Made of Money: We’re in the Black

March is over; yesterday we closed out our month-long series looking at the future of money and nationhood—at least officially, that is. We move on to new topics at the beginning of each month in an effort to open up big conversations, full of voices from near and far. Just because the month is over, though, doesn’t mean that the conversations are as well.

We aren’t finance experts, even now, but innovation in the money sector is ripe and we’ve learned a lot from our writers and followers alike. One reader, Eve Badía, who’s native to Puerto Rico, wrote to us early on to ask: Why do we still need banks in the traditional sense? She wanted us to explore the future of personal banking. We did. In response to a piece we published about who will issue money in the future, Steven Cleghorn posted on Twitter: “Fiat money and the digital currency boom. Will it liberate or become a total mess? China wades in.” The governor of the People’s Bank of China has pledged to completely phase out paper money over the next 10 years.

If by chance the Ides of March had you down and you’re just now waking up to the onset of spring (and this conversation), settle in for a long read. We’re now ready to tell you everything we know about the world’s money.

What We’re in For

Our introduction essay asked how money and nationhood will intersect in the decades to come, prompting the assertion that “one pretty good indicator of the place we call home is the money we spend.” That might not be true, especially as more and more countries have adopted U.S. currency over their local banknotes—and money as a unique identifier will get even more muddied as everything goes digital.

Goodbye, dollar bills

It’s coming, so roll up for the cashless panopticon. Ian Steadman reviewed the world’s greatest cryptocurrency heist in an effort to show the perils of banking that’s entirely online—an exchange of information bytes that is wholly trackable. Sure, cash supports a lot of the illicit, underground economies around the globe, but lest we forget its anonymity is liberating for us all.

Hello, digital currency

Dave Birch says money will indeed go digital, but that doesn’t mean it’ll all look the same. There’s no single, global currency in store. We will, however, have more types of digital money than we do nations. Who will invent the money of tomorrow? It could be central banks, commercial banks, private companies like IBM, local communities, or cryptographers.

Goodbye, banks?

If you’re interested in disrupting that digital money—a familiar phrase in the financial tech sector—it’s not possible, says Brett Scott. Not at least until we acknowledge that our ideas about the past and future of money are totally wrong. Once we do that, there are plenty of ways to change our interaction with money, but it won’t be by abolishing the banks so integral to how we move money.

Hello, mobile money

On the contrary, others are convinced (to a degree) that banks will become artifacts of the past. With the penetration of mobile phones in developing countries, they think for unbanked populations, the future of banking is pocket-size. Fanny Potkin sent us a dispatch from the streets of Mynamar, where just five percent of the country has a bank account but nearly everyone has a cellphone. Mobile money accounts debuted in the country last year, and implementation has been confusing for a citizenry that still trusts cash and jewelry above numbers on a small screen.

Money Today

After his son ran the numbers for a budget and built his own custom computer, Steven Johnson found himself asking: Why aren’t we teaching math for the real world? It seems that a kind of revamped home economics in our schools might help our kids become more financially literate and serve them far better than, say, memorizing the area of a cone.

Finance 101

Understanding the basics of finance is even tough for educated adults. If we’ve learned anything this month, it’s that the subject of money is flat out complex. You’ll never guess how long it took us to simplify these basic economic concepts into infoGIFs explaining where money comes from and what it’s worth—and we won’t tell you. (Shout out to our hipper than hip art director, Darren Garrett, who helmed the project.)

GDP is the worst

As far as we’ve evolved economically, we still don’t really know the best way to measure the financial success of countries around the world. The primary indicator, Gross Domestic Product, was invented way back in the 17th century, so it’s outdated to say the least. In fact, Duncan Geere thinks GDP sucks. He mapped six other indices that show how nations compare when we consider things like life expectancy, education, environmental sustainability, and income per capita.

Diane Coyle agrees that we need to radically rethink GDP. If it shows that our global economies are slowing, she believes we’re just measuring the wrong things as well.

More money = more happiness

As a followup to his piece about different ways to index financial progress, Duncan Geere turned that idea on its head to investigate what we can learn about happiness from economics. New research reveals that our happiness as it relates to money doesn’t actually cap out at $75,000 a year like we once thought. It just increases in slower proportion as we earn anything over that. Other things that make us happy? Being childless, and perceived social mobility.

Not without hiccups

Cash, at least when it’s made of paper, is filthy, not very durable, and easy to counterfeit. Countries like Australia moved over to polymer notes nearly 30 years ago. In developing countries, it’s all about mobile pay. Whatever direction we head, every new way to pay has its problems — and money’s design matters more than you think, writes Ian Steadman.

Plastic cash

Boston-based writer Kendra Pierre-Louis struck out to write a story about counterfeiting and the securest money there is: plastic cash, or polymer banknotes (as referenced above). What she found instead is that there’s a global war against dirty money and the U.S. won’t join — all because it makes too much money printing and selling paper notes to other countries.

Virtual smuggling

There’s counterfeiting, and then there’s an entire underground banking system that moves loads of foreign currency into the world’s most authoritarian state. Foreign correspondent Oliver Hotham covers this stuff regularly, so he knows all about how to smuggle money into North Korea with little more than a cellphone.

Yesteryears +

It’s not possible to know where money’s going unless we know where it came from. If you still have questions after all this, take another look at the best money stories that we didn’t write on our Made of Money reading list.

Failed states

In 1978, Warren Zevon sang that when you’re down on your luck, send for lawyers, guns, and money. It’s a good plan, unless things are so bad there’s not even a working currency. Over the closing decades of the 20th century, the USSR, Iraq, Bosnia, and South Sudan all rebooted their money after total collapse. Julian Sayarer got ahold of the world’s leading expert on setting up currency in failed states and found that much of the process involves taxation, neutral banknote design, and a plan for changing out the old for the new.

One nutty physicist

He hadn’t really planned to write a story about this, but when Ian Steadman began researching money fraud he stumbled upon a real historical gem: Isaac Newton was the world’s original counterfeiter cop. When he wasn’t writing about the law of universal gravitation, the famous physicist was on the hunt to capture his era’s most notorious currency faker. He got him, and the crime was punishable by death.

An old debt

The United States accounts for half of the world’s $19.6 trillion debt. It’s been borrowing money on record since 1790. Indeed, U.S. debt is massive—and other countries are desperate to keep it that way. It turns out that lending money by buying U.S. Treasury bonds is a really stable investment for oil barons in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and those with money in Caribbean banking centers. Confused? Read Dummies author and finance professor Annie Logue’s debt primer.

That money is funny

Finally, Richard Baguley dug up five of the world’s most unusual forms of currency. Yep, gargantuan, immovable stones; salt; and iron rods were viable money in the past.