The Precious Metals in my Purse.

I’ve mentioned before how my background as an economist makes me see the world around me through different eyes. The same thing applies to an idea as apparently simple as the value of money.

Living, working and thinking in several currencies means that everything, including pocket change, has no stable value. Every time I open the Financial Times, turn on the TV or access the internet, the value of the contents of my purse fluctuates. Even if I don’t have many euros, dollars, pounds and pesos lying around at any given time, I have to do heavy math just to count them.

We all have our little obsessions in life and I’ll tell you one of mine. I have friends who walk down the street avoiding cracks in the pavement and others who involuntarily keep track of the time it takes to walk from one block to the next. My obsession comes into play when I’m on a business trip and walking down the street with my briefcase in one hand and my purse in the other. With euros in my purse and local currency in my briefcase, I picture them shuffling around as I walk, with their relative values fluctuating with each step, and I wonder which is worth more, my briefcase or my purse. I’m sure there will eventually be a technical solution, perhaps involving an iPhone, some sort of Bluetooth gadget and a permanent connection to oanda.com, to answer that question for me.

During my childhood, I lived in four currencies—the U.S. dollar and three Mexican currencies. When I was a small child and lived in Mexico, we had the peso and only the peso, which was simple enough. Later, well after my arrival in the U.S., economic disaster struck, resulting in the introduction of the nuevo peso. That only lasted a few years before the nuevo peso switched names, back to the peso, although the currency itself wasn’t devalued that time. For a long time there, we didn’t know what we were talking about. Sometimes I’m still not sure I do.

Similarly, when I first visited France, everything was in one currency, the French franc, which had changed to the euro by the time I moved here. Despite the change, a lot of people spoke in francs instead of euros, and some still do—a bad habit facilitated by the fact that, six years after the introduction of the euro in paper and coins and almost a decade after it was introduced for banking purposes, prices are still largely quoted in both.

Worse yet is the slang used in place of the name of the currency. As Americans will say that something costs “five bucks”, the French say something costs “cinq balles.” Balles used to mean francs and now it means euros, but for a long time it could mean either one, only causing confusion.

From childhood, we learn to quantify a lot of the world around us in monetary terms. Growing up in Mexico and then in the U.S., I always knew how much money I needed for a handful of chiclets in the former and a handful of Hubba Bubba in the latter. Mexican economic crises notwithstanding, the basic necessities of childhood were fairly simple, at least one currency at a time.

But now, in a cross-border adult life, things are never that simple. I find plane tickets for a vacation and have to decide whether it’s better to buy in the currency of the country I’m flying from or the currency of the country I’m flying to.

I go on a business trip to Eastern Europe, only to get off the plane and discover that my purse-full of local currency is no longer necessary because they have adopted the euro. I have friends who have changed jobs and moved overseas to make more money, only to discover a year later that the exchange rate has changed so much that, back in their home currency, they’ve accidentally taken a pay cut.

Can’t we all just agree on one common global currency, say, the Mauritanian Ouguiya, Swaziland Lilangeni or Tonga Pa’anga (respectively worth 373.89, 10.19 and 3.04 to the euro), and stick to it? Just in case, I’m going to stock up.