The New $20 Bill
Imagine if you woke up one morning and found that all money was now this color.
In this story, normal green dollar bills were accepted as money yesterday, while purple dollar bills were worthless colored pieces of paper. But today, purple dollar bills are accepted as money, and green dollar bills are just worthless pieces of paper. This sounds absurd. Yet it is not so far from what happened in a dozen different countries on January 1, 2002. If you had awakened in Italy on that day and gone down the street to a neighborhood café, you would have noticed that the simple act of buying coffee had changed from the day before. Your local café still looked as it did on December 31, 2001. But where you had previously paid with notes and coins called Italian lira, you would now pay with a completely new currency called the euro. The same was true in France, Finland, Germany, Greece, and seven other European countries. On that day, 12 countries all officially gave up their own currencies and instead adopted a common currency—the euro. Admittedly, the transition was not quite as stark as in our story: there was a period of about 2 months in which euros and the old local currencies both circulated. But the essence is the same. At one time, euro notes were just colored pieces of paper that shopkeepers would not accept for transactions. Then, not that long afterward, those colored pieces of paper became valuable, while the old currencies turned into worthless pieces of paper. This was an amazing event for the international economy. Familiar currencies like the French franc, the German deutschmark, the Greek drachma, and the Spanish peseta simply disappeared. The following figure shows some of these vanished currencies. Some of the world’s largest economies changed their currency.
