Stone Money Essay

When I started to learn about Stage Money in class, when I first heard about it I thought that it was some kind of fake story. When I got to understand the story of Stage money when we were talking about it and when I started to listen to the podcast for class, it was really interesting to me because it made me realize how similar The Yap and their money system is to the kind of financial system that we current have here in the United States. In the Podcast,The Island Of Stone Money, The reporters found out the question that has been unable to be answered for periods at a time: Money is Fiction. According to The Invention of Money Prolog, The reporters found out the question that has been unable to be answered for periods at a time:“Money is Fiction, “It’s unclear if these stones started as money. But at some point the people on Yap realized what most societies realize. They needed something that everyone agrees you can use to pay for stuff.”

As I was listening to The Island of Stone Money, I learned that a piece of stage money is really valuable because you wouldn’t use it for some everyday purchase. One key thing about this money is that It was really heavy, a big piece could weigh more than a car. The reason that the money is very valuable is because as a result, this very concrete form of money quickly made the jump to being something very abstract. One person gives it to another person. The stone money for some odd reason doesn’t move. It’s just that everybody knows the stone now has a new owner. It keeps getting passed around to every single person that asks for the stone money. According to “Scott Fitzpatrick the Island of Stone Money by Scott Fitzpatrick they talk about how the stone money is very sturdy and is very durable, “”If somebody was in real dire straits, and something happened to their crop of food or they were running low on provisions and they had some stone money, they might trade,” says, an anthropologist at North Carolina State University who is an expert on Yap.

In the How Fake Money Saved Brazil article, it made me a bit confused because I don’t understand how the economist and his buddies tricked the people of Brazil into saving the country from rampant inflation. Brazil’s inflation rate hit 80 percent per month. At that rate, because of inflation,if eggs cost $1 one day they’ll cost $2 a month later. If it keeps up for a year, they’ll cost a lot. This meant stores had to change their prices every day. The guy in the grocery store would walk the aisles putting new price stickers on the food. Shoppers would run ahead of him, so they could buy their food at the previous day’s price. To stop the economist and his buddies they have to put a plan in place but the plans succeeded at only one thing: Convincing every Brazilian the government was helpless to control inflation. According to Bacha in the “How Fake Money Saved Brazil”, They talked about how  the economist and his buddies tricked the people of Brazil into saving the country from rampant inflation. “”He said, ‘Well, I’ve just been named the finance minister. You know I don’t know economics, so please come to meet me in Brasilia tomorrow,’ ” Bacha recalls. “I was terrified. He and three friends had been studying Brazilian inflation since they were graduate students — four guys at the campus bar complaining to each other about how no one else knew how to fix this.  And now they were being told “Fine, do it your way.”

As I was listening to The Invention of Money Prologue, Five reporters stumbled on what seems like a basic question: What is money? These five reporters found the unsettling answer about what money is: Money is fiction. It’s about Stone money on the island of Yap. In the Podcast, Jacob Goldstein talks about a pre-industrial society on the island of Yap that used giant stones as currency. They used the stones all of the time. According to the Invention of Money Prologue, “The crew made it back to the island and told everybody what happened. And everybody decided that the piece of stone money was still good — even though it was on the bottom of the ocean. As a result, this very concrete form of money quickly made the jump to being something very abstract.In other words, that stone money on the bottom of the ocean that you used to own now belongs to the power company.” Some digits in your bank account get shifted around, along with some digits in the power company’s bank account. The four economists wanted to create a new currency that was stable, dependable and trustworthy.  The only catch: This currency would not be real.  No coins, no bills. It was fake.

Now saying all of that, I have now learned all about what stage money is about. It’s unclear if these stones started as money. But at some point the people on Yap realized what most societies realize. They needed something that everyone agrees you can use to pay for stuff. Like many societies, the people of Yap took the thing they had that was pretty their version of gold and decided that was money. It gave me a whole new perspective on what stone was about back in the day. As a result, this very concrete form of money quickly made the jump to being something very abstract. The crew made it back to the island and told everybody what happened. And everybody decided that the piece of stone money was still good even though it was on the bottom of the ocean. hundreds of years ago, explorers from Yap found limestone deposits on an island hundreds of miles away from the Islands that had the Stone money. 

References

The invention of money. This American Life. (2018, February 19). Retrieved February 13, 2022, from

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/423/the-invention-of-money

Goldstein, J., & Kestenbaum, D. (2010, December 10). The island of Stone Money. NPR. Retrieved February 13, 2022, from

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/02/15/131934618/the-island-of-stone-money

Joffe-Walt, C. (2010, October 4). How fake money saved Brazil. NPR. Retrieved February 13, 2022, from https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-fake-money-saved-brazil/%C2%A0