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RE: The Economist 1988's Front Cover Foretelling a World Currency in 2018 - Is This True?

in #bitcoin7 years ago (edited)

OK, so just found this from Highbeam Research. Here is the link https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-6359751.html

The site is an archive of publications and says this in its About us section "HighBeam Research is operated by Cengage Learning, a leading provider of innovative teaching, learning, and research solutions for the professional, library, and academic audiences worldwide." There is a link to the full archived editorial for subscribers.

Get ready for the phoenix. (government and businessmen are growing tired of floating exchange rates) (editorial)

THIRTY years from now, Americans, Japanese, Europeans, and people in many other rich countries and some relatively poor ones will probably be paying for their shopping with the same currency. Prices will be quoted not in dollars, yen or D-marks but in, let's say, the phoenix. The phoenix will be favoured by companies and shoppers because it will be more convenient than today's national currencies, which by then will seem a quaint cause of much disruption to economic life in the late twentieth century.

At the beginning of 1988 this appears an outlandish prediction. Proposals for eventual monetary union proliferated five and ten years ago, but they hardly envisaged the setbacks of 1987. The governments of the big economies tried to move an inch or two towards a more managed system of exchange rates-a logical preliminary, it might seem, to radical monetary reform. For lack of co-operation in their underlying economic policies they bungled it horribly, and provoked the rise in interest rates that brought on the stockmarket crash of October. These events have chastened exchange-rate reformers. The market crash taught them that the pretence of policy cooperation can be worse than nothing, and that until real co, operation is feasible (ie, until governments surrender some economic sovereignty) further attempts to peg currencies will flounder. …

The Economist (US)
January 9, 1988 |