Money, the Root of All Happiness

Greg Turko is a policy analyst at the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and
Universities.

Cleveland, a senior vice-president and partner with Ernst & Young, has
set himself the task of tracing the origin, or the history, of money and
other financial concepts through a series of humorous historical
“essays.” These essays cover a range spanning from Biblical times to
the present disintegration of the Soviet Union and the rise of Japan as
a world economic power.

The reader needs to develop a certain taste in humor in order to
appreciate these essays, as, quite frankly, the history of finance,
accounting and banking has, with some justification, never been seen as
a fertile source of laughs. The author, for example, traces the history
of the first promissory note—the promissory note surely represents a
great and undisputed step forward in the progress of civilization—to
camel transactions involving Moses of Muollah (I kid you not). Other
individuals apparently figuring, at least metaphorically, in the history
of money include Captain John T. Boodle and Chief Little Dole.

People in the financial industry may well find this stuff irresistibly
funny, and educational to boot. Those of us outside the field will be
substantially less prone to side-splitting laughter, or even to very
modest grins. We may also want to reflect upon what the financial
industry can do even when it is, presumably, not trying to be funny. Now
if someone just took a light-hearted look at junk bonds, the U.S.
savings-and-loans saga, the BCCI morass, various Canadian banking
scandals, and the trials, legal and otherwise, of a host of trust
companies and brokers we might all have a real laugh.

The debate whether what people find funny is a product of culture or
whether humor is universal has been going on for a long time. This book
does not resolve this debate, but it does provide considerable evidence
that humor is, or is also, occupation specific, at the very least with
respect to the financial industry.