In Shuggie Bain, the award-winning and harrowing portrayal of alcoholism, sectarianism and inequality by Douglas Stuart in post-industrial Scotland, income is often scarce and always filthy. Shuggie’s mother, Agnes, abandoned by her second husband and unable to keep a job, depends on her twice-a-week child benefit to feeding her children. She and Shuggie are routinely relegated to desperate means to combat hunger:
- Extracting coins from power and television meters.
- Pawning their few precious possessions.
- Eventually trading their bodies for violent sexual favours, though the latter almost always wins.
Stuart beautifully captures the suffering with a Glasgow of greasy coins and dirty banknotes. One of Agnes’ lovers unintentionally shows her with cash from his wallet during one of the many unfortunate copulations in the back of a taxi. At one point, Shuggie’s father reappears briefly, giving his son two 20-pence pieces by way of a donation from his taxi’s change dispenser, grudgingly adding four 50-pence elements when the boy seems nonplused. The “rag-and-bone man who goes from house to house buying old clothes and garbage, pays “with a roll of grubby pound notes,” tied by an old Band-Aid. (“Don’t ask for Mair!”) The photo is highly shocking because banknotes have only seldom existed in the story. In this world, the only credit is from rent-to-own catalogues, the lender of the Provident gateway, and a few hard-pressed shopkeepers.
I grew up in middle-class, sober Glasgow for the most part, but I also recall the tyranny of the damned coins: the horror of getting too little for a bus ticket or the wrong kind for a phone box. All this is as much a part of ancient lore to my children as a pirate chest of doubloons once was to me. Coins, soon to be replaced by banknotes, are quickly disappearing from their lives. Almost all transfers are now electronic in certain parts of the world, not only China but also Sweden. After 2017, debit card transactions in the U.S. have surpassed cash transactions. Cash is giving way to cards even in Latin America and parts of Africa, and a rising number of people handle their money from their phones.
The dollar is the world’s favourite currency, dominant not only in the reserves of the central bank but in foreign transactions. It is fiat money, and the production is determined by the U.S. banks and the Federal Reserve. We can quantify its worth about the buying of commodities by customers, the degree to which it has barely depreciated this year (inflation runs at 1.2%) or about other fiat currencies. On the above point, it is down 4 per cent since Jan. 1, according to Bloomberg’s dollar spot index. Gold, by comparison, in dollar terms, is up 15 per cent. Yet the price of a bitcoin in the currency has jumped 139 per cent year-to-date.
The Bitcoin boom this year has taken many smart individuals by surprise. The high last week was only below the top of the previous rally in December 2017 ($19,892, according to the Coinbase exchange). Economist Nouriel Roubini of New York University did not hold back after Bitcoin was eventually sold off. In February 2018, Bitcoin, he told CNBC, has been the “biggest bubble in human history.” His price will now “crash to zero.” Eight months later, in Congressional testimony, Roubini returned to the fray, condemning Bitcoin as the “mother of all scams.” He referred to it in tweets as “Shitcoin.”
Quick forward to November 2020, and he’s pushed Roubini to change his tune. Bitcoin, he acknowledged in a Yahoo Finance interview, was maybe a partial value store, because… it can not be debased so quickly because there is at least an algorithm that decides how much bitcoin supply increases over time.” Suppose I were as fond of hyperbole as he is because St. Paul, I would call this the most extensive conversion.
Roubini is not the only one pressured this year to reassess Bitcoin. Paul Tudor Jones, Stan Druckenmiller and Bill Miller are among the big-name investors who have turned bullish. The other day, even Ray Dalio acknowledged he “might be missing something about Bitcoin.
“Financial journalists also capitulate: Izabella Kaminska, a long-time cryptocurrency skeptic, admitted on Tuesday that Bitcoin had a valid use-case as a hedge against a dystopian future “in which the planet falls to authoritarianism and democratic liberties can not be taken for granted.
