Our currency is shrinking because there's more money
Notice how as you get older, the currency seems to get smaller and coins more tiddly? A sign of impending middle age and excessive nostalgia? Or is something else going on?
First, £1 notes were replaced with coins. Then a slimmed down version of the once chunky 50 pence piece was issued. 10 pence coins shrunk to the size of a 5 pence coin, while the 5 pence coin is about the same size a 1p piece. Now it seems that the experts at the Treasury who control our currency want to do something similar again.
Why? US$1 bills and Swiss coins still look pretty much the same to me as I remember them years ago. For almost six hundred years, apparently Byzantines had the same unchanged unit of currency (pictured above).
Perhaps our currency in Britain is getting physically smaller because its value is being steadily eroded? Almost regardless of which political party holds office, successive governments have issued more and more money. Since 1971, the year I was born, the only thing restraining UK governments from issuing as much money as they wish have been various forms of self-restraint.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, since then successive governments have found it convenient to simply print off more money. While that might suit the state, and anyone with debts denominated in Sterling, anyone with assets held in Sterling has lost out.
Looking back over three decades of de-industrialisation, where we have shifted from being a nation of savers and producers, to one of debtors and consumers, have we really managed our currency so wisely?