Except for the Dark Ages, when prices fell for 600 years, the value of money has generally diminished. Last year was no exception, as Manhattan's First National City Bank reports in its annual survey of the shrinking worth of currencies.
Beset by war, the Vietnamese piaster fell 38.6%. That chronic invalid, the Brazilian cruzeiro, lost another 31.8% of its value in 1966, and thus would pay for only 2% of the goods and services it could command a decade ago.
Among industrial nations, Austria's schilling (down 2.1%) was last year's most stable currency, and Denmark's krone (down 6.9%) the least. The...
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