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From: Martin Gregorie on 15 Jan 2010 11:03
On Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:15:29 +0000, Kenneth P. Turvey wrote:

> On Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:08:51 +0000, Martin Gregorie wrote:
>
>> I'm
>> intrigued to see that there are no longer any currencies with three
>> decimal places. Some years back a few middle eastern currencies used
>> them.
>
> Inflation?
>
That would be my guess. IIRC one of the Dirhams (Saudi?) used to have
three decimal places but now they all have two.

In a similar vein, when the UK switched to decimal currency it really
screwed up by retaining the existing pound as the basic unit. At that
time there were 240 pennies. Decimalising that to 100 new pennies left an
over-large penny, so they invented a new half-penny as a half-asses sort
of fix. This was repaired by inflation, which was huge through the late
'70s and early '80s so that somewhere along the line the half penny was
dropped.

FWIW Canada, Australia and New Zealand all went decimal before the UK and
all introduced a dollar, worth 10 shillings (so one old pound was two
dollars) and so bypassed the problem completely. This also let most of
the new coins with the exact same value as old coins, so the new coins
were made exactly the same size and both could be used interchangeably,
thus saving replacement costs and avoiding confusion. Same with notes.
The dollar was the same size and colour as the 10 shilling note.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
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