Dearest reader, it has occurred to me recently that most people, or you personally, don’t really know what money is, or that they/you/we don’t really think about its meaning and the significance or insignificance that comes with it.
I will talk about the U.S. dollar currency because I use this type of currency most often and it seems to have the most importance of any currency in the world, as the rest of the currencies compare to the value of a U.S. dollar. In any case, what I will have to say will apply to all currencies since they are all money.
Most people don’t know what the U.S. dollar is backed by. Heck, most people don’t even know what “backed by” means. To me, “backed by” is a phrase meaning that I can exchange the paper, or coin, currency for something more stable in terms of its value. That is why the U.S. dollar was backed by gold because the value of gold is more stable than the paper, linen, ink and the security features that the dollars were made.
The U.S. dollar is not backed by gold anymore. That was news of the last century. It is backed by something called “faith”. The reason that the dollar is not backed by gold but by faith is because that gold is finite and so limited that if everyone were to exchange their dollars for gold the United States of America would be bankrupt. Since we all know that population growth is exponential and gold doesn’t grow, as to my knowledge, we can just imagine the consequences of using gold as the back up. Thus to solve this problem, the U.S. government essentially said that the dollar will be backed by faith.
Why faith, and what of it? Faith is just how much we believe in the trade system. For example, if I gave you a $20 bill you would be glad because you can use that $20 bill to buy something that is worth about $20 in value. But if I gave you a sheet of paper that said “$20″ you would not be able to trade with it because other people are not going to accept that “$20″ paper that I wrote.
So essentially money is worth nothing and everything at the same time. Actually its worth depends on time. Right now the U.S. dollar is not worth as much as in previous years because the U.S. economy is tanking. But so is almost every other economies of the world. So relative to the past, the dollar is worth less but relative to other countries, I would say, the value has changed little because every few countries are actually doing well economically.
When people on TV, on the radio, in the newspapers report the economy is so bad they are only half right. The result of all this negative news will have a negative mental impact on the viewers, listeners, and readers. The situation will not change unless we think the opposite.
So how do you/me/we are going to fix the economy? Remember my previous post from a week ago about Mr. Bruce Padian? I’ll let you connect the dots and meanwhile I’ll leave you with a story.
A few days ago, as of this writing, I gave a framed photograph of mine that was worth $675 in an upscale local art gallery in 2007 to one of my dear neighbors. My mom was thoroughly upset but I was very content.
The framed photograph has been in my room for the last year and half, collecting dust with the rest of my photographs. But during my solo photography exhibition at the gallery, my neighbor said that particular photograph is his favorite one. This tells me that to him this photograph is worth more than it is to me, because if I valued the photograph I would have hang it up on the living room wall.
If my mom valued more of my photographs, she wouldn’t have taken down my photographs in the living room and replaced them with oil paintings of an unknown artist.
I also believe that my photograph will have a positive impact for him not just materialistically, but also mentally, since he likes it best among all of my photographs.
Not to mention I received a dinner invitation from him and his wife at a nice Japanese restaurant.
I hope this post can do some good and I hope someone can comment on my blog, and especially to this post, with similar stories. So far I’ve receive 4 spam comments that were blocked by WordPress and 0 real comments. Please show me some love, I am a real person.
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