Hi, everybody, this is Charles W. Chuck Bryant here to talk about currency, specifically the September eight, two fourteen Stuff You Should Know episode How Currency Works. I think this one was really cool because it's not just money, all kinds of currency everybody. So that's why this is my pick. I hope you check it out and hope you enjoy it all over again. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry all Right. Yeah, that makes the Stuff you Should Know. Have you ever had one of those? Uh? I don't know why I wanted one, but when I was a kid, I wanted one of those coin things you wanted your hip to make change. I wanted one of those worst than anything, really. Yeah, I don't think like a peanut vendor. I don't know when I said when I was at six Flags what everyone I saw those things? I just thought it was boss. That's really funny. And I don't think I knew that you could buy them for like three bucks or else. I would have a bunch of them. Yeah, because there's not much to them. It's just like the thing's not counting anything when you press it with your thumbs. Releases. But each one, you know, your quarters, they have different sizes, so you know, you can just without even looking, you could go, here's three quarters, buddy. I know what somebody's getting for Christmas this year. I just thought of that out of nowhere. I haven't remember that since I was a kid. I was obsessed with those things for a little while. Well, you know what, you were technically obsessed with a dispenser of currency? How's that ted that one up? Yeah? Yeah, knocked it out of the part. I collected banks too, which is a weird thing for a kid to do. Banks like piggy banks. Yeah, even then, none of them were piggybanks. Well what was your favorite one? Oh man? I still have the collection. My mom's got them. Um. I wonder if they're worth any money, and I doubt it. I mean it was like a Garfield Bank and uh and uh Opus the penguin Eric Davis? Now was it Opus from bloom County? How? Why am I blanking out on that? That was my favorite comic? I don't know that sounds right, man, I'm losing it, buddy, So the penguin from Bloom County, we're going with that. I was obsessed with Bloom County and then Change Counters nice and Biggiebanks cool. That was my childhood. And Dale Murphy not Eric Davis. Now, who's that? Who's for the Reds? Oh? The Reds player? Yeah? He was great though, I love it he as a non Reds fan. I was an Eric Davis fan. I'm with you. Where are you obsessed with? I liked baseball, baseball cards? Did you claim anything? Mad magazines? Yeah? Me too. Those are still I think at my dad's house. They'd better be. You still got him? Uh? What else did I collect? I saved up my Sports Illustrated for years too. Um. And remember the first one I ever got had Muhammad Ali on the cover. That's all I am. Wow. It was during his comeback and when he was like fat and mustachioed. Don't call it a comeback. It was not not much one. That's not how that goes? Uh? How's that first side track? To get us going? I haven't even done the intro. Let's hear it? So the intro is as follows Chuck in two New York Magazine, not the New York Times, not New Yorker, New York Magazine, which is an equally good publication in that time out in New York. Not the Village Voice, all right, just New York Magazine, um which is actually where the movie Saturday Night Fever came from. It came from an article that was later admitted to be completely fabricated by the author. Yeah, in that magazine. Awesome. Anyway, New York Magazine ran a really interesting article in January called um or January called SuDS for Drugs, and it talked about how there's a huge black market for tide laundry detergent, specifically liquid tide in the United States. Yeah, they did not make it anymore. No, they make plenty of it, but tons of it gets stolen. And the reason why is tied is such an agreed upon great laundry detergent that tied and only tied. Like if you try to use gain or um all or anything like that, you would get turned away. But if you have a jug of tied liquid laundry detergent, you can buy drugs in the United States with it. It is agreed upon as a currency. I had no idea even though you can just buy it in the store. Yeah, let's see. That's the part I don't get, because if you're a crackhead and you steal a carton of them, then all of a sudden, you didn't have to pay for this tide and you can use it to buy drugs. Interesting, why don't use any of that stuff? And I don't mean to pick on just crackheads. If you're a junkie, same thing. Sure, if you have a gambling habit, Yeah, we've man, we got we got a lot of crap from a cup. The people by using about using the word junkie, Yeah, it's pretty derogatory if you think about it. I guess, well, but it's a word with a definition which means something, and that's what it means. I mean, it's not like we were just like slagging people. Yeah, no, I get what they're saying, though. You're saying like it's just such a dismissive term of anyone who's addicted. It really kind of flies in the face of the disease model of addiction. Yeah. Yeah, so I had to talk to the people who call us out on man, I get it. But the point is tied is now a currency as like remember our prison episode we talked about how honey buns are currency. Yeah, same thing, right, cigarettes, yeah, currency, deer skins, Yeah, those were currency once. That's where we get the word bucks