Wizarding Money by TomFoolery

As we are a Harry Potter site, I bet you're all thinking, "Ok, this is nice TomFoolery, thanks. It has very little to do with Harry Potter and I bet this article is really boring." However, I have noticed in a few fictions that someone will say, for example, that a hamburger cost 50 pounds. In terms of American dollars, that's about nintey-five of them. Must have been a good hamburger. So, boring though it may be, if you're stumped as to how much in one hand will equal the same amount in the other, here's a short lesson on money. British currency is the pound sterling. The pound (£) is made up of 100 pence (p). The most common coins in circulation are of 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p and £1 and £2. Notes are issued in denominations of £5, £10, £20 and £50, and £100 in Scotland and Northern Ireland. (Prior to 1971, £1 was divided into 20 shillings (s) or 240 pence (d), there being 12 pence to the shilling.) British banknotes currently in issue consist of: * a £5 note featuring Elizabeth Fry. * a £10 note featuring Charles Darwin. * a £20 note featuring Sir Edward Elgar. * a £50 note featuring Sir John Houblon, the first Governor of the Bank of England. American currency is the dollar. The dollar ($) is made up of 100 cents (¢). The most common coins in circulation are of 1¢, 5¢, 10¢, 25¢. Notes are issued in denominations of $1, $5, $10, $20, $50, $100. British banknotes currently in issue consist of: * a $1 note featuring the first President of the United States, George Washington. * a $5 note featuring the sixteenth President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. * a $10 note featuring the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, Alexander Hamilton. * a $20 note featuring the seventh President of the United States, Andrew Jackson. * a $50 note featuring the eighteenth President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant. * a $100 note featuring Benjamin Franklin Now where shall the two meet? Neither the American nor British monetary system are backed by anything but government promise, and monies in both countries are commodities unto themselves with values that fluctuate based on the demand for each. In plain English: value of money changes everyday due to a number of various reasons. As of the date this article, one British pound is the equivalent of 1.90878 United States dollars. But tomorrow that figure will change. For up to date currency conversions, www.xe.com is a great resource. To use it, put in the number of units, be sure to select the proper currency from each column (Britain is United Kingdom Pounds-GBP and not the Euro-EUR) But When in Rome... Ok, now I'm getting to the point. I promise! Now what do Wizards do with their money? Wizard currency is the Galleon (capitalized). Wizard currency is currently issued thusly: * a gold Galleon * a silver Sickle * a bronze Knut One gold Galleon equals seventeen silver Sickles, and one silver Sickle equals twenty-nine Knuts. J.K. Rowling has mentioned that one Galleon is the equivalent of five pounds. Now, the value of wizard money doesn't seem to dither from that figure, so while pounds in relation to dollars will jump all over the board throughout the course of a decade, the value of Galleons to pounds, and consequently Galleons to dollars will never change unless wizards decide to radically integrate their money system with that of their Muggle counterparts. (I have to admit, it's the only way she's disappointed me as an author: she had the chance to teach the wonders of money supply and demand and she gave it up to focus on plot. Oh well, I guess sacrifices had to be made somewhere.) Anyway, what I'm sure you've all been waiting for, here's a conversion table of Galleons to dollars and pounds. The units in dollars are flexible to do aforementioned fluctuations in the money market.   Galleons = Sickles = Knuts = pounds = dollars approx. 0.104 approx. 1.768 approx. 51.272 approx. 0.52 1 0.20 3.4 98.6 1 approx. 1.91 approx. 0.0020 approx. 0.0345 1 approx. 0.01 approx. 0.02 approx. 0.0588 1 29 approx. 0.29 approx. 0.56 1 17 493 5 approx. 9.53 5 85 2465 25 approx. 47.70 100 1,700 49,300 500 approx. 953.54 1,000 17,000 493,000 5,000 approx. 9,535.08 1,000,000 17,000,000 493,000,000 5,000,000 approx. 9,535,016.05 There is a currency converter at www.cnn.com that will do more odd conversions, but it far under-estimates the actual value of wizard money, as it was created before Rowling gave a definitive value. (The CNN calculator assumes that money in the Harry Potter world is worth less than the figures established in this article. Presumably it used the figure that £3.01 = 1 Galleon, or something similar).

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