Money, It’s A Gas

“Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.”– Pink Floyd, “Money”, Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

I really don’t mean for this blog to be one, long obsessive rant about the Fed Reserve. Really. But, I was excited to no end today to visit the Mu$eum of American Finance, in its new location at 48 Wall Street. I’ve been downtown for the past two days for job-related training, and have been staring at the NYSE building wistfully, wondering about the machinations the titans of global finance were scheming within. I drew up the courage to ask the guard at the front gate about the visiting gallery to the exchange. “It’s been closed since 9/11; go to the finance museum.”

So, I spent a good hour drinking in the museum’s exhibit on money. The history of money in this country, according to orthodox economists, doesn’t begin with labor, value, or the commodity. No sir. Money began with currency, and the exhibit smartly traces the history in a chronology that wraps around the three walls of the room. The story of money is so intertwined with the story of the state; I would so much love to diagram a timeline of both, charting hyperinflation with the American revolution, the Civil War with counterfeit currency, the silver movement with populism, and of course the Great Depression with the welfare state.

Two random, funny facts I learned:
1. Abraham Lincoln created the Secret Service as an arm of the U.S. Treasury to restore confidence in state currency and fight counterfeiters. The day he enacted the Service – April 14, 1865 – is also the day he was assassinated.

The state in the body of the sovereign is murdered when the state asserts its monopoly on money.

2. L. Frank Baum, was an activist of the free silver movement, which wanted the state currency tied to silver, not gold. Miners and farmers favored silver, because it would allow them to pay off their debts. Gold was beloved of east coast financiers, probably because their pockets or vaults were stuffed with it.

Baum wrote the “Wizard of Oz” as a commentary on the 1890s U.S. economy:

• Dorothy represented the U.S.; the little girl from aw shucks Kansas.
• The ruby slippers were originally silver.
• The yellow brick road? Gold and the delusions it encourages.
• Oz = based on the ounce of gold.

Here’s more on this.

I remember reading an analysis Salman Rushdie did of the “Wizard of Oz”. I don’t remember him doing such a materialist interpretation.

Okay, enough with my obsession about finance. I promise to next write posts about my other infatuations of late: Second Life and Samuel Beckett. Forthcoming.