from. I think what you're getting at. Oh, I can't wait to get to that stuff later. Okay, etymology, I love that stuff. Um. I think what you're trying to say is that or what you are saying is that currency is nothing more or than a medium of exchange and a substitute for something a good or a service. Yeah, it is an agreed upon that's the key. Yeah, it's got to be agreed upon. Yeah, you can't be like I'll give you five Lincoln logs for a car. Well that's what you do when you're a kid, right, And you go, I don't think I want Linkol logs, and everybody goes, oh you do. Right. But if the other person says those Lincoln I don't want Lincoln logs, then what you have are Lincol logs, not a currency, because it has to be mutually agreed upon, like you say, like dollar bills. Yeah. I have gone off on this on our show about the amazing fact that this paper we have all agreed as is worth something, and that as the only reason it's worth something that people dedicate their lives to pursuing paper is as as ephemeral as a cloud. Almost. Yeah, not the greatest analogy you I've made, but it's still kind of works, all right. So let's let's talk olden days and currency as a substitute for things. Um, what currency did was solved the problem. It allowed you to give change and make change. Yeah, that's a that's a big one. Because back in the day, if you had a bushel of corn and you wanted a chicken, you would go to your neighbor. Well, you had to find somebody they had a chicken that wanted corn. So that's the first problem. That's a problem. But what if you do find someone, You're like, great, my neighbor's got a chicken and I've got this corn. He wants this corn. He wants the corn, but he says, you know what, this chicken is worth a lot more than that corn. Somebody's getting a bad deal until you can make change. Yeah, because what if corn you could that's not the best example because you could take out some of the corn. Let's say you can't chop a chicken. Yeah, Well, you got a cow, your neighbor has a chicken, and it's not an even trade. But you just need one chicken and your neighbor just needs one cow. You can't make change like that. You can't make change. So that's one of the first roles that currency its fulfilled, was a way to make change, to make trade more equal. Yeah, and before that, I think there were a lot of bad deals going down out of desperation. You know, like if your family really needed that chicken for a reason, you might end up taking a bad deal just because you need that chicken. You give your cow away for that chicken. Yeah, and then your family would berate you. It's right, where's the milk, honey? Yeah, this is like the magic beans incident all over again. Can't milk a chicken, honey? You get berated by your wife. Another reason that currency uh became popular is because it allowed you for the first time to really a mass wealth. Because you can harvest all the corn you want, but that corn is gonna go bad unless you can find a way to trade it in. A barn full of rotten corn does no one any good. It doesn't make you any richer like in in practice, practically speaking, you would be an extraordinarily wealthy person if you had tons of corn. In theory, but like you said, it's gonna go bad, so you could lose all all your wealth would literally rot away. That's not the case with say a gold coin. Gold coins aren't gonna go bad and deteriorate. So there that stand in for those enormous stocks of corn because you had all that corn and then you traded it for gold coins. So what you did was you took your wealth of corn and stored it into something of equal value, in this case gold coins. Yeah, and that had a huge impact on civilization because the most powerful people were not just the ones who held the political and military influence. All of a sudden, if you could accumulate wealth, then you could buy that junk. Yeah. It gave rise to the merchant class. And it democratized is that the word. It democratized the world. It did because before it was like you were born into a wealthy, noble family, and that's gain power. And if you weren't t yes, that meant that you work the land for this wealthy family. But if you can sell something and get money in exchange for it instead of a cow for a chicken. Yeah, you say that junk up and you buy someone to go kill that landowner and then that's your land. Right. Democracy, democracy work. Uh. They are generally considered to be four categories of UM currency. You have commodity currency, coins, paper money, and electronic currency these days, and in the commodity system, it is a placeholder, like we said, um for purchasing power, but it is also has value as a thing because corn is valuable. Um, it's not just a piece of paper, where in the case of the Aztecs or little Coco, beans were valuable and so they use those as money. But um. One of the roblems with that is if the person you're trading with doesn't find that valuable, then it's worthless. Yeah. Usually within a society, everyone will find that commodity currency valuable, Like the Aztecs with cocao. They love the stuff. They made chocolate out of it. It was the elixir of the gods, kind of stuff. Drank it right, Yeah. Mina Zuma drank like twenty or forty cups of it to day until he died from drinking too much chocolate. Um. But the canky sitters who came didn't value cocow beans at all, So rather than trade, they just took everything yeah and