10/3/00

A Fool and His Money

So how much is a grusch worth anyway?

    If it's true that money makes the world go 'round, that's proof enough for me that the world is flat.
    My grasp of the subject -- finance, not globalism -- is no better than my understanding of electronics, cricket, women and space exploration. (Though to my immense credit, I do understand Israeli politics. If only I had known the right people, I could have become finance minister.)
    I admit I'm rather infantile in my economic reasoning: I work for a certain wage, the money goes into the bank, and the bank steals it. This much I understand. My credit card is useful for accumulating "points," but I don't know what "points" are, so I only use the card for accumulating "debt."
    If I am exaggerating, it is only by a little bit.
    I classify insurance in the same category as economics and finance, because it bewilders me just as much. (And in this case, I am not exaggerating.)  When I bought my new car, I called my insurance company, Direct, to get an idea of coverage. The thing cost 94,000, and insurance would run me another 2,906. It would seem logical, by comparison, that insurance should be about 160 shekels for my old '84 Renault -- which was valued at NIS 5,000. But no. Insurance for the oldmobile was 2,891, just 15 shekels less. Does this make sense? I could buy a '00 Toyota Corolla, push it off a cliff, and with the insurance money I could buy 19 old Renaults.

FOREIGN CURRENCY is another subject I have trouble with. Sometimes I travel to another country that does not use shekels as its dollar. I will go to the window marked "Money Changer" and hand over, say, 500 shekels. The exchange rate is clearly indicated, but I can't figure out if I'm going to get 83,000 foreign moneys for my 500, or 8.30. That's why I hate going to England: you hand over a pile of bills, they weigh it and say "one pound" and you get a single bill in return.
    The opposite happened when I went to Romania in 1990. I was there for five days with a few Romanian journalists, on an all-expenses-paid junket. I planned on buying a few souvenirs and gifts, so I whipped out a mighty American 100 and marched toward the Money Changer.
    One of the journalists intercepted me and kindly explained that this was dumb. I could get eight times the going rate on the black market. Great, I said, feeling no patriotic loyalty to the Romanian national economy. But instead of thinking it through and downsizing my exchange -- say, by peeling off a 10 -- I happily handed over the 100.
    He was gone a long time. I began to suspect he had run off with my money, but finally he returned. "Sorry," he said, "it takes a long time to count this stuff."
    Each tattered bill was worth about 2 cents, and that was the biggest bill in circulation at the time. Never mind: pockets bulging, I felt rich, rich, rich!
    Turns out that (1) I couldn't reconvert the lei; (2) there was almost nothing to buy at the time, three weeks after the revolution; (3) whatever there was to buy was unbelievably cheap; and (4) my compadres knew all that, and didn't need souvenirs anyway, so they didn't change any money at all.
    By the second-to-last day, with the taxpayers of Romania having paid our way, I had managed to spend about 8 cents worth of lei. With still $99.92 left, I began to binge. I went looking for beggars and handed them fistfuls. At a festive lunch hosted by the government for our party of eight, I offered to pay, but the government official politely declined.
    Our last day there was free. I roamed Bucharest, but couldn't find anything to buy. I gathered together my entourage, stopped by the Associated Press office and scooped up the entire staff, and we went out looking for a place to blow the rest of my fortune. We went to a nightclub and got blotto on the best booze money can buy, which was unfortunately limited to a plum brandy called tzuika and a gawdawful wine called Murfatlar. At the next table was a bunch of Syrian students, and I ordered the waiter to give them a case of Murfatlar, compliments of Israel.
    All that cost me a mere pittance; I was by now getting a backache from lugging around all that cash.
    We found a fancy restaurant, which was a surprise, because there appeared to be no food for local consumption.
    Don't hold back, I begged my dinner companions, and to show them the way, I asked the waiter: "What's the most expensive item on the menu?"
    "Stuffed pheasant," he said, and told me the price, almost too embarrassed to state the exorbitant cost.
    "Wow! How much is the second-most expensive item?" That would be the duck a l'orange, he said, and quoted the price. "Jeez! What's next on the list?" Venison.
    "Great," I said, "I'll take all three, one at a time."
    Well, we gorged, it cost me a pretty penny (almost literally), I left a tip that set a new record for Romania, and ended up depositing the rest of my lei in an Israeli recycling bin.

IF YOU'RE an old-timer in this country, perhaps you remember "asimonim." If you're from  way back, you might have a dim memory of "dollarizatzia," "inflatzia" and "Aridorizatzia." If you go further, into prehistory, which is when I arrived, maybe you recall the "lira."
    In February 1980, the shekel made its debut in Israel. In February 1981, so did I.
    Israelis had 361 days to come to grips with the new moolah before I got here. They didn't.
    You have no idea how confusing it was for me.
    I had only $23 to my name when I got off the plane -- and that was Canadian dollars, so it was really only 18 bucks -- which meant I had to be pretty thrifty.
    My first home was a roach-infested dump in (honest) Bnei Brak. I couldn't go into the makolet and ask for credit just yet, mostly because I didn't know how to say "credit" in Hebrew. (Now I know. It's "kredit.")
    The owner of the makolet, my lifeline, had not yet adapted to the "new" currency. Neither did the bus drivers, who at first shocked the pants offa me when they demanded a fare 10 times what it really was.
    When they asked for "18," they were talking lirot, and everyone else understood just fine. You were expected to hand over a shekel-eighty.
    All the money was like Greek drachmas to me: I had new shekels, not to be confused with today's "New Shekel" (which consigns its earlier prototype to be called "old" shekels) or the sheqel, which was used 5,000 years ago in Babylon and is still referred to by religious people. The new-old-new shekels were mixed in with identical-looking old lirot, and far worse, agorot (old ones) together with agorot (new ones). I was expected to understand that 100 new agorot equaled 1,000 old agorot which equaled 1 shekel or 10 lirot, and that when someone barked "10" at me, I was supposed to waste no time in handing over either 1 or 10 or 100 or 1,000 without knowing if he was stating Old or New money (which looked the same anyway), and without knowing which was which -- and that was as easy as it got, because if someone demanded, say, "384," or "27.95," I was sunk. But that was only the half of it, because the other prevailing currency in use was the dollar which, it was understood by everyone else, was worth either 5.13 shekels or 51.30 lirot (or the other way around), and that's only when they spoke of green dollars. The black dollar was an unofficial but popular currency that was pegged to the green dollar, shekel and lira, though all I had was gruschim.
    And I had to convert all that to Canadian dollars to understand what anything was worth.
    That shows you how tough we pioneers had it in the early years of the State. Oh, sure, the legendary halutzim before us were greening deserts and draining swamps, but that was easy: they weren't getting money for it.