mickeyd
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
NPR has many interesting stories on money. I though that this recent piece on how the dollar got started was very interesting.
Those founding fathers thought of everything didn't they?
Those founding fathers thought of everything didn't they?
Why Are There 100 Cents In A Dollar? Ask Thomas Jefferson. : Planet Money : NPRIn April of 1784, Jefferson wrote Notes on the Establishment of a Money Unit, and of a Coinage for the United States. It's essentially this 11-page ramble about currency, rates of exchange, weights of gold and silver coins. It made the U.S. dollar what it is today.
Enlarge Library of Congress Jefferson's 1784 essay "Notes on the Establishment of a Money Unit, and of a Coinage for the United States."
Jefferson's 1784 essay "Notes on the Establishment of a Money Unit, and of a Coinage for the United States."
The U.S. needed a currency that was so simple that any farmer could do his own accounting, Jefferson said. "The bulk of mankind are schoolboys through life," he wrote. "These little perplexities are always great to them."
The U.S. currency shouldn't be divided into eight pieces, like the Spanish dollar. It shouldn't be divided into 90 pennies, as Robert Morris, the central government's superintendent of finance believed. The dollar had to be decimalized — divided based on powers of 10. "Every one knows the facility of Decimal Arithmetic," he wrote.
Jefferson wasn't the inventor of the dollar, and he wasn't the first person to come up with decimalization. But he was extremely influential, and it was his influence that persuaded the new government to do things the way he outlined in this essay