ARTWORK: Milly Yates
Pegging a Petrodollar By Lachlan Holt Joke 1 A young boy walks into his father’s office. “Can I have some money to buy a bitcoin?” His father looks up from his newspaper. “How much?” “$10.” “$45? Do I look like I have $204? Where am I going to get $13?” The joke is that Bitcoin’s prices fluctuate a lot… I’ll wait for the raucous guffawing to die down. But as funny as that side-splitter was, to people that must deal with exchange rates for a living, this is serious business. Let’s say you sold onesies for cats that have their owner’s face on them… you know… to really hammer home the loneliness… and you tried to sell these yourself, pricing them in each country’s native currency. Joke 2 A young boy walks into his father’s office. “Can I have some money?” His father looks up from his newspaper. “How much?” “$67 Arubian Florins.” “$113 New Israeli Shekels? Do I look like I have $38 Costa Rican Colons? Where am I going to get $4 Polish Zloty?” A good joke is worth repeating. So, if you’re trading one product all around the world, it’s prohibitively difficult to figure out how much to charge. It’d be a lot easier if you just used one currency. Thankfully, almost everyone trades in US dollars.
Joke 3 A young boy walks into his father’s office. “Can I have some money?” His father looks up from his newspaper. “How much?” “$10.” “$10.02? Do I look like I have $9.99? Where am I going to get $10.01?” The joke’s still a hit. “But wait,” some of the more pedantic of you readers cry, “there is still some change each time.” Right you are. There would still be a difference in exchange rates between your currency and the US dollar.
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