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NEW YORK, NEW YORK —
Bartering: Manhattan Island was sold for some beads and wampum,
but ever since Alexander Hamilton whipped the U.S. Treasury into shape,
lucre has been on the rise. Bartering has had a somewhat rustic, backward,
almost medieval connotation ever since. As Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson pulled strings and stayed up nights to save the markets, wags made gloomy predictions of America’s return to a “barter economy” if he failed. Bartering was the easy butt of too many jokes, taking its place alongside dark-humored quips about bread lines and the WPA, the inevitable Depression-era consequence of a devalued dollar and a marketplace in which everyone ceased to trust each other. |
There is no such
thing as bad publicity, and in 2008, “the barter economy” expanded to at
least $3 billion in the U.S. Trading something you have for something you
want used to be the function of money, before money came from ATMs and
plastic cards and home loans. Bartering... it still isn’t a bad idea. |
