While Shanghai’s skyline grows to look more and more like New York’s skyline, it is the western monetary system that is beginning to resemble the eastern monetary tradition.
Whether you pay in Switzerland, in the USA or in China, the system is the same: worthless coins and notes which are only valid in their own country are accepted as means of payment. Thus a monetary system prevails in which the state claims a monopoly on the currency. However, the western and eastern worlds have taken themselves down fundamentally different routes to achieve this system, as this excursion through their monetary systems will show.
