CHENNAI: Every now and then, I like to dip my hands in buckets of water that are quite shallow but fresh and clean at the same time. For example, the hypothetical that I’m expounding on in this column is a topic that any human with a basic understanding of how global economy and human behavior works could explain and debunk. But what fascinates me, however, withstanding the temptation to dismiss this is, given that human behavior plays an important role in contributing to the failure of this model, we believe that we can predict behavior and generalise human beings to a magnitude that stretches across the entire planet.
I am going to indulge in some expository writing because I haven’t read or written enough to understand the nuances of economics. So, what is a super currency? For starters, it’s a compound word that I just coined with the possibility of it easily existing on the Internet already. What is the super currency? For all those thinking why I’m going in circles, well, it’s not exactly a circle because there is a change in the usage of the article in the question. A super currency is the real world equivalent of the Lord of the Rings – One Currency to rule them all. When going through the tedious process of exchanging currencies, my neural networks resorted to the obvious first thought, why not have a single currency all around the world?
Simple economics will tell you that a currency is a direct reflection of a country’s sovereignty. This would be the same as treating the entire world as one single country, another obvious thought I tackled a few months ago. The world is not a weighing scale with equal weights on both sides; it has a hundred kilograms on one side and 2.5 milligrams on the other. It wouldn’t be fair to the 100-kilogram weight if we have the same standard for the 2.5-milligram weight as well. If the super currency does exist, then when one country has economic problems and needs an economy boost, the super currency cannot be lowered to aid the boost because there are other countries with flourishing economies that will be gravely affected if done so.
Whenever there is a hypothetical that will never see the light of its day, I seek to indulge and fall prey to clichés like discussing pros and cons. Now that the cons are out of their way, time for some pros. Obvious ones for these obvious thoughts: You won’t have to go through that tiring ordeal of using Google to convert some foreign currency that you managed to save from your last holiday. If you are a small business or any sort of business, you can write contracts and trade seamlessly without having to worry about exchange rates and fluctuations.
Those are just perks. The actual hypothetical itself is a bad idea. What happened with Greece’s economy a few years ago, and what’s happening now with Britain pulling out of the European Union, pretty much stemmed from imposing a single currency on a spectrum of countries.
(When he isn’t writing, the creative producer with The Rascalas watches a lot of ‘cat videos’ on YouTube)