May 31, 2025· 58 min

How Do We Define a Currency?

Iñaki Aldasoro Stefan Ingves Rebecca Spang

Orality

Model

50%

Speaker Breakdown

HostJoe Weisenthal(929 words)

M:94%

HostTracy Alloway(799 words)

M:29%

GuestIñaki Aldasoro(2,912 words)

M:29%

GuestStefan Ingves(2,234 words)

M:28%

GuestRebecca Spang(2,539 words)

M:27%

Oral Indicators

Agonistic27%

certainly, amazing, basically

Engagement54%

you, our, your

Memory Aids100%

listen, like, right

Repetition100%

money (135x), think (81x), they (77x)

Parallelism100%

And I'm Tracy Alloway...., So you should really just go g..., And I'm Joe Weisenthal....

Sound Patterns34%

35 question(s), alliteration: "markets move", alliteration: "barclays brief"

Formulaic Phrases10%

the fact of the matter, at the end of the day, you know what

Literate Indicators

Hedging9%

may, maybe, quite

Passive Voice12%

are revealed, were invited, were invited

Abstract Nouns28%

investment, community, business

Subordination7%

while, since, because

Sentence Length49%

Avg: 17.2 words/sentence

Word Complexity48%

investment, analyze, anticipate

Academic Markers3%

according to

Impersonal Style46%

558 personal pronouns found

Descriptive Style86%

apply, really, certainly

Description

What is a currency? This turns out to be one of those questions we just kind of skip over because we don't have clear answers to it (and because economists often like to skip over these foundational things). This special episode of the Odd Lots podcast was recorded as part of Princeton University's “How to Write the Biography of a Currency” event, hosted by the Princeton Economic History Workshop and the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy & Finance. In this discussion, we talk about how we should define a currency and how that definition has changed (or not) over time. Our panelists were Iñaki Aldasoro, an economist at the Bank for International Settlements, Indiana University Bloomington Professor Rebecca Spang, and Stefan Ingves, the former head of the Sveriges Riksbank, the central bank of Sweden, from 2006 to 2022. Read more: Dollar Drops on Renewed Trade Uncertainty, Soft Economic Data Asia’s $7.5 Trillion Bet on US Assets Is Suddenly Unraveling Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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