• In June 2013, $3.2 trillion was the sum of U.S. dollars in circulation, with some $500 billion in circulation outside of the United States. One of the preferred methods people around the world use to hold on to their wealth is by hording U.S. $100 bills.
• John Maynard Keynes spent at least five years scouring ancient texts searching for the origin of money.
• The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi said in 1754 B.C. that a man was not allowed to sell his wife to settle a debt.
• The slang term “greenbacks” came from the color of ink on paper money used by the Union during the Civil War and “bucks” originated from U.S. Colonial history when deer skins were used as barter currency.
• The term “millionaire” was first used in 1719 after the merger of Banque Royale (the French national bank) and the Mississippi Co., a company selling shares in the Louisiana land-development scheme. You can probably see what’s coming: The bank/ investment company went bust after the price per share jumped from 150 livres to 10,000 livres in two years and investors realized they were not buying into the Garden of Eden, but basically a hot and humid swamp.
• The reason paper money is sometimes called “filthy lucre”: Researchers found 3,000 types of bacteria on dollar bills – microbes that cause acne, pneumonia and staph infections. Dollar bills obtained from a Manhattan bank had on them 1.2 billion DNA markers with only about 50 percent coming from humans. The rest had on them viruses, fungi and DNA from horses, dogs and possibly even white rhinoceroses. Some bills had remnants of anthrax. British researchers found 6 percent of the notes they examined had the fecal bacteria E. coli on them.
Coined: The Rich Life of Money and How Its History Has Shaped Us by Kabir Sehgal. Grand Central Publishing, March 10, 2015. Review copy had 254 pages plus 43 pages of footnotes.
William L. Haacker is an award-winning journalist and editor who has worked for various New Jersey newspapers, including Gannett New Jersey.