A Traveler’s Take on the New Color of Money

By Rolf Potts

This week, the U.S. treasury issued its first-ever multicolored American currency: a $20 bill with pastel green, blue and peach-colored background hues. The move is meant to confound counterfeiters, but -- given the worldwide popularity of U.S. dollars -- I can't help but think it will also confound travelers trying to spend the new notes outside of America.

As a veteran Asia traveler, my distrust of legal tender goes back to a day in 1999, when an elderly vendor in Phnom Penh's Russian Market refused to accept a worn $10 bill I'd brought directly from the United States. "Too old," she'd told me. When I asked the woman to show me an example of acceptable currency, she held up a discolored (yet crisp) $20 bill that had obviously been forged locally. In Cambodia, it seemed, the true value of American money was not pegged to its authenticity, but to whether or not it was wrinkled.

In this way, travel has a way of testing one's faith when it comes to the workings of money. At home, one can pass bills without thinking too much about it, but the arbitrariness of modern currency is all-too-frequently apparent when one is abroad. This may well go back to the fact that portable currency (a system created in part by the demands of travel itself) has never been foolproof. In areas where a standardized money system has yet to catch on, for example, the act of shopping can prove ambiguous. In the 19th century guidebook The Art of Travel, Francis Galton suggested bringing beads and shells to use as "small change" when traveling in remote regions. Galton warned against knickknack-inflation, however -- noting that one African chief had complained that his women were already "grunting like pigs" under the burden of beads given to them by previous travelers.

Other times, the absence of standardized currency has worked in travelers' favor. Pioneering voyages to the South Pacific abound with tales of an improvised iron-based economy, wherein a sailor could acquire a short-term Tahitian wife through the gift of "an old razor, a pair of scissors, or a very large nail." In 1767, Captain Samuel Wallis of the Dolphis had to forbid his men from trading nails for anything save wood or water, "to preserve the ship from being pulled to pieces" by libidinous sailors. Of course, iron isn't the only item that has served as de facto travel currency. Wandering Norsemen once brokered deals in butter, the nomads of the Sahara traded in salt, and (in a scenario that's fun to imagine) ancient Aztecs paid off their debts in chocolate. Tobacco was legal tender along the roads of colonial Virginia -- a fact that sounds strange only until you consider that cigarettes were used as money in many parts of Europe after World War II.

In fact, paper money -- which carries a purely hypothetical value -- has only recently caught on as a world currency. The Chinese may have valued paper notes against silk to mixed success 1000 years ago, but a similar effort in 13th century Persia was ruined by counterfeiters. William the Bad tried to introduce leather money in 14th century Sicily -- though (given the king's unfortunate name) it's easy to conclude that this royal experiment didn't go over so well. To this day, the uncertainty of paper money has been known to break a regime: In late 2001, forged paper notes reportedly helped destabilize the Taliban government (one naturally wonders what graven image the Afghan Islamists had printed on their money -- a rock? a grenade? an unplugged TV set?).

Fortunately, the introduction of colored U.S. dollars doesn't threaten to destabilize any economies, and most people worldwide will still accept them as a dependable token of value. In this way, the paper dollar appears to have established itself as the largest system of common faith in the world. Even the metaphysical workings of the dollar's "managed system" of value (wherein American banks and the Federal Reserve determine, Old Testament-style, that a dollar Is What It Is) would seem to infer that the polychrome greenback will have a kind of quasi-religious staying power.

Still, as a traveler, I'll carry those colored American banknotes with a lurking sense of skepticism, if nothing else because I'm bound to trade them in for colored Asian ones. In doing so, I'm often reminded that paper money is still just paper -- as was recently the case in Yangon, when I pondered the logic of trading a dozen small-denomination Myanmar kyat notes for a ten-pack of toilet tissues.

For the record, I went ahead and swapped twelve banknotes for ten tissues. But only because the latter were more absorbent.

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