Money, Money, Money

A lot of the news in recent weeks (or months, or years) has been about the Greek financial crisis. Somehow, circumstances have arrived at Greece being in the European Union, and within the €urozone, without having had its finances sorted out. (Some Bahá’í friends of ours moved to Greece in the 1990s. They had the great inconvenience of having to wait nearly 2 years to get a telephone connected because they refused to pay a bribe.) There is a need now for justice for all parties and an acceptable standard of living for ordinary Greeks, but what the financial world sees as important is something quite different – the “success” of the €uro as a currency.

Every day, huge amounts of money are being changed from one currency to another (and of course some people are making a *profit* out of it!) The currency of every country is being constantly valued and revalued by people in the “currency markets”, as people make money out of money.

But isn’t money what we use to buy food with, or clothes, or houses? Why should it be a plaything for companies and financiers? Money was invented to make people’s lives easier, but the financial markets do not treat it like that. In the nineteenth century, Bahá’u’lláh offered the idea of one currency for the whole world. Although this would necessitate certain realignments in financial arrangements, this would surely be both easier and fairer than the present system, in which the currency of poor countries is seen as worthless, while the currencies of rich countries, such as the United States of America, Japan or the United Kingdom, are sought after. The present system leaves poorer countries at a daily disadvantage.

The “€uro” currency could be seen as a step towards a world currency, but money markets prefer to see it as a “risk” or an “experiment”. The only country which has officially proposed a world currency is China, and what it is proposing is a currency for trading purposes. Each currency would be traded against this common world currency, instead of dollars, yen, Swiss francs or gold. The Chinese do not perceive it as something ordinary people could use.

So, back to Greece. Either Greece will stay in the €urozone, or it will drop out of it and go back to drachmas, or there will be some other arrangement – for example the Greeks using both currencies. This will be important to the Greeks, of course, and probably the rest of Europe, but whatever happens, useful experience will have been gained in what does and does not work with a shared currency. Ultimately, it will have helped mankind to develop what it needs: one currency for the whole world.