Is Money a Valuable Asset?

Money is something that is brought up a lot in America. It is an important in many people’s personal lives. People use it for everything. They use it for many things such as buying, selling, trading, getting access to things, and many other things. Money is also represented in many ways such as green paper bills, coins, cyptocurrency, and others. Money is used so much by people for everything in their lives and represente in many forms. Money can also change over time as far as worth goes in situations such as inflation, bubbles, and crashes. As a result, many people value money really highly, and they make money a really important asset in their lives. However, is money actually a valuable asset to our lives, or is it just a made up concept that we make seem like it is valuable?

When I read the article “The Island of Stone Money” by Milton Friedman, I saw a lot of interesting things that I haven’t really thought of before reading this. The people on the island of Yap used stones as their currency rather than what we normally call currency, which is of course green papers and coins. This made question a lot of things, such as what even is currency? What we call currency is literally just green papers and coins with tons of symbols and people’s heads on them, and we have the nerve to call them “valuable”. The people on the island also have really good memory and they can just identify which stone is more valuable than the other, which I think is very fascinating. The people also didn’t have to move the stones at all to trade them. All they had to do was to leave markings on the rocks when an offer was made. This is cool because by simply marking on the rocks, it shows that the rock has a worth for a person.

I also listened to the NPR Broadcast “The Invention of Money”  to see what they would say, and they said a lot of interesting things. The broadcast clearly stands by the viewpoint that money is not really a real thing, but rather an idea that was come up by people. For instance, back then, the United States used to use gold as its main source of currency. It was very valuable back then, especially in areas that were really country. However, later on, the United States decided to switch to paper, specifically, the green papers that we have today. Now, we have tons of types of currency to chose from, specifically, green papers and coins as well as online money and cryptocurrency, I think this is really interesting that this is, and has been, happening because it almost seems like that the definition of value is kind of changing as history goes on because we choose to use something else for currency that we see as more valuable than the former. The broadcast also touched up a lot on Brazil and its interesting experience with money and inflation. In 1990, Brazil was having quite an interesting financial crisis. It was experiencing an immense amount of inflation, and as a result, prices started to skyrocket ridiculously high. This, as a result, caused shoppers to try to be careful financially. They tried to shop early so that they could get products at good deals or even reasonable deals. 

I also read “The bubble burtsts on e-currency Bitcoin” because this is the latest kind of currency to really take off and take the world by storm. This is also a currency that people reallt see as super valuable. When this article was released a while ago, there was a huge bubble that had formed for bitcoin, and there tons and tons of crazy prices skyrocketing at bitcoin that week. However, a while after that huge rise, Bitcoin had suffered its first true crash. When huge price swings happen for a company or any product for that matter, that is not a good thing because the actual overall value of the company or the product is completely wishy washy, and its true value remains very unclear. Sometimes, when things like this happen, it can take a few years for the crash to go back to the state it was before the crash. The crash itself took three days to get to its lowest point, which is really fast given the statistics and the type of company we are talking about. The exact amount of money it was in those three days was from 266 dollars to 54 dollars. Money is extremely diverse in many forms, and that makes it easy for value to fluctuate a lot. That is another reason to prove that money isn’t an actual real thing, but rather an idea cause by people. Something so valuable like money or different people’s kind’s of currency shouldn’t have to change value so quickly. If there has to be any changes, it is in my opinion that the changes should be minimal and that I think the value should be fairly consistent. 

From reading and listening to all these articles and broadcasts, I have had a lot of thoughts and revelations. I really don’t think now that money is a real thing, but instead, I definitely think now that money is merely an idea that people made up for themselves in order to make themselves feel more important and valuable. If something has to be so valuable, such as gold, then why is it that It is possible for the value to switch to a different object? Also, the ideas of inflation and crashes are definitely interesting in the sense that they either raise the value of something or decrease the value of something relative to how the market is doing right now. It almost seems like that the people deliberately transferred the value from one thing or another just to either be relevant to today or even to make things a little more portable. 

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References

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/bubble-bursts-e-currency-bitcoin-064913387–finance.html

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