You may have heard Michael Jackson's and Lionel Richie's "We are the world" before. All about how we're all connected. Well it's not only our human souls that find connection, but it's our economies too. The country of Britain found that out in a most brutal way on September 16, 1992, when their currency, the pound, lost ten percent of its value. This was due to a system called the ERM or the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which was supposed to manage large discrepancies of European countries' currency. This worked for a while but, like with inflation, values of each currency fluctuate.
I find it very interesting not to mention metaphorically resonant that the world's economies come down to one important thing: value. What we hold value in, we try to capture for ourselves. We try to understand subjects that are of some worth to us. We try to hold onto things that are most precious. Both life and money have these astonishing fluctuations of value. To one person, something may not be as valuable as it is to another. Such with countries and their economies. With this idea of value found both in this chapter and the one before, I am opened up to seeing money as more than just cold hard paper and coins. Money represents something. It represents what we put value in. And this value, whether it is worth more to me than to you, dictates what I do with it. In fact, it dictates what entire nations do with it.
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