dumped the cacao beans because it was worthless to them. Yeah, but that is a good example of a commodity based currency, like even if even if everything else falls apart, that cocw beans still has value and that you can make chocolate out of it. In the society, chocolate is valued ergo they value the cacao beans, so you can use it as currency. Plus in this case, cacaw beans um are easy to carry, so they're portable, and they're plentiful and small, so you can make change with them. Yeah, but not everything was the cacao bean. In commodity currency, a lot of stuff is perishable more perishable um, a lot of like cattle is super bulky. You can't carry on a bunch of cows, goats, goats um. But nevertheless, that is a form of commodity currency. Has just had its downside, Like the goat has has value in and of itself. Yeah, cute cute milk, meat and cute hair and cute and very cute. I'm gonna get one of those pigmy goats one of these days. It's gonna happen. You're gonna come over to my house and then little goat is gonna bounce in the room. Clip clop, you're gonna go. What the have you ever seen be the Lamb? I showed you that, right, dude, of that's probably my top five if you don't know, Be the Lamb where into YouTube? Now? Oh was it a lamb? I think so. I thought it was a pigmy goat. I think it's a lamb. Jerry says, Lamb. Alright, I win. Alright, here's some cacao beans. Nice. Okay, we're back. Let's see if we can get the mojo back again. All right, the mojo is still flowing because our message break in reality, was only two seconds long. That's our dirty secret. Coins is our next form of currency. And they were first minute a minute in Lydia, which is modern Turkey, and they're king uh Crosis or crotus. So you know what, I'm gonna make these little small metal ingots. I'm gonna amblem with our emblem and it's six ford BC and this is called coins and it's worth something. And the Greek said this is great, and the Romans said this is great. And they're we're gonna make ours out of silver and gold. So it's actually worth something. Although when you think about it, that's just you know, worth something because someone says it's worth something. Gold, sure, all of it. Yeah, I read this Forbes article that basically said all currency is a fiat currency. Fiat currency means that it has valued by fiat, like um, the fiat of the king, a decree um, and it says the government or the king says this has value. It's it's n gold, it's valuable, so go trade it as such by fiat. Right. Yeah, if you think about the only things that really have real value or like food and water pretty much, you know, like you can make the case that a commodity based currency like cocao beans isn't necessarily a fiat currency because it does have inherent value that anybody can use. But gold old is, Yeah, it's not really that valuable. It's not really that useful, especially in like a pre industrial society. I wonder if gold first became valuable because it was shiny and and it literally yes, they could make pretty things with it, honestly, yes, interesting, I think that's exactly why. Because it's so malleable, you can't make tools out of it. Yeah, even today it's not that useful. I mean, they use it in some solid state electronics and things, but it's not it's more valuable simply because it's gold. Yeah, so even if it's backed with gold, it's technically still a fiat currency. I've never heard that term f I A T. So what does the fiat car all about? Does that mean it's just special because they say it is? All right? Um in China, I thought the Chinese made the first coins, but Ums says no. Yeah. Grabster says that it happened about the same time it did in the West fifth century BC. They started out oddly with tools like knives, shapes as currency with little holes drilled in them so they could keep it on a string, and they just shrank over the earth until it was about the size of a coin, right, I thought was odd, But they kept the hole in there. So even until like the mid nineteenth century, the Chinese coins still we're just these little round coins with a hole in the middle so you could string them on a string. Yeah, that's because they didn't have the little coin dispenser on the hip. They would have thought of that, which is surprising because the Chinese invented practically everything except the coin dispenser, the hip mounted coin dispenser. Did they even still make those? Sure they do. I'll bet all right, I'm gonna buy one. Um. If not, Archie McPhee probably makes it in an ironic version. So who's that they make? Um, you've seen all their stuff. They make like funny like they were the original, probably like bacon air freshener, car freshener. They make stuff like that. They make his head, gotcha. They outfit Um, they all their stuffs in urban outfitters, probably in the chakey section. Yes, all right, I hate them. Then. Uh So, one of the big impacts of coins was now the government actually controlled the money supply and could manipulate it and say what it's worth. And Roman emperors were dumb and said, you know what, We're just gonna reduce your amount of precious metal in some of these because that makes us richer. But that devalued things such that it ended up being one of the factors in their downfall. Yeah, they didn't quite understand now it worked, and it took thousands of years for anybody to figure out really how it worked. But basically if you still