Harry Truman once submitted an RFP for an ‘economist with only one hand’, a not so subtle elbow directed at the dismal profession’s kidney that counsels like an inflamed appendix. Case in contemporary point, the eco-pundits attempt to rationalize our current gout of unprecedented fluctuations in the currency markets. But rather than attempt to stop the printing presses in the heat of an unprecedented moment, I’d much rather consider the torch that is being co-signed by a new generation of bearers; born in the JFK century, but destined to live their vestige of majority in the present. And that unsecured debt of ingratitude poses to consider the question:

what would happen if there was only one global currency?

Personally, I am convinced that many people would counter that this unilateral display of pecuniary is already in print. Since Bretton Woods the US dollar has been notarized as the international reserve currency of last retort. But the in Nixon we Trust greenbuck, that first separated quantified church from qualified state, has today reached the summit whereby the residual shareholders are stuck holding unsolicited, yet fully secured, divorce papers; indeed it’s the kids who always seem to suffer the most.

Which brings us back the pundits of Camelot and their cliometric recount as to just what is - or ought to be - the modern day recipe for equalizing monetary room temperature. Backed by their acquired confidence that all politicians will beggar their constituents’ neighbors into Chapter 11, these industrious S&D folk lords are quick to cite gold breaking through the $400 US barrier as proof positive that the good old days of specie discipline are coming back with a vengeance. Notwithstanding the frictionless entropy that comes from swapping intellectual shares of Fahrenheit for ethereal debentures of Celsius, exchanging American apples for European oranges really does effect and affect global warming.

To my way of thinking, any rhetoric to Ricardo’s attic or footnote to Gresham’s cellar in terms of gold in the 21st century, is bit like attempting to reverse engineer a red herring. Because what the history of money unequivocally supports is that the actual unit of transaction is converging into a singular, yet less and less tangible form, while the actual base or basis of that unit's Trust can, and will, never be put back into an alchemist’s bottle of AU. This is not meant to suggest that some more tangible form of real world discipline is remiss, rather it is meant to suggest that Newton’s third law will inevitably have to find another economic pendulum to cradle.

But perhaps what this current hyper-cycle of specie speculation is really exposing is a whole new wardrobe of emperor’s clothes:

- On the one side of the closet is the so-called anti-globalization activist, those people who are fighting for equal (one-to-one) Human Rights, while concurrently extrapolating that all nations - no matter their population, must also be created equal.

- On the other side of the closet is the so-called contemporary economist, those people who quote their universal cake exclusively in US dollars knowing full well that a worker in Zhengzhou (and that worker’s landlord) couldn’t tell a Benjamin from a Jackson.

My imperial point is, however, couched in a metric of utter humility. That is, if the world did in fact evolve to usury one - and only one, global currency, the class of workers most likely to be forever outsourced would be money traders. Moreover, the incentive for global multi-nationals to whimsically move jobs around the world chasing the cheapest worker would be severely curtailed, if not eliminated.


Accordingly, and as a matter of job security, these captains of industry are more than happy to let the anti-globalization activists continue with their global-Crusade, for in the absence of such egalitarian noise the landlord's premium on the pecunary would all but disappear. Thus perhaps a quote from some unnamed, two-handed money trader to all the anti-globalization activists is in order:

“Not In My Front Yard”
(translation: ‘Me thinks thou doth protest not enough.’).

Then again, perhaps this story-line is not really such a new world order; fashion, now there's a species of specie.