The Globe(al)

Queen Ann Replogle globe from the Globe Store

    Remember those globes, spinning orbs that were suspended on a hook or a forked base and dotted with an ever-growing mosaic of countries and terrains.  Before the days of computer graphics such world globes were a steady feature in libraries and classrooms (and sometimes even in a home), a visual aid meant to impart the distances between cities and countries or the location of them.  And then suddenly...they were gone.  Now and then you'll spot one, perhaps as a nightlight for a child's room or as a piece of period furniture meshed into a corner with some dust-gathering books; and occasionally it will begin to draw you over as if tempting that tactile memory, daring you to touch it and spin it and pretend that you are actually interested in whatever part of the world shows up when it stops.  And then you move on, just as the world itself has moved on taking with it a piece of that "globe" memory by itself going global.

    None of this would have likely come up except that for some reason I was due some $17 in change from one of those automated checkout machines at the local grocery and once again, it came out with two $1 bills followed by three $5 bills.  Why not a $10 bill instead of the fives?  It's not that big a deal, to be sure, but this seemed to occur far more often than not so where the heck were the $10 bills?  And then the mystery was solved, although not for the reason I suspected...for some reason the $10 bill is one of the least-printed bills by the U.S. Treasury, at least as compared with the much more popular $20 bill (nearly 5x as many are in circulation) and the $1 and $100 bill, both with nearly 6x the number in circulation).  All of this emerged from a rather creative "infographic" book titled The Global Economy As You've Never Seen It.  So why that particular book?  Perhaps in a trend started by our current President (who allegedly does virtually zero reading but relies instead on Power Point displays and graphics), it has become easier to grasp the burgeoning world of vast numbers by seeing them visually...say, a tall tree next to a small one vs. a bunch of zeroes lined up with an even larger bunch of zeroes to explain the economy.  So big deal, you say, some countries are bigger and some are smaller, ad nauseum.  But this book captures far more than even I expected.  A few tidbits: the world's largest container ship can carry as much cargo as 1100 Boeing 747-8Fs; the use of cocaine in Europe is now almost as high as it is in the U.S.* (and still gaining in popularity); slavery still exists for nearly 25 million people although it's been given the milder name of "compulsory labor" (what proved surprising was that prostitution represented less than 20% of that "forced" work); and the most-produced crop in the world is not wheat or rice or corn, but sugarcane (nearly double that of corn, and nearly 7x the production of soybeans).  So as interesting and perhaps as trivial as much of that may seem, I then turned to the true title section of the book, that of graphically explaining the global economy.

   So with advanced apologies to those of you much better versed in economics and world financial matters, sorting the G-8 (now the G-7) from the G-20, and the Fed from the IMF, and the World Bank from the WTO, well it all seemed as jumbled as the painted countries on a spinning globe.  Big meetings with big leaders who made big decisions which shook big markets...what was that all about?  So here, re-interpreted from the book's graphics, comes my limited attempt to explain a bit of the mess.  The G-7 represents the leaders of a group of large industrialized nations plus a smattering of emerging economies (the EU has its own seat here so make that G-7 + 12 others + the EU) while the G-20 is basically the underlings of those countries, the heads of state and a few banking chairpeople (which is where the U.S. Fed --the independent Federal Reserve-- comes into the picture).  The IMF (International Monetary Fund, not the Tom Cruise character) is considered the world lender of money but one of "last resort," and is in charge of keeping the exchange rate stable (189 nations and 2600 staff members) while its sister organization, the WBG or World Bank has the more altruistic goal of "combating poverty" by giving loans with lower interest (same number of nations but with 4x the staffing and about 2/3 less money to use); both were created by the United Nations in 1944.  Add to these two the FSB or Financial Stability Board which has even more members (the G-20 and a few more countries and organizations) and has the same goals as the other two but imposes no binding contracts (agreements are made by consensus); its money mainly comes from BIS (Bank of International Settlements) which was created to succeed the FSB by the G-20.  The World Bank and the IMF are members of the FSB, as is the OECD.  Oh, did I forget about the OECD?  It's the Organization for Economic Operations and Development, meant to promote democracy and "collaborative solutions" to market economies; this group has 34 nations as members (and again, the additional EU vote) and the same amount of staff as the IMF but with about 1/3 more money to dole out.  Left out of the FSB is the WTO or World Trade Organization which seeks to create trade rules; this has almost as many member nations as the IMF and World Bank (with 161 + the EU) but with only about 1/10 the money of the IMF.  The OECD, IMF and the World Bank are all member negotiators in the WTO.  Phew, that explains a lot, doesn't it?...or not.

   The writer John McPhee has a new book out with his collection of rather old unpublished book pieces, a random assortment of people, places and things he jumbled together as if creating a broken quilt and appropriately titled, The Patch.  One of his pieces gave a rare insight into the vaults of the Fed, the world's largest storeroom of gold holdings all put there for safekeeping by countries around the world.  In the old days, when gold was gold, the gold deep under the Fed was literally moved about in support of the currencies of nations.  Suppose Denmark owed a large sum of money to France.  A coded cable would arrive from Copenhagen and another from Paris, with matching instructions from each country.  Then, down in the gold bins, professional stackers --men with forefingers the size of bananas from handling the bars of gold-- would go to Denmark's compartment and take out what was owed to France.  They would wheel it to the French compartment and stack it inside.  That sort of thing went on all the time. (no longer) ...The mouth of the cave, its only entrance, is plugged with a steel cylinder that weighs ninety tons...Visible through the steel mesh and the steel dowels in the doors of the cells were stacks and stacks of sullen, imprisoned gold....The stacks had been put together with both the care and the pattern that masons would employ in the making of a dry wall -- level courses, shimmed (with wood), interlocking.  In one large compartment was well over half as much gold as there is in Fort Knox.  It was in three separate stacks.  Two were about fifteen feet high and included a hundred thousand bars apiece, while the third had been built with fifty thousand bars.  Stackers --sweating, working like the slaves of pharaohs--  could handle a maximum of twelve hundred bars a day, so the construction of these three stacks alone had taken nearly a working year.  Suddenly, the composite foolishness of all this shivered through history and fell on me like a ton of gold.  I thanked everybody and split for sunlight.  Suffering from acute duodenal aurophobia, I staggered into the street.

   As we leave a somewhat confusing year, we look ahead for answers.  What will the markets do?  What will new leaders do?  What will change and what will remain the same?  The climate?  Energy?  Our well being?  For those in declining health or years or money, what lies ahead?  Sometimes we can put euphemistic names to things (the golden years) or draw fancy pictures (the Kells) or display dazzling comparisons as graphs, and it will still be as confusing and labyrinthine as before.  But unlike a gold bar, most of us have every opportunity to grab life, to take it by the horns and go where it is going no matter the destination, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.  And sometimes it can indeed seem to be, as McPhee put it, just foolishness.   Much of life can be as exciting as trying to grab that elusive gold ring on the carousel...but sometimes it is important to just enjoy the ride.  To all of you --whatever happens, wherever life takes you now and whatever you might figure out-- my wish for a Happy-er New Year!


*For some reason I had thought that the cocaine market had withered and had been replaced by the popular opioid selection of prescription drugs, heroin and fentanyl.  Apparently, it is doing quite well and even growing (as is, the opioid market).