Fiat lucre – and behold, there was lolly! The cryptic conspiracy of currency

“I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love,” proclaimed the Beatles, showing that they intuitively knew more about the myth of monetary value than many a professional bean counter.

While money mightn’t be able to woo Cupid, the love of money remains an abiding universal compulsion, made all the more intriguing in that what we call currency can buy us anything at all, and represents a prize that passeth understanding. And the mystery of money has got even more mysterious with the launching of the digital rupee.

The dismal science of economics has, momentarily, become a little less lugubrious thanks to a lively discourse as to whether the sarkari digital rupee is in any way related to the non-sarkari – some might say anti-sarkari – forms of lucre known as crypto currencies, like the Bitcoin, the Litecoin, and the Ethereum. The digital rupee, and other government-backed e-currencies, as well as crypto currencies, obviate the need for physical pelf by way of banknotes and specie, and are meant to make commercial transactions easier and faster, in an evolutionary process which will eventually lead to the monetary utopia of a cashless world.

Government currencies, or fiat currencies (Fiat lucre – and behold, there was lolly!) might be likened to PSUs or Public Sector Undertakings, while crypto currencies could be compared with PSOs, or Private Sector Overtakings, which seek to bypass all regulatory mechanisms except those of the free market.

But both instruments of exchange are based on a confidence trick, in which we are all complicit, that is crypto, or secret, to the point which make the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece, or the kabbalistic codification of the esoteric Hebrew system of gematria interpretation, look like a user-friendly, manual for a DIY assembly kit for an Ikea infant cot.

All currency notes are promissory notes, or IOUs. In India banknotes “promise to pay the bearer the sum of xx rupees” followed by the signature of the RBI governor. The note in itself is not xx rupees; it is only a guarantee that this sum will be paid to its possessor.

But what is the sum, or the worth, of xx rupees, regardless whether the x stands for 10, or 20, or 50, or 100, or 500, or 2,000?
By what criteria is this sum arrived at, and what does it stand for by way of tangible goods or commodities?

When paper currency began to supplement coins in Britain some 300 years ago, each promissory note was backed by the country’s gold reserve. But when countries went off the gold standard, the US officially doing so in the mid-1960s, the actual worth of money became a commonly accepted myth, or fable, like a child’s belief in the existence of Santa Claus, or the Tooth Fairy. Money is worth only the paper it’s printed on. Or, rather, worth the confidence we have, by conspiratorial consent, in the paper that bears its denomination.

Just how misplaced such confidence can be has been shown by the bouts of hyperinflation nations have suffered, as post-World War I Germany did when a wheelbarrow of bank notes was required to buy a loaf of bread, and which Argentina is undergoing right now.
With the entrance of crypto currencies and digital currencies, money has morphed into a flicker on a computer screen, a firefly dance in the reaches of cyberspace.

Perhaps it’s to cloak the open secret that money has only the illusory value we ascribe to it that we surround it with so many slang synonyms, like a thieves’ cant of code words.

In British argot ‘sponduliks’, and ‘rhino’ are both aliases for money, the first possibly derived from the Greek ‘spondilikas’, a form of seashell once used as currency, and the second from the horn of the rhinoceros, valued for its purported aphrodisiacal properties. However, the jury is still out as to why the British pound should be called a ‘quid’. Does it come from ‘li-quid assets’ as some have hazarded, or does it derive from the Latin ‘quid pro quo’, which means ‘something for something’. And how did ‘lolly’ come to mean money? From lollipops?

Americanisms like ‘bread’ and ‘dough’ are of obvious provenance, money now being being seen as the staff of life, but the etymology of a single dollar being a ‘simoleon’ is unknown.

Bollywood has popularised the use of ‘peti’ to denote a lakh of rupees, a khokha for a crore, and a ‘tijori’ for 100 crores, useful terms when conducting cache-and-carry property deals, or brokering hush-hush political horse-trading.

All of which is another way of saying that money ain’t what it’s said to be.

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