(iii) On Money and League of Nations Currency

In the course of this little tour of Europe I bought 1,000 francs and 4,000 liras, and 1,500 drachmas, 3,000 dinars, and the same number of levas, some lei and 20,000 piastres, 7,000 Hungarian crowns and 32,000 Austrian crowns, 3,000 Czech crowns, 10,000 German marks, 15,000 odd Polish marks, 500 Belgian francs, and some paper money of the principality of Monaco.

You have to be somewhat of an arithmetician to think one week in piastres and the next in dinars, and the next in crowns, and the next in marks. You are always losing but you always think you are winning. You afford pleasure to strangers whenever you go because you can be robbed so easily and safely. In each country you can be robbed coming in and robbed going out and generally robbed in between. You do not mind very much, it is part of the legitimate expense of modern travel.

You accumulate great wads of paper. See the people of Vienna and Warsaw, their inside pockets are all misshapen by the bulge of the money. The pockets of an international traveller are worse. He holds his unnegotiable accumulation of the money which is not worth changing nor yet worth throwing away.

"How much do you expect to get for this?" said a Hungarian banker surveying a bulky packet of Turkish piastres. I mentioned a likely sum.

"Grande erreur!" he exclaimed, and lifted his hands in horror. In Budapest they were marketable only for a tenth of what I gave for them.

So the piastres remained together with provincial French notes and small denominations of dinars and what-not, nominally worth something somewhere, but in fact unsaleable.

The Germans have just now a very popular word for a nouveau-riche, it is a schieber, one who exchanges. Getting your money changed is one of the most wasteful processes for you and one of the most gainful for him.

A certain man had 10 pounds which he exchanged for 450 francs. Then he exchanged the francs for 600 lira; he journeyed by Fiume to Serbia and changed again for 900 dinars. At Belgrade he bought 6,000 Hungarian crowns. He carried the money to Budapest and then to Vienna, where he had some luck and got 15,000 Austrian crowns. However, at Prague the bankers said they did not encourage the sale of Austrian money as they did not know what it was worth. He got 1,000 Czech crowns, which in turn he changed to 10,000 Polish marks. He then changed those for 500 Roumanian lei, returned to Poland again and only received 8,000 marks at the re-exchange. At Berlin they looked very disparagingly at the Polish money and offered him 280 German marks for the lot. He changed this for 11 florins in Amsterdam, for which when he reached Antwerp he received 40 Belgian francs. His 10 pounds lingered tentatively over the abyss of a nothing.

The title of this story should be "Exchange is no robbery."

A golden or at least a paper rule for merchants dealing with foreign firms is "pay them when the exchange is most in your favour." But the foreign firm under these circumstances, having expected to get so much, gets in reality so much less. It is not surprising then that trade is sticky.

We hear much of the efforts of Governments and financiers to regulate
the exchanges, but nothing comes of it. The only obvious cure is a
Utopian one: institute one currency for Europe in the name of the
League of Nations.

Let us have "League of Nations gold currency." But to have that the resources of Europe must be pooled. We are not ready for that.