know how it works kind of, you know, I think we have a better grasp than the early Roman emperors. Yeah, that's because they would say, hey, man, I've got a ton of gold, and my predecessors would make ten thousand gold coins out of a ton, but I, being as clever as I am, I'm going to make twenty thousand gold coins out of this ton and double my money. But rather than double the money, it devalued the currency and led to the decline of the Roman Empire. That's right, like you said, But that's how Yeah, and after that, um, it took a while for coins to come back in fashion, all the way to the Renaissance because in the Dark Ages, because of a lot of that uh stuff, people didn't trust coins right, and for good reason, because there was a someone behind it who could decree the percentage of gold in that coin. The thing is is um and we'll get to this later. The powers that be can decree value, but ultimately it's up to the general public, the people who are trading in these things, to determine really how valuable they are. There's something called perception of value that has to do with just how valuable a currency is or not we'll talk about in a minute, but that's what happened in Rome. Uh. Next up, we have paper money or is they call it folding money here in the South, and um they paper money was first developed by the Chinese as well, and they used um, like you said, a buckskin, sometimes bark, parchment and it was a bill of payment. And leather was also used in Europe around eleven undred, which didn't really catch on then. No, I think leather money be kind of cool though. Leather money, sure, if you know, if you hate animals, what better way to kill more of them? I wonder how much a cow would have been worth then, yeah, because you while they were using the skin for other stuff anyway, good point though. Uh. In Sweden in six sixty one they issued paper money, but they didn't quite understand it either and flooded the market with it, which made it almost worthless as well. Out, Um, I get the the I get the desire though, like, oh, everyone says this stuff is worth something, let's just print a ton of it exactly. Yeah. Um, So it didn't catch on after the Swedish experiment of the seventeenth century, but it didn't take too much longer. It was the eighteenth century when paper money finally did catch on, and it was based on the practice of goldsmiths at the time, where if you gave them some gold, they give you basically an IOU say they were making something out of the gold, or they were hanging onto the gold for you. You had what what it amounts to a promissory note saying you bring this I O U back to me and I'll give you this amount of gold and return. It was basically the first what what's called gold backed paper currency. And once banks figured out just how that could work in theory and in practice, anybody could start issuing currency. Yeah, and um, money was backed by gold. Even right here in the US all the way up until nineteen UM every dollar had and not theory, every dollar had gold somewhere, not just dollars. Pretty much any paper currency in the world at the time was backed by gold, silver, some sort of precious metal that we all agreed was valuable because it's shiny. Yeah, but there was a stock somewhere in the world that you could trade your paper money for that value in gold. Yeah, you could go somewhere to the gold trader. E let's say here I want all this money in gold. Did you know that's what the the Wizard of Oz is about. It's an allegory for the gold standard. Oh man, it's depending on who you ask, it's about ten different things. It's an allegory, a populist allegory for the gold standards. I just posted an article about like ten different theories on what the Wizard of Odds means on our Facebook page. Mine is right and yours is right, and then everyone else is wrong. Thank you. That's all I ever want to hear from you, I know. Um. So, now we're on to E money, which is uh. It seems like something super new, but it actually came about after World War Two when UM banks started recording their information of the day onto magnetic reels and taking it to the Federal Reserve Bank, and all of a sudden they said, you know, we don't need these silly ten dollar bills because we can just record this all electronically. And all it took then was a wire connection and trust for people to trust that this really is money, even though I'm not seeing any money right right then. That is the real distinction of it, because with an electronic transfer, originally you're transferring information about money, like I will I have a hundred thousand dollars over here I officially give to you, and so that that electronic transfer becomes a promissory note in and of itself. Um. And they figured out that they can do this after they realized that money in and of its self isn't valuable, so we can just do this whole thing electronically. And like you said, they did have hundred thousand dollar notes and apparently there's some in circulation still, there's a couple hundred of them in circulation. They had five hundred, one thousand, ten thousand, and hundred thousand dollar bills. There's a really neat mental floss article that you can read called a hundred thousand dollar Bill, The Story behind large denomination currency, and it talks all about that. But it was prior to the magnetic tapes that were passed from bank to bank or that recorded