Sunday, February 22, 2015
Ruling Economic Value
U.S dollars as means of circulation and self-value is tried by Truitt as representing sense of Vietnamese national identity by integration in global monetary market system. I found understanding this interpretation of dollar value as analogous with Vietnam’s personal synergistic design. Commercial transactions used already placed local forms of exchange to emphasize differences from artifact like state-allocated system statements and ‘real/true’ value. Keeping dollars for Ho Chi Minh notes with printing from mulberry tree blocks or remembrance of national unification by previous exchange rates is one example where money seems to shape Vietnamese identity by collusion with larger political and contextualizing local community.
In reference with Truitt’s notion of pricing as elegantly described of balancing point of supply-demand which cleave into Vietnamese societal norms, I wonder how this application of pricing can attempt to explain forms of exchange as defining macroeconomic value.
Does international trading policies contain separate methods of validating currencies by IMF or WB as reference points for legitimizing their own culture of exchange value by defining guidelines for trade? When do international criterion for exchange across global networks become statements of artifact or ‘real’ value? Bretton Woods and BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, and China) convention come to mind as transitions of global culture by disputes in new standards of pricing. Is there forms of normalizing standards of rules which comply with efficient trade agreements, but still remain culturally sensitive to biases in currency exchange? Are there international standards that are sensitive to deteriorating forms of cultural exchange which rid them from biased systems for 'real/true' value?
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These are important questions about both the value of currencies and the pricing mechanisms in the national versus international markets. I think the point Truitt is trying to make is that textbook theories about pricing or devaluation of a currency based on the laws of supply and demand are not able to explain how these two measures form. Truitt follows Hart in seeing money as tightly bound to both markets (local, national, international) as well as states. The latter is of course what interests her most as we can see, especially in chapter 1, how the various forms of governance--from colonial authorities, to national liberation movements and subsequent governments, to more recently international governing bodies--play a decisive role not just in the symbolic meanings of currencies but also in their actual value vis a vis other currencies.
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