The Peso....

I remember once upon a time when money had real meaning to me. A dollar was a dollar, it was as natural as the wind. The only meaning that the word inflation carried for me at that point was what you did to a balloon, or maybe a tire. I didn’t give foreign currencies much thought either. The fact that money had different values in different countries didn’t enter into the equation, a dollar was a dollar.

While this concept eroded over time, it was mainly intact shortly before coming to Chile. Sure I knew that money was nothing more than some concept that some how people had figured out, manipulated and managed to use to their advantage. I had taken a variety of mandatory economics classes throughout my high school and college years, but economics was a concept and had no place in my practical world. Most calculations I made were simple subtractions, and a very few additions.

Then I met the peso, and my one dollar was multiplied to 600 something. Then things got weird and the dollar dropped, it was worth less pesos, but what does that mean? I sometimes read the economic pages, maybe nod my head a bit and pretend to understand. I’m not fooling anyone however, all I can do is recite numbers and figures without really knowing what I’m talking about.

I read Bloomberg.com and come across something like this:

"The peso weakened 0.3 percent to 532.4 at 10:13 a.m. New York time. It has gained 9.7 percent in the past 12 months, the second-best performance against the dollar among 61 currencies tracked by Bloomberg."

Now at face value it is easy, but how on earth did this Peso weaken, who decided this? Please, where are you, the economics guru who reads the business pages like a novel, hit that comment button and educate the rest of us who just try to make more additions to our financial holdings then subtractions and are confounded by that.