this information. And this is how banks would settle up transfers through ten thousand, hundred thousand dollar bills. Yea. And the hundred thousand UM has Woodrow Wilson on it and they only made those for about three weeks. But um, that was never like in the public. That was just between banks, Like, no, it was never in circulation. That's still there's still around from what I understand though, Yeah, that was um in nineteen I'm sorry. In two thousand nine, there were less than four hundred five dollar bills, thousand dollar bills, five thousand dollar bills, and ten thousand dollar bills um, all between like three and four hundred still in circulation, which I thought was pretty interesting. And they're usually worth frame now, you know, but there were way more than their face value. Um. This mental plus article points out that if you have a pristine ten thousand dollar bill, yeah, it's worth at least ten times that. Wow. And so they all had different presidents throughout the years. It wasn't like a single version of it. Uh, there was a bunch of different versions of all those except for the hundred thousand. Yeah, it was always Wilson, right, Yeah, because they just printed it for three weeks? Would would he? Um? I wonder why he get that honor? Yeah? I don't know, because he was money. He didn't even know it. So uh, with electronic money, another few things really helps submit that as a as a viable thing. One was the first credit card and Steen fifty Diners Club said, you know what, rich businessman, here's a piece of plastic, so you can impress your friends by not even carrying cash and pay for whatever you want with this thing, and then we'll charge you some interest and then you'll pay us back. Yeah. And we got even further from the commodity by saying, now you're not even using cash. Yeah, we're using electronic promisory notes by charging this that's the promissory note. And then they realize, hey, this shouldn't be just for rich dudes, because we can financially cripple everybody exactly. This interesting is really neat. So everyone should have a credit card, and today there's over two hundred million visas, which started in n h Then the Social Security Administration started doing e deposits all the way back in and people kind of got used to the idea that all right, I see it's in my bank account now, so I trust it. Yeah, which is a big step forward. Yeah, it took a little a while catch on. But then now it's, like the grabster points out, people started paying bills, transferring money between accounts, and sending money electronically without ever even touching it. Yeah, which is true, Like I hadn't thought about that, But there's plenty of money that that I earned and spend. That's just like it's never physical ever, that's all my money. Yeah, I almost never have or use cash. Like I get paid electronically. It goes to a bank in number, and then I have a American Express that I pay for things with, and then I pay for that electronically. And I'm just trusting that this is. As long as the lights are on, I guess everything's working out right exactly basic and basically it's like the future, like what everybody talks about in the future, We're not gonna have money, We're gonna have credits. Well, the future is here. Apparently eight percent of the world's currency is in hard like currency. This all sounds so dangerous when you start talking about it like that, Like all it takes is one big crash of electronic crash, and what if they were Like all that money that you thought you had it is not here now we don't know what happened to it. It's entirely possible. Remember they have the fd I s though, Yeah, that's United States at least. Remember the early days of internet purchases. How distrustful. We all were, Yeah, I'm not putting my credit card, I'm not typing that thing in and it never occurred to that. We hand it to like a waiter or you know, whoever that can do anything with it. And then it finally just became less important just because so many people were doing it, that the chances of your credit card being stolen, um, we're lower. Coupled with the fact that it became evident that credit card companies were willing to just like wipe clean that's accrude, like that illegally, Yeah, made people a lot a lot more trusting of it. I guess. Yeah. I had a lady in front of me this grocery store the day that wrote a check and I was just like, oh, were just like I know, I felt like a jerk because I had a wait longer minute, but I did want to say, like, you know, there's a better way of doing that now checks And I can't remember the last check I wrote. It's been years and years and years since I've written a check for me. It's usually like like a government thing like a tag or something, tag tax or something. Yeah, I do all that with my card too. Uh. And then of course, if you want to talk about the bleeding edge of electronic money, um e g. Bitcoin and that kind of thing, should go listen to our bitcoin episode, which we're told was pretty good. Yeah. I think even the guys from pot on Pod reviewed our show and they listened to the midpoint episode and said we did a good job of explaining it. Yeah. So, Chuck, we're talking about the gold standard and how that's what the Wizard of Oz is about. And um, prior to that, with the gold standard, it was I mean, inflation happened. The price of gold fluctuated, so therefore the price