related to happiness and money. They'll even say "I know that money can't buy happiness, but I'd like to give it a try." They have no idea how they might go about getting that money they would like, nor do they have a plan to put into effect that would make them different from the people in all the tragic stories they have heard about people who became suddenly rich.

Their way to get money, for most who don't have real plans, is to gamble. Lotteries are the favourite sport. The fact that they might have a better chance of being hit by lightning and survive twice in their lifetime than of winning a lottery deters them not. Whatever amount of cash they spend on lottery tickets they tell themselves is their small way of treating themselves.

These people who would like to have lots of money don't have a viable way to get it. And if they did, they would likely blow it all or allow it to ruin their lives.

Happiness, though, should be a grand objective, shouldn't it? Sure. What's happiness? The people who wish for it have no clear concept of what happiness is, how they could recognize it in others or how they could become happy themselves.

Money, happiness and all the attendant benefits that go with them are artificial needs or life objectives created by industries to sell their products. Think not? Just watch how much "fun" people have shopping for themselves. What do you do when you're feeling blue? Take more vitamin D? No, go shopping. The ads and commercials tell us how to live our lives.

Most people who conduct their lives like this find themselves in the latter years of middle age (they never get old, that would be against what the commercials teach) settling for belief that they must have found happiness because they have followed what the advertising told them to do for so many years.

Do you want my opinion about what you should want from life? If you silently answered Yes to that question, then you are still prepared to take someone else's word for what you should want from your life rather than to make up your mind for yourself, to be in control of your own future, your own destiny, your own purpose in life.

Money and happiness are shallow objectives for life. They're selfish, perhaps even narcissistic. People who choose these as life goals have nothing much to show for their lives when they die. And that is exactly what industries want of us, to be spent out.

If you want to get some ideas about objectives for your own life, ask a few people who have worked to improve the lives of others. That might be by mentoring, helping in a homeless shelter, giving help to kids or adults who are trying to learn to read, offering to help elderly people who are having difficulty holding their own in the house they have lived in for decades or any of myriad ways that people help each other.

Don't look to advertising for answers. Any situation where people want you to give money to achieve happiness will not likely deliver the goods for you.

It's your life. You should make it mean something while you can.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how, what and when to teach children the knowledge and skills they need to lead healthy and fulfilling lives as adults (and as kids).
Learn more at http://billallin.com