Typography

I executed one of the oddest financial transactions of my life earlier this week. I did Norbert's Gambit. These days a big chunk of my income is in U.S. dollars. But since I live in Quebec, my expenses are all in Canadian dollars. To pay my bills, I need to convert this flow of U.S. dollars accumulating in my account to Canadian dollars. Outsiders may not realize how dollarized Canada is. Many of us Canadians maintain U.S. dollar bank accounts or carry around U.S. dollar credit cards. There are special ATMs that dispense greenbacks. Canadian firms will often quote prices in U.S. dollars or keep their accounting books in it. I suppose this is one of the day-to-day quirks of living next to the world's reigning monetary superpower: one must have some degree of fluency with their money. Anyways, the first time I swapped my U.S. dollar income for loonies I did it at my bank. Big mistake. Later, when I reconciled the exchange rate that the bank teller had given me with the actual mar...

SWIFT headquarters in Belgium ( source ) German foreign minister Heiko Maas recently penned an article in which he said that "it’s essential that we strengthen European autonomy by establishing payment channels that are independent of the US, creating a European Monetary Fund and building up an independent Swift system." So what exactly is Maas's quibble with SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication ? SWIFT is a proprietary messaging system that banks can use communicate information about cross border payments. This November, U.S. President Trump has threatened to impose sanctions on SWIFT if it doesn't remove a set of Iranian banks from the SWIFT directory. For Heiko Maas, this is a problem. Iran and Germany remain signatories to the same nuclear deal that Trump reneged on earlier this year. The deal committed Iran to cutting back its uranium enrichment program and allowing foreign inspectors access to nuclear sites, in return obligatin...

A few centuries ago, lack of fungibility used to be a big weakness of monetary systems. But technological and legal developments eventually solved the problem. Nascent systems like bitcoin are finding that they must wrestle all over again with fungibility issues. Fungibility exists when one member of a population of items is perfectly interchangeable with another. So for instance, because your grain of wheat can be swapped out with my grain without causing any sort of change to our relative status, we would say that wheat grains are fungible. Fungibility is a desirable property of a monetary system. If all monetary items are interchangeable, then trade can proceed relatively smoothly. If monetary items are not fungible, then sellers cannot accept the monetary item without pausing for a few moments to verify and assay it, and this imposes frictions on trade.    In this post I argue that there are two ways for something to be fungible. They can be fungible for physical reasons or for leg...