Monday, January 20, 2014

Climateer Line of the Day: Le Numéraire Edition

From The Verge story "Can Dogecoin send the Jamaican bobsled team to the winter Olympics?":
Jamaica's cash-strapped bobsled team should be able to make it to the Olympics this year thanks to some unlikely donors. At the head of the pack is Reddit's community of Dogecoin enthusiasts, who have collected over $30,000 worth of their virtual currency and are currently in the process of transferring it into liquid, stable cash that can be sent over to the team....
A quick definition for folks who aren't obsessed with this stuff: the numéraire is the unit of account. Is your gold priced in dollars or are your dollars priced in gold?

Or, from Wikipedia:
If a store sells 1 can of soup for $1.20, the numéraire is dollars. If the store would buy $1 for 5/6 of a can of soup, the numéraire is cans of soup.