Numeric data question

[Alex Martelli]

James J. Besemer wrote:
        ...
> E.g., in the stock market, 1/8 "point" is $0.125.  Also you quickly run
> into scale problems with non-US currencies, e.g., 2 billion Lira is too
> harsh an upper limit.  (My last hotel bill in Venice was over L
> 1.000.000).

Not a problem any more since Jan 1.  Unless you travel to Turkey,
obviously, where a million (Turkish) liras will NOT buy you a night
at a hotel, even though it's a cheap (and wonderful) country.

> Basically 12 pennies to the shilling, and 20 shillings to the pound, or
> 240 pennies per pound.  THAT was when money was worth something, when you
> minted coins worth 1/16 of a cent or 1/3840th of your basic monetary
> unit!

A pound was originally a pound (roughly half a kilogram; same for
'lira', coming from 'libra', meaning 'scales' and also 'a pound')
of SILVER -- hardly a "basic monetary unit", more like an accounting
abstraction.  Starting from roughly equal valuations in the 8th/9th
century (wherever Charlemagne reigned, plus places, such as Britain,
where he didn't but his writ still had prestige), currency then
underwent wild gyrations, best narrated imho in the works of Carlo
Cipolla (mostly in English, don't worry -- although Italian, he
taught in the US for most of his career).  Inflation was slow and
sluggish in Britain (mostly because, as Cipolla shows, British
economy was in turn dormant and deeply feudal), up to wild and
furious in the booming Italian merchant-republics (exactly because
their centuries-long mercantile boom demanded far more currency
than the then-limited supplies of species could satisfy).

Then of course the whole system was forever uprooted in the 16th
century as unprecedented amounts of gold and silver flowed into
Europe (outpacing for the first and only time the growth rate of
the real underlying economies).  It IS a tribute to Charlemagne's
lasting influence on Europe that his "pound", "lira" or "livre" 
still remained at least in name (and in some cases in the classic
1:20:12 ratios, at least in Britain) despite all of these
turmoils (French noblemen still accounted their rents in "livres"
to the late 18th century, even if no currency of that name had
been minted for many centuries).

But of course the whole field of numismatics is chock full of
such fascinating fossils -- starting from "money" itself (and
its counterparts "moneta", "monnaie") from the attribute of
Goddess Juno Moneta (Juno the Warning-giver -- the famous
sacred geese were apparently in Juno's temple) in whose temple
the Roman Republic's mint (same root) was established in the
3rd century BC. -- all the way to "dollar" with its strange
connection to Joachimstal (today called Jáchymov)...


Alex