of anything pegged to it, like the dollar, would fluctuate too. With when we abandoned the gold standard officially in nine one, but prior to that, I think in the thirties is when it really started. Um, we really took a huge leap of faith because there's nothing backing it anymore, Like there's a huge it's a myth that you can take your dollar bill and turn it in for gold. They will, some guys in white coats will come and lock you up in a padded room for a little while. They said, you can come and buy this gold ring with your cash. Pretty much you can buy gold bullion with it, but you cannot, Yeah, exactly, and we're going to charge you some fees for that too. Um. So once we abandoned the gold standard, it was a big leap of faith because um, as Milton Freedman put it, quote, the pieces of green paper have value because everybody thinks they have value. And as long as we all think together and believe together, they will stay valuable. But there are certain times, there's certain occasions and events when we all believe that things become a little less valuable, that currency is a little less valuable than at other times. So this perception of value can have an impact on the value of currency. And the Grabster gives a pretty good example. It's when we deflate or devalue currency relative to other currencies, which will do sometimes because we want to attract that currency's native investors over here in the US. So like if right now you can buy five francs to the dollar, euros five euros to the dollar, um, and we say, what, we want to encourage more investment in Europe, So we're gonna let the dollar devalue um, and we're gonna make it so it's equal to three euros and then we'll stabilize it. Well, that will encourage more people in Europe to invest in the United States because the Euro now has more buying power relative to the dollar. But everyone in the in the United States because wtf, we got all these dollars and now it's worth less because you just told us that you're going to make it worth less relative to the euro. Nothing really happened to the dollar that everybody agreed literally overnight that the dollar is less valuable now because it was devalued. That's one way that that currency can fluctuate these days. Yeah, I wish I had a better understanding of when people say what the dollar is worth. Sometimes it just makes my head spin. I have one for you. You're gonna love this, man. Let's hear it. The Big Mac Index. It's it's exactly what you just said. If you want an understanding of it. There is a guy in six who wrote in The Economist basically the Big Mac Index, and and it says we cover this in uh one of them. We may have done it in their stuff super stuff gut to the economy. Then that was eight years ago, though it was, But what so we'll go over it again. The big Mac index says the price of an end of a big mac relative to the price of a big mac in another country. Right, So it's basically saying you can, and it's tongue in cheek, but it actually does kind of work. You can you can show the buying power, the purchasing power of one UM currency relative to another based on how much a big mac costs in each country. And once you once you see it and and look at it like that, you go to the economists and type in the big Mac index and it'll bring this up. And it's an interactive scale UM which makes it awesome, and you understand relative purchasing power. Well, I should spend some time that side, thank you. It will make me hungry. So then the other way that things can devalue is with supply, and that is just basically supplying demand. Like when there's a lot more money available, it by nature becomes less valuable. Yeah, demand is high prices go up. Demand supplies high prices go down, right, So that's inflation and deflation that goes up, it goes down. Okay, I guess we should answer this. Are you watching the Simpsons every episode marathon? I've tuned in something here and there. But what I've really enjoyed is the influx of articles about like the best seasons, the best episodes. It's really like a trip down memory lane. I do not have f x X and so therefore I'm bereft. Yeah, but you've seen them all anyway. Yeah, it would be so nice to see him again like this, you know. Yeah, I mean they're running the NonStop. Like you wake up at three am, it's on. I know, I don't think I wake up at three am and realize that I'm missing a Simpsons right then, Well you caught Bed Goes Up, Bed Goes Down on. That's because I love the Simpson exactly. So. Uh. We talked about inflation and deflation, but um, if you want to know more about that, you should check out how much Money is there in the world, are super Stuff, Guide to the Economy, stag Inflation. Those are all some good episodes we've done on that kind of thing. Yeah. Um, and we mentioned earlier, you know, I talked about I can see how you might be incentivised to just print loads of money if you want more of it. Um, and we've covered and other shows why that's a bad idea. But never has it been more evident than in post World War One Germany. Um, they had I mean, this is amazing stuff. I think Zimbabwe beat them eventually, didn't they. I couldn't remember. It'swere hungry. Well, no, I think it was Zimbabwe. UM, I don't know. Maybe it was hungry, remember hungry. He had a revolution in the forties. That was just staggering numbers of hyperinflation. Yeah, but this is a pretty good example of hyperinflation. Well, after World War One, Germany um owed and war reparations about thirty three billion dollars in like, they didn't have that kind of money, so they said, well, let's just print a bunch of it. Uh, and see what happened. Um. It's not gonna be backed by any kind of commodity. Um. And it resulted in hyper inflation to the extent where in nineteen twenty three it was called, uh, the hyper inflation of the Weimer Republic from June one to January. It's because they funded the war through borrowing. Only they didn't like raise taxes to pay for the war. They literally borrowed money to pay for World War One, and it resulted in eventually forty two billion billion with a b German marks was equal to one penny of US money, and I didn't think that could be right, but it's right, yeah, um. And it was so bad that they there was something called a mental condition called zero stroke that it caused, which is when you're compelled to write endless rows of zeros because when you see some of these numbers, it just you're like, is that even a number? When you're trying to do these calculations, and it it. There was an influx of zero stroke in Germany at the time, and so I was wondered, like, how did Germany ever recover? They basically started over again and said this isn't money anymore. We're gonna start over and we're gonna have a new bank issues something called uh Deutsche marks no the um rent rent a mark, and this is our new money. Not all that money is no good to start, but this is actually back. There was a bank, the Deutschen Rent, a bank mortgaged land and industrial goods to the tune of about three point two billion dollars like hard assets that we're backing this money. And it worked and it turned around almost overnight to the point where a U. S Dollar was worth four point to rent a marks but a four point two billion, and I guess everyone just got on boards, all right. That old money is no good wallpaper your walls with it, and now we have new money, you know. UM. A lot of historians credit that really difficult period that Germany was put through, um or put itself through, depending on who you ask, after World War One is the reason why fascism was allowed to take hold there. I believe it in the lead up to World War two because I mean when I say it's stabilized, its stabilized the money overnight, but it still wasn't like they were still in bad shape. You know, it took a while to dig dig out of that. Did you see that thing I sent you on um um Cowry shells, Oh yeah, it's a little bit. Cowrie shells are sea snail shells. They're little, tiny white shells that look porcelain and literally for about two thousand years UM they were used as currency throughout the world, and they came almost exclusively from the Maldives, UM. And they would like, if you were a trader, you would go down to the Maldives, you would buy about a million uh cowarie shells for one gold dinar. Then you go back to India or go to India and you would sell ten thousand of them for a gold dinar, so you could just make a ton of money overnight. And then the further and further away they got from the Maldives, and the closer and closer to China they got, which is a country that used these things like crazy, as they were worth more and more. Yeah, and the Maldives, it's just like you just scoop up baskets full of them, and they were not nearly as valuable, but as you got away from the Maldives, they grew more and more valuable, and they were used as currency literally until the mid nineteenth century. I mean they started and we have the earliest reference in about three fifty b C. And in the eighteen fifties is when the the currency finally collapsed, just because there were so many of them on the market that people would, you know, they would pay using five in cowery shells and you'd have to count out five hundred thousand cowery shells. And didnt they use them because they were like pretty and they were hardy and like didn't break really easy. And yeah, plentiful small so you can make change with them. Yeah, and people like them, so therefore they became currency. But they lasted his currency for like two thousand years. Again, all you have to do is agree that's something, although that's a weird thing, because that's something you can just go out and find if you're in the right part of the world, if you're in the right exactly, that's why they were less valuable in the Maltives, more valuable like in China. So you want to talk etymology, Yeah, you said, what was the first one? He said, the buck comes from from buckskin and the sawbuck. I don't know where the sawbuck is a tenner, right, I believe so the word fee comes from the German word for cattle v v i e h. Interesting right, yeah. Speaking of shells, you know, I believe Pacific Northwest tribes used whop them, whamp them yea, which were white shells um and the phrase shell out comes from that, like when you pay somebody in shells, you were shelling out. I wonder if that's where clams comes from. Probably, what's your funny word for money? Beans, bones, rock, samoleons, samoleians. I tried to look up Simoleon, because I think everyone knows that's the cartoon, right currency, But I couldn't find anything. It kept defaulting and saying, do you mean Somali money? I was like, no, I mean Samoleon. I think it's um. I even put cartoons, and I couldn't find much of anything except like I couldn't find an origin, like who made that up? Let's say Napoleon since it rhymes maybe Chuck Jones. It's possible. I could ask our friend Jessica. She might know. You saw Charles Schultz's granddaughter emailed us. Huh, No, I didn't see that. Yes, And now Chuck Jones's granddaughter and Charles Schultz's granddaughter are both stuff you should know fans, which is uh pretty awesome waiting for a returne emails like you gotta give me some inside story here, please about Grandpa? Right exactly? Um? Do you want to know the atomology of Semolean? Do you have it? Yeah? Man? How did my Google uh skills not pan out? I am proud of you, Chuck yeah for not saying yeah, uh so Semolean is spelled s I M O L e O N. It's an English word, all right. That's where I got sidetracked. They think that it is a late nineteenth century blend of simone, which is apparently a French word for dollar and Napoleon. Really yeah, and why was it exclusive to cartoons? I don't know, but they think it came from New Orleans in the late nineteenth century. So simone um was either dollar or sixpence coin. It was a British slang and Napoleon, so I guess that's where Semolean came from. Would you get that? What's the website words sense dot eu? All right? I believe that dot eu that says at all. They have a clean look to their website, which makes me believe that they know what they're talking about. Yeah, when you look at a website, you can get a lot of information about its accuracy, just if it looks like a MySpace page from um, I hope my space is around in nineteen because the penance will right in. Yeah, it wasn't my space then my Space came about and the word dollar itself. UM account in Czechoslovakia and a town called well, it doesn't matter where it was. He started minting silver coins in fifteen nineteen and they were called uh Taller Grossian, which was shortened to Taller's and Taller eventually became dollar in the United States today. And we talked in the Salt episode about how the word salary came from assault. So I looked again because I think he said that that wasn't true, that that's a myth, and it's not necessarily true. That it's a myth from what I can tell, it's just unproven. So in the first century, Pliny the Elder, the Roman historian, says a good beer too, that that's what the words salt came from. Was they used to pay soldiers in antiquity in salt. But he doesn't back it up and they can't verify it. That's a good story. Yeah, at the very least is about a two thousand year old story. So let's go with you. It's true. Yeah. I had the history teacher in college, my best history teacher ever, that said, never let facts get in the way of a good story. I've heard that he was a good guy. I can't remember his name. He might have had him. He was man. He was great. One of my first big inspirational teachers in college. That is, I got you so much so that I don't remember his name. That one guy. Uh. If you want to learn more about currency, you should listen to any number of our episodes on currency, including this one again. Or you can type currency into the search part how stuff works dot Com. It will bring up this article. And since I said search parts, time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this rare shout out. We don't do this a lot um, but I'm gonna do it today because I like the cut of this dude's jib. My name is Jared Bagnal exclamation point. I'm writing to see if you could do a tribute to my wife, a Bree Bagnal your listener mail. I'm a huge fan of you guys, but my wife is most definitely your number one fan. You can safely say that a few hundred of your listeners could be attributed to her alone. She has dozens of people hooked on s Y s K and from them a dozen each. She's so excited every Tuesday and Thursday that your podcast comes out. She tells everyone about them. She's the nicest person in the world, caring, sweet, shy, and deserve some recognition for being so awesome. Our one year anniversary is coming up. Got married in Jamaica, and though it was an amazing experience, she's obamed that we couldn't go with our family. UM, I would like to see. I would like to see if you could dedicate your listener portion to her into our anniversary so everyone can know that she's great. That's pretty nice, Chuck, Thanks Josh, Chuck and Jerry. Um did I spell that right? No? You did not? How do you spell it? J e r r Y. Let's just get it on the record if we haven't before, j E R I, that's right. Um. For the five percent of people who listen to listener mail, hey guys, this would be a great surprise for her while running into your podcast to hear this tribute. So Jared number two fan writing on behalf of Bree number one fan, Happy anniversary. Way to go, way to make it to the one year mark. I wish you many many more years of happiness to come. We both do. Yes, I'm speaking for Josh, although thanks man. Do you wish them? Of course I do? Okay, you're like, I'm glad for them? Yeah. Uh. If you want to take your chances to see if Chuck will give you or your loved on a shout out on the episode you know the podcast That's what I meant good luck uh exactly. You can try tweeting it to us at s y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com and as always, join us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios. How stuff Works for more podcasts for my heart Radio